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Comment by wfn | Hacker News Reader

A very nice and well-built tool. Excellent use of sequence numbers for stateless send/receive (SYN cookies): https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan/blob/master/src... (very well-documented source too, a pleasure to read).

I once (2016) used it to scan port 22 on the whole ipv4 (had to experiment with rate limits to not trigger alarms and get complaints forwarded by my VPS provider; the clever ip+port randomization technique helps a lot with that). Then took the ~22m (iirc) IPs which responded and ran ssh-keyscan on them to extract and analyze some ~15m ssh banners and public keys (a bunch of them broken, through debianized PRNG etc.) I think most of the scanning + extraction was done overnight, via ~13 VPS rented hourly (whole thing cost < $10, and very few complaints). Fun times :) I should write it up some time, and do it again.

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"A very nice and well-built tool. .... (very well-documented source too, a pleasure to read)" Could not agree more. This code is really nicely organized and commented. Such a pleasure to read and learn about how this tool works. I wish more codebases had comments like this! Great work and thank you @ErrataRob.

What is "22m" ?

22 meter?

22 millies of something.

I do not follow?

22 million.

22 million meters of IP.

at the cost of a rod per hogshead

The irony of saving 6 characters in the word million, but people don't understand his post and use many more keystrokes asking what he means.

"mm" is a common abbreviation for million in the context of accounting. It refers back to the latin "mille mille" which means "thousand thousand" literally. "Mille" is still used for thousand in French and Italian. The abbreviation is reasonably common in english, though I also would not be surprised by anyone not having run into it before.

The Latin numeral M denotes thousands. Thus, MM is the same as writing "M multiplied by M," which is equal to "1,000 times 1,000", which equals 1,000,000 (one million).

So, we should refrain from using lowercase m for this.

> So, we should refrain from using lowercase m for this.

Except that mm is already used by a number of industries and people to mean million.

What you did was quote from the first result of a google search without attribution and then pretend the quote means the opposite of what was written. See: https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ot...

Your quote left out the first part, which is italicized in the full quote below:

In finance and accounting, MM (or lowercase “mm”) denotes that the units of figures presented are in millions. The Latin numeral M denotes thousands. Thus, MM is the same as writing “M multiplied by M,” which is equal to “1,000 times 1,000”, which equals 1,000,000 (one million).

Why do you think it's in parentheses? Because it's not the main, correct way to write this. Lazy people didn't capitalize, and now you see it in the wild. Given the origin is Latin numerals, I see no argument here.

Lower-Case use of mm in accounting and finance is incredibly common. If you worked in those industries it’s understandable you’d think everyone followed that convention.

Yeah, maybe wasn't clearest notation in retrospect :) I somehow felt too humble to actually write out "million"

What is “22 million”? I don’t understand. Is it length? Thousandths? An ion grinder? An exotic big cat? A tiny On?

“People don’t understand”, none of those were at all plausible even without the context of scanning the entire IPv4 address space.

The OP clearly states that it's about 22m responding internet protocols.

That surely is a lot of protocols.

22 cats. Go with cats.

Is that an abstraction of 22m meaning 22 mice, resulting in 22 cats? Clever. Very clever.

Internet pipe!

Internet pipe version 6 is clearly superior with its larger throughput.

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