
After 3072 hours of manipulating BGP, a Nyancat was drawn on this RIPE interface - job
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
======
rcarmo
OMG. The ingenuity (and geek level) of achieving this with something that is
essentially invisible to 99.99999% of the human race (even most network
admins) and planning ahead to do this is... indescribable.

(the AS holder is [http://instituut.net/~job/](http://instituut.net/~job/), to
those uninitiated - I had to double check my comment)

Sir, I take my many virtual hats off to you.

~~~
job
Thank you for the kind words :-)

~~~
AceJohnny2
... what is that VT510 connected to?

Is that tmux, with some ip config on the left, and an empty shell (with a
fortune) on the right?

Do the sunflowers represent anything? :)

~~~
job
PC Engines APU2 with openbsd

~~~
jameskegel
I'm glad people like you are part of the community.. Really cool project!

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garaetjjte
In similar category of doing fun things with internet tools, you can play
tetris on IPv6 traceroute:

    
    
        traceroute -I -q 1 trh.milek7.pl
    

Game is controlled by appending chars into subdomain: w – rotate, s – drop, a
– move left, d – move right. Example: tracerouting wwddds.trh.milek7.pl
rotates 2x, moves right 3x and drops piece. After dropping to request new
piece it is required to traceroute trh.milek7.pl without commands.

~~~
jwilk
Doesn't work for me:

    
    
      # traceroute -I -q 1 trh.milek7.pl
      
      connect: Network is unreachable

~~~
garaetjjte
Are you sure that you have IPv6?. I don't have 60k addresses to do it on IPv4
:)

~~~
jwilk
I was sure the machine I was testing this on had IPv6. I was wrong. Ooopsie.
How can I downvote myself?

------
aendruk
Screenshot:
[https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmcnTG8JBgvp3gAD7aDFVqZ53bYKfwa...](https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmcnTG8JBgvp3gAD7aDFVqZ53bYKfwadXwdr5YvW8HYwi5)

~~~
SeriousM
Thank you! I was hoping someone is posting this

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zkms
This sort of endearing Internet-scale thing reminds me of how NTT changes
their reverse DNS's
([https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2016-February/0841...](https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2016-February/084128.html)).
There's other vanity reverse-DNS tricks that you can see in traceroutes, but
this is done with a global-scale IPv4/IPv6 network that actually is carrying a
lot of customer traffic. Try "traceroute ntt.net" now, you'll see hops like:

9 ae-19.sayonara-todd.r04.sttlwa01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.66.57) 17.225 ms
17.166 ms 17.171 ms

10 ae-5.sayonara-todd.r21.sttlwa01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.2.7) 16.257 ms
16.156 ms 16.101 ms

11 ae-3.sayonara-todd.r23.snjsca04.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.3.124) 33.097 ms
33.125 ms 31.566 ms

12 ae-7.sayonara-todd.r23.dllstx09.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.4.155) 69.840 ms
69.764 ms 69.763 ms

13 ae-6.sayonara-todd.r10.dllstx09.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.4) 69.634 ms
74.424 ms 72.319 ms

14 ae-0.sayonara-todd.a01.dllstx09.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.3.244) 74.050 ms
74.046 ms 74.035 ms

or

3 ae-13.sayonara-todd.r05.plalca01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (2001:418:0:5000::bae)
1.324 ms 1.307 ms 1.205 ms

4 ae-15.sayonara-todd.r02.snjsca04.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (2001:418:0:2000::172)
2.505 ms

5 ae-10.sayonara-todd.r23.snjsca04.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (2001:418:0:2000::cd)
2.091 ms 2.067 ms

6 ae-7.sayonara-todd.r23.dllstx09.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (2001:418:0:2000::1fa)
38.386 ms 39.757 ms 38.312 ms

7 ae-6.sayonara-todd.r10.dllstx09.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (2001:418:0:2000::1c1)
41.586 ms

8 ae-1.sayonara-todd.a02.dllstx09.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (2001:418:0:2000::135)
51.986 ms

~~~
job
It might amuse you to know the same NTT people are behind the BGP Nyancat :-)

~~~
freetime2
Is this NTT as in "Nippon Telegraph and Telephone"? It's a surprising and
welcome sight to see such shenanigans coming out of a Japanese mega
corporation that used to be owned by the government, and now operations in a
heavily regulated industry.

~~~
yusyusyus
yes! It is probably more accurate to think of NTT as many smaller companies.

These guys are from GIN and are some of the best people I've had the pleasure
of working with, both on a personal and professional level.

------
mateus1
I am as curious as the next guy but just a link to a random graph and no
explanation... Uninteresting

~~~
transitorykris
He's doing announcements and withdraws of a bunch of /24s and a few other
prefixes (including a few IPv6). The green bars are showing that a specific
prefix was visible in the global routing table at a specific point in time
(and the absence of green indicating it was not globally routed).

~~~
mateus1
Thanks for this. Appreciate the response I wasn't complaining about the
content, just the lack of context.

------
Lanzaa
That is amazing. Does anyone have similar examples of weird technological art?

