Reverse Engineering a Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel (2016)

https://www.gkbrk.com/hotel-music

by bayesnet • 7 months ago

220 29 7 months ago

kstrauser2• 7 months ago

I LOLed at the ending. Nicely done!

I appreciate people posting negative results, too. The journey is the interesting part, and I like the humanity of saying "welp, at least now I know".

mingus88• 7 months ago

Yeah 99/100 times it’s gotta be mundane but wouldn’t it be interesting to spoof that traffic and play anything you wanted in the elevator?

kstrauser2• 7 months ago

"That would be wrong. You totally should not do that."

But yes, absolutely!

eru• 7 months ago

Though in this case, it's actually more of a positive result? The author figured out what the data was. It just wasn't very exiting.

gkbrk4• 7 months ago

Author here, hi :^)

contingencies2• 7 months ago

Since you appear to be Turkish what's your favourite Turkish food that is poorly known outside of the country? Also don't miss https://subseacables.blogspot.com/2025/12/fully-diverse-100g...

gkbrk4• 7 months ago

"poorly known outside the country" rules out the main foods I like.

I love a good Kuymak [1] though, I think that's not too well known.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuymak

nicelunch• 7 months ago

Hi! Do you happen to have that elevator music saved? I'm curious what it sounded like.

gkbrk4• 7 months ago

I had it saved, but it was 3-4 computers ago. I don't think I still have it, and if I did I wouldn't know where.

Aside from the article, I only found these scripts on my disk related to this project.

listen_2046.py and send_2046.py

https://gist.github.com/gkbrk/445929a854051203ee31afc7495c5a...

kogasa240p• 7 months ago

Lol asked the same thing on his website

bayesnet• 7 months ago

Thank you for writing one of my favorite blog posts of all time! I am curious: What is your favorite thing you’ve written?

dang• 7 months ago

Related. Others?

Reverse engineering a mysterious UDP stream in my hotel (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34912300 - Feb 2023 (179 comments)

Reverse engineering a mysterious UDP stream in my hotel (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26633792 - March 2021 (86 comments)

Reverse Engineering a Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16197436 - Jan 2018 (15 comments)

Reverse Engineering a Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744518 - May 2016 (181 comments)

yunnpp• 7 months ago

It's just as good in 2026 - 2d. Imagine Santa delivering his goods and hearing a mysterious UDP stream and wondering, "Is my supply chain being disrupted?", only to then realize that it was just the owners' TV spying on him after it was left on standby instead being completely turned off.

Dilettante_• 7 months ago

This is the shortest, yet still fully complete example of an article that scratches that itch. Awakening the "intellectual curiosity", documenting the steps, and finding the actual end of the matter. The mundanity of the revelation is like the icing on the cake.

deadbabe• 7 months ago

I wish there was a whole book of just random compiled stories like this.

schmuckonwheels• 7 months ago

I was expecting to see a post bemoaning the lack of encryption on the elevator music...

runtimepanic• 7 months ago

This is the kind of curiosity that leads to the most interesting findings. Hotels are a perfect storm of shared networks, opaque vendor integrations, and “it just works” assumptions. A mysterious UDP stream could be anything from Chromecast-style discovery to IPTV control or some half-documented vendor heartbeat. What’s usually more revealing than the payload is the pattern: broadcast vs unicast, frequency, and who responds. Also a good reminder of how much ambient network noise we’re all swimming in without noticing.

7e22v837278gb1p• 7 months ago

Good hotel room hacking entertainment is provided in-house, in this case.

mikesale• 7 months ago

omg this is so my vibe! I used to read corrupted database files for a living and it was soooo much fun.

naikrovek• 7 months ago

Site is down, I think. :(

jiscariot• 7 months ago

I've read this one before, but this time it really hit home in how unlike most of the modern AI-emoji-filled-cringy-heading-20-page blog slop, it is. Very refreshing.

VoidWhisperer• 7 months ago

Archive link as it seems the site is down: https://archive.is/afYvQ

gkbrk4• 7 months ago

Oops, picked a bad week to migrate from Cloudflare Pages to something custom in Rust.

StayTrue• 7 months ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20251230193736/https://www.gkbrk...

cryptoegorophy• 7 months ago

Web server down? Can’t access.

JSR_FDED• 7 months ago

I love how tiny and to the point the Python scripts are. I bet if you asked AI to make these today the comments would be longer than these entire scripts. But I’m too bored by the idea to try it :-)

bobske4• 7 months ago

expecting a rick roll here

Reverse Engineering a Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel (2016)

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