My fiber optical modem broadcasts a poem via ethernet frame 0x8300

https://gist.github.com/riobard/c7eb86aa3586c36ffaa75f7be3b57d66

by riobard • 6 years ago

189 69 6 years ago

gist.github.com

doylecnn• 6 years ago

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32870553/telling-a-story...

perryizgr8• 6 years ago

Huh! Maybe it is some sort of keepalive beacon. But why not use some normal standard way?

yaris• 6 years ago

Maybe it is some _copyrighted_ beacon? I've read somewhere that Oracle have made some verse a part of some network API of theirs to be able to copyright it.

mschuster91• 6 years ago

Something in nature like "DontstealOSX" or whatever that SMBIOS string in Mac machines is called?

In any case, doing this to an API is just plain nasty... but I believe at least under European law it's still getting trumped by the right to interoperability and reverse engineering.

ezoe• 6 years ago

That strategy doesn't work in my country as the law clearly stated mere protocol is not copyrightable.

Another interesting case was, Nintendo released a floppy disk with their logo relief and use its presence for DRM purpose. When third party released a compatible floppy disk, Nintendo sued them for trademark violation. Nintendo lost.

teraflop• 6 years ago

The original LEGO Mindstorms had a handshaking mechanism like this. The firmware for the RCX brick was stored in battery-backed RAM, so you had to re-upload it via infrared whenever you changed the batteries. But the ROM bootloader would only accept a firmware image if it contained the string:

"Do you byte, when I knock?"

After uploading, the host computer would send an "unlock request" with the string "LEGO®", at which point the RCX would return the other half of the rhyme:

"Just a bit off the block!"

I assume the only reason for jumping through these hoops was to have a legal excuse to discourage other companies from making interoperable products. I have no idea whether this strategy would have actually held up in court; in any case, there were plenty of homebrew tools that just embedded the magic strings anyway.

jaywalk• 6 years ago

Unless I'm missing something, it appears to be going out on the customer-side Ethernet. So there's really nothing to keep alive on that side.

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 6 years ago

It's possible it dumps it out all interfaces.

toast02• 6 years ago

A lot of residential modems are also providing networking for IPTV set top boxes. This could be a keep alive for them (even if this particular provider doesn't offer that service).

geoah5• 6 years ago

Google has a couple of versions that seem like a match.

The day I lost my very first tooth,
Was halfway through grade four,
I'd run my tongue along the gap,
Where my tooth had been before,
I remember I want home crying,
And showed it to my mum,
She told me that a brand new tooth,
Would grow up in my gum,
In a while the gap would stop feeling strange,
I wouldn't notice the tooth was gone,
The only reason I missed it now,
Was because it was there for so long,
Then slowly but surely over the weeks,
In the gap a new tooth grew,
And now it makes me wonder,
If people are like teeth too.

https://www.wattpad.com/53876107-descend-teeth

geoah5• 6 years ago

Oldest version I can find is by "thepoeticunderground" as an image from 2017.

https://touch.facebook.com/e.h.thepoeticunderground/photos/a...

geoah5• 6 years ago

I know I'm just talking to myself but I'm liking this rabbithole.

There is another mention of this earlier this year.

https://twitter.com/riojot/status/1268821579724541954?lang=e...

My ISP-provided optical modem broadcasts a poem line every 10 seconds to my local network from address 00:00:00:00:00:12 using ethertype 0x8300 frames. Anyone knows why? It's simultaneously amusing and scary.

riobard7• 6 years ago

I've traced the author to be Erin Hanson. Her other works can be found at https://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/erin_hanson_2006_2.p...

bzb63• 6 years ago

Cute and relatable for someone who was dumped recently. :P

kuroguro2• 6 years ago

Ohh... Thought it was about death.

bzb63• 6 years ago

Interesting! It’s written in a way that makes us all relate to it.

Zancarius2• 6 years ago

Likewise, albeit not quite so recently (~5 months ago).

