
Playing battleships over BGP - benjojo12
https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/bgp-battleships
======
ademarre
I love Battleship hacks. The game begs to be implemented everywhere for its
simplicity. Before I learned to program I implemented it in MS Excel circa
2002. It was played over a local network as a shared file, and it relied on
manual polling (file reload) and honor (don't peek at your opponent's
worksheet).

I played it with a coworker during breaks in an environment that IT had locked
down, but they didn't block Excel.

~~~
ComodoHacker
>in an environment that IT had locked down

When I worked in one such environment people made and enjoyed HTA chat app
which used text file on a corporate file share as its storage.

~~~
gh02t
I remember me and a friend figuring out how to use `net send` to send messages
in my middle school typing class. They had everything so locked down, but they
allowed command prompt for some reason. We felt so accomplished.

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empath75
> The game went smoothly, apart from a 45 minute period where no moves were
> exchanged due to causing the previously mentioned route flap damping to
> activate. This happened on my side and caused Level 3 to have a less optimal
> route for my traffic in the 45 minute period. To mitigate this from
> happening again later on the game, we decided to move to a 90 second
> cooldown period on every move.

Must have been an interesting support call.

~~~
scruffyherder
I can't even imagine taking the call from the business people why we were
basically off the internet for 45 minutes, and or severely degraded..

~~~
jauer
Only way they'd be offline or severely degraded is if this was a shit network
that was only connected to (3).

~~~
scruffyherder
Level 3? Yeah it's shit. And by causing the routes to be dampened, yeah great
thing to do with a production network.

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pbhjpbhj
Love it. But I like the skrillex steganography even more!
[https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/encoding-data-into-
dubstep-d...](https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/encoding-data-into-dubstep-
drops)

~~~
twic
> But that had me thinking, how much effort would it be to actually embed
> machine readable data inside a dubstep track

The Aphex Twin actually did this in 1999:

[https://www.magneticmag.com/2012/08/the-aphex-face-
visualizi...](https://www.magneticmag.com/2012/08/the-aphex-face-visualizing-
the-sound-spectrum/)

As did a few other people around that time - there was even software for it.

> while ensuring that the sound could be enjoyed by humans as well…

Ah, well now that is arguably something that the Aphex Twin didn't do.

~~~
bfhd
The same trick was used in the soundtrack of the new Doom game:
[http://www.factmag.com/2016/05/30/doom-game-pentagrams-
sound...](http://www.factmag.com/2016/05/30/doom-game-pentagrams-soundtrack-
spectrogram/)

------
mino
Found your tweets weeks ago by accident and started following you.

Man, you must start giving nerd standup comedy talks at CCC/RIPE/ARIN/etc!!

------
pavel_lishin
If this looks familiar, it's probably because you've recently read Ben's post
about making art from SSH key randomart: [https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/ssh-
randomart-how-does-it-wo...](https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/ssh-randomart-
how-does-it-work-art)

------
iDemonix
I work for an ISP and have done a fair bit of work on the peering side of
things - it's amazing how many peers have no/few filters on their side, and/or
refuse to use an MD5 password.

------
an_account_name
> Since we were both supporting real production traffic through the prefixes
> we were using to play the game

Annnnd fired

~~~
jauer
Naah. :) Network engineers that can do this are pretty rare and their managers
are usually quite chill.

See also: the BGPNyaa cat: [https://stat.ripe.net/widget/routing-
history#w.resource=as15...](https://stat.ripe.net/widget/routing-
history#w.resource=as15562&w.starttime=2017-01-15T00%3A00%3A00&w.endtime=2017-06-23T00%3A00%3A00&show=Maxmized)

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z3t4
Need to come up with a good reason to register a ASN so I can play too

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mey
I am amazed about the hilarious design and concept. Horrified that this was
done with links running production data.

~~~
progval
No experiment is worth doing without your production system at stake

~~~
mey
Typically move fast and break things refers to improving a product, not the
next move in battleship.

~~~
iDemonix
I think it's open to interpretation.

------
xingped
Does anyone have any recommended resources for learning more about and playing
with BGP?

~~~
iDemonix
You can setup a decent lab with GNS3.

~~~
scruffyherder
Why bother with a lab, I want a company that'll let me mess up their traffic,
and an ISP that'll not block me for doing so.

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samgranieri
This is _insane_. Wow.

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ConceptJunkie
I can't be the only one who was annoyed because the game is "Battleship", not
"Battleships". I can see using the plural to describe the game generically,
but he also uses the name capitalized, which is just wrong.

Nevertheless, it was an interesting article. It's always cool when someone
totally subverts the purpose of something to do something entirely different.

~~~
dgritsko
The game is much older than Milton Bradley's version (which I assume you're
referring to) and has gone by several different names - including
"Battleships".
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_(game)#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_\(game\)#History)