~~~
Pxtl
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAbyeM2C1Oc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAbyeM2C1Oc)

Jump to 5:20 to hear Aphex Twin's face.

~~~
sambeau
Also these animations in a spectrograph:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxx6Gqf1Q4w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxx6Gqf1Q4w)

------
memetomancer
pretty effin' great... this strikes me as a new variation of the Hellschreiber
technique:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellschreiber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellschreiber)

~~~
Someone
That's just impressive for being minimalistic, not for what it does. We had
better faxes at least 50 years earlier
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax#Wire_transmission](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax#Wire_transmission)),
and (lousy) television using the same principle at about the same time
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_television](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_television))

------
0xADADA
whats a RIPE interface?

~~~
colonelxc
From their About us page: "We’re the Regional Internet Registry for Europe,
the Middle East and parts of Central Asia. As such, we allocate and register
blocks of Internet number resources to Internet service providers (ISPs) and
other organisations."

This interface is the historical bgp announcements for this particular ASN.
The X access is time. The Y axis is ip address blocks.

~~~
shmageggy
So some employee at an ISP registered IP addresses over time in such a way as
to create this pattern? Kind of like how people make art out of their github
commits [1] (only without the ability to retroactively modify the dates)?

[https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti](https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti)

~~~
detaro
Nearly, but they didn't register them, they just had their network announce
routes for them (which is just telling other networks "hi, if you have traffic
for _this_ IP range I can send it on", the registration is unrelated to that)

------
0xADADA
Whats BGP?

~~~
na85
A cursory Google search would have revealed that BGP is Border Gateway
Protocol.

~~~
okreallywtf
Why did people downvote a pretty appropriate snark while not downvoting a
question that took longer to ask than the google search would have taken?

~~~
martin-adams
I for one appreciated the question "what is BGP?" for the following reasons...

1\. It allows me to understand that I am not the only one who doesn't
understand the terminology involved, allowing the discussion to be more
educational and inclusive.

2\. Sometimes searching for terminology is ambiguous and without prior
knowledge of the subject domain, can result in lack of confirmation as to
whether the definition is the same as the one in the article.

3\. For one person to ask here and have it answered, can save 100 people
having to search for themselves when reading the comments.

~~~
okreallywtf
On a technical newsfeed almost every story is littered with jargon and a ton
of them I don't know what an acronym means. Not only is the correct wikipedia
article the 1st result, Google actually includes the start of the definition
right into the search. Its fine to ask, especially when its a generic acronym
but that was not the case. Its a bad habit to get into and I speak from
experience, spend a couple minutes on your own and come up with a question
that shows you were willing to put in some effort.

Better yet, as I see people do around here from time to time, go read a brief
synopsis and then post a "For other people who didn't know what BGP was: BGP
is ....". I'm not for creating a hostile stuck up community but rewarding pure
laziness seems pointless to me.

~~~
hueving
It takes less effort to Google it than to ask it here, so it's not laziness.

------
kiallmacinnes
This is pretty cool, and took months, nice! :)

------
camiller
Did anyone grab a screencap? Following the link does nothing for me.

Or is it because I'm behind a corporate firewall....

~~~
dingo_bat
I had to wait ~20 seconds and it loaded.

------
delegate
job, How did you come up with this idea ? I'm just curious what inspired you
to work on it ?

------
wruza
Were 128 days an additional target or simply a consequence of manipulation
routine?

------
arrty88
What do these charts usually look like?

~~~
job
This is a more regular example [https://stat.ripe.net/widget/routing-
history#w.resource=AS82...](https://stat.ripe.net/widget/routing-
history#w.resource=AS8283)

this shows the routing history of the prefixes originated by AS 8283 - and
their observed reachability

------
NTripleOne
But 2011 was 52560 hours ago!

Still, pretty neat. :)

------
jsmith_2
Pretty cool!

------
zmix
Upvote! 'nuff said.