What's strange is how the poem relates to me somewhat differently being as that "gap" has already started to slowly fill. Honestly, it put a smile on my face. I love how little things like a simple poem can become so relatable to all of us.

Regardless, I'm sorry to hear of your loss. Please do give yourself time to heal--I know it sounds cliché but it's absolutely of the utmost importance. Without knowing the context, it's almost certainly for the better. It took me a while to realize that toxic people can--and WILL--drag you down no matter how much you might love them or try to work things out. Plus side is that in my case, the problem solved itself once I stopped responding to her patterns of behavior that were causing us issues!

If you need to let off some steam or just want someone anonymous to talk at, feel free to email me at my HN username at gmail.com. Having been down that road not all that long ago, I know how you feel.

bzb63• 6 years ago

Thank you very much for your reply, I really appreciate it and it resonates with me. It wasn’t so recent, but as you said things take some time to heal.

Relationships sometimes end in a sunk cost fallacy: you’ve spent so much time with someone, you think you have to fix the broken relationship at any cost, even if you’re the only one who’s still invested. And that leads to toxicity and being taken advantage of.

daneel_w• 6 years ago

That's just under 5KB per minute, or about 200MB per month. Odd.

api• 6 years ago

Its on your local LAN, so that's nothing.

londons_explore2• 6 years ago

More importantly, it might cause some devices to wake their network hardware or even CPU's up every 10 seconds, and significantly shorten battery life.

client4• 6 years ago

I always thought it would be a unique method of prayer (for an existing or new religion) that used part of the IPv6 packet header or an ICMP packet. We would be sending prayers at random with a ttyl to be broadcast across existing networks, and routers/endpoints could choose to listen.

mfashby• 6 years ago

Reminds me of this one: https://www.theguardian.com/books/shortcuts/2015/mar/17/terr...

An HTTP header as a memorial.

gigatexal• 6 years ago

Why would an ISP do this? Is this some kind of developer Easter egg or some sort of way to track the customer?

riobard7• 6 years ago

I believe it's from the firmware of the optical modem. I just couldn't figure out why. Please help investigate, HN! :D

tifan3• 6 years ago

Naive implementation of loop detection

tifan3• 6 years ago

Ah, this is used for loop detection by Huawei CPE.

Configuration reference: http://huawei.communicationsmuseum.org.uk/MA5616/clireferenc...

justinsaccount• 6 years ago

Would have been more fitting to use

  Algorhyme

  I think that I shall never see
  A graph more lovely than a tree.
  A tree whose crucial property
  Is loop-free connectivity.
  A tree that must be sure to span
  So packets can reach every LAN.
  First, the root must be selected.
  By ID, it is elected.
  Least-cost paths from root are traced.
  In the tree, these paths are placed.
  A mesh is made by folks like me,
  Then bridges find a spanning tree.
  -Radia Perlman

greenyoda• 6 years ago

The author of this poem is actually the inventor of the Spanning Tree Protocol (which the poem describes): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radia_Perlman

P.S. For those who like nerdy poems, here's a poem which is a proof of the undecidability of the Halting Problem: http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/01/19/how-dr-suess-wou...

riobard7• 6 years ago

But the modem is not made by Huawei. Its model number is G-140W-UD and it's made by Shanghai Nokia-Bell Co.,Ltd.

Could it be from the ISP-side devices?

milankragujevic• 6 years ago

It could be using Huawei software and hardware. Serbian ISP "Telekom Srbija" which uses mostly Huawei HG8245Q2 ONTs and has standardized on Huawei OLT and Core network, also uses these Nokia branded devices. AFAIK the Huawei GPON network is incompatible with other vendors which is why there's a small part of the capital city Belgrade stuck on old ZTE CPEs as that was a part of a pilot FTTH project with ZTE before China financed this rollout.

So, my point being, given they also use this exact Nokia ONT, it could very well mean that it's compatible with Huawei because it IS, in part, Huawei.

geoah5• 6 years ago

But why a poem and why THIS poem?

riobard7• 6 years ago

That's the other (and arguably more interesting) part of the puzzle! :)

LinuxBender• 6 years ago

Could it be for trademark / copyright protection? There was an anti-spam mechanism in the past that worked this way. If you abused the system, they could sue you for millions. No idea if that is still around.

toast02• 6 years ago

A shortish poem like this seems like a nice match. Ethernet has a minimum packet size, which is around the length of a line. The whole poem is short enough that you can remember it, but long enough that seeing a duplicate line would give you a good idea of having a network loop (possibly with delay) or having a second sender that started at an offset (although, maybe there's some ID information in the packet before the text begins).

This poem seems cute and memorable, and unlikely to offend any censors, and may have been available under a permissive license?

riobard7• 6 years ago

I'm the owner of the modem. I've found about this a couple of months back when I moved the modem to its own vlan and noticed the broadcast frames. I did some research into the author of the poem on Twitter (https://twitter.com/riojot/status/1268821579724541954), but nothing fruitful.

If anyone knows how the poem ended up in my modem, or even just what's ethertype 0x8300 all about, please comment!

tifan3• 6 years ago

See my comment below :)

Randor2• 6 years ago

Hmmmm,

Looks like ethertype 0x8300 is covered in this Chinese patent titled "Access-network looped network monitoring method" https://patents.google.com/patent/CN102263658B/en

Chinese version: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/a3/f8/5e/8a9fcd4...

Jon_Lowtek• 6 years ago

The type 8300 is not a registered standard and the patent includes a payload description: "mac, port-info, vlan-info" (yes some is redundant to the headers, that is explicitly mentioned) and that doesn't fit the data. Maybe "Huawei compatible" in the meaning of "can be understood by their devices, but not exactly as patented by them". If a ring with a second such device is formed, it might respond with a different poem.

bityard• 6 years ago

This story is slightly munged due to my own faulty memory and to obfuscate the guilty parties...

The company I work for develops network appliances for large backbone and provider networks. One of the things these appliances do is maintain a "hearbeat" with each other so that if one disappears, the others know about it and can send an alert to the NOC.

The heartbeat packets themselves needed some kind of payload, even though the payload was not important. At that time, the company was still a small and scrappy startup so humor was generally encouraged. So naturally the engineer decided the payload should be a random line from a list of pirate quotes. Ship-its all around and the feature made it into the next major product release.

A couple months later, a very angry call comes into the helpdesk from someone _very_ high up in the food chain of a major U.S. telecom. It turns out they had noticed the pirate quotes in a random packet dump they were looking at and the network team spent a whole weekend thinking their network was very deeply compromised because our appliances were one of the tools they were using to inspect the network and kept seeing the "Yarr, Matey!" and such everywhere they looked.

Needless to say, the pirate quotes went away in a few days as part of an emergency patch and the heartbeat message was changed to something more mundane but less likely to trigger heart attacks in our customers.

geoah5• 6 years ago

Amazing story, thanks for sharing it. Any chance the pirate quotes got replaces with a random poem on the internet in this story? :D

whalesalad• 6 years ago

Needless to say, the pirate quotes went away in a few days as part of an emergency patch and the heartbeat message was changed to something more mundane but less likely to trigger heart attacks in our customers.

It's like the engineer picked the literal worst possible thing to send over the wire. Like making an alarm clock for people who have wartime PTSD that fires off a 9mm round to wake you up.

More startups need to be cognizant of this. Humor is important but there is a balance between fun and idiotic.

Cerium• 6 years ago

At work we have a test for these things: "If you would be uncomfortable explaining something to an auditor or judge, don't include it in the product." I think it is a good test because there are many in-jokes and engineering terms that don't sound good to laypeople.

eznzt• 6 years ago

Can someone translate the filter used in that tcpdump command to wireshark syntax?

parliament32• 6 years ago

eth.type == 0x8300

yarosv• 6 years ago

My fiber optical modem broadcasts a poem via ethernet frame 0x8300

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