back to article Router admin? Bored? Let's play Battleships using BGP!

Playing Battleships over the Border Gateway Protocol probably wasn't a scenario considered by the standard's authors, but UK blogger Ben "Jojo" Cox has explained how to do it. Cox's tutorial is part amusement, part warning, because while explaining the protocol (and why it's hard to fix), he pointed out that in the 32 bits …

  1. lglethal Silver badge
    Trollface

    But but but...

    but what about the most important information missing in this article? Who WON????

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: But but but...

      Russia and North Korea.

    2. Dabooka

      Re: But but but...

      He should've coded tic-tac-toe, that way no one would've won

    3. MyffyW Silver badge

      Re: But but but...

      You sank my battleship :-(

    4. Bill Gray

      Re: But but but...

      From the linked article :

      "...the final blow to my friend AS203729 was dealt on the 68th move. Making me the first winner of a board game conducted done over a public internet routing protocol."

      As I recall, Battleship is usually played with each player launching a "salvo" of five shots, and being told in reply something along the lines of: "You got two hits on destroyers, one on my battleship, two misses." It sounds as if this game is being played with single shots, which should simplify the whole process.

      I read an interesting article a while back about an effort to determine an optimal strategy for Battleship. It's a tough game to analyze, with a huge decision tree.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: But but but...

        "As I recall, Battleship is usually played with each player launching a "salvo" of five shots, and being told in reply something along the lines of: "You got two hits on destroyers, one on my battleship, two misses." It sounds as if this game is being played with single shots, which should simplify the whole process."

        Never played it that way. I always played one after the other, which is how most seem to play it.

        http://www.papg.com/show?1TMC

        https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/the-basic-rules-of-battleship-411069

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Almost as useful ...

    Almost as useful as some of the Juniper (ab)uses of BGP... Actually more useful...

    Anon... For obvious reasons...

    1. stiine Silver badge

      Re: Almost as useful ...

      can youenlighten us?

    2. Tom Samplonius

      Re: Almost as useful ...

      "Almost as useful as some of the Juniper (ab)uses of BGP... Actually more useful...

      Anon... For obvious reasons..."

      Double bullshit. First that JunOS has some horrible BGP abuse in it, when the whole thing has been, as they say in the UK, bog standard.

      The second bullshit for suggesting that there was some big issue in JunOS BGP that you have to post anonymously. Nothing you can say or post about JunOS BGP could be of any consequence that you have to post anonymously. Juniper isn't Oracle, that forbids you from posting benchmarks in the shrink-wrap license. But hey, it is 2018, and conspiracies are more fun than facts.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Trollface

    For all you know it been happening under your nose

    "don't try this at home", ANYMORE.

  4. Crisp

    Would you like to play a game?

    How about a nice game of chess?

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: Would you like to play a game?

      You can do that. There are only 32 pieces, 5 bits, and a move can be encoded in 11 (piece, new location x, y). The remaining five can be used for "illegal move", "check", "checkmate", "withdraw", and "good move, my friend".

  5. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

    Wot's next? DooM over BGP?

    1. Alister

      Difficult to get even Doom graphics into 16 bits, sadly.

    2. psychonaut

      surely that would be doom over BFG?

  6. sisk

    This article made me chuckle.

  7. Jeffrey Nonken

    Jebus. It's 2018 and professional computer geeks STILL haven't figured out how to spell "integer".

    No spell checker on the white board, I suppose.

    1. Martin Budden Silver badge

      The chance of "integer" is somewhere between 0 and 1.

      ;-)

  8. LeahroyNake

    Spare time

    I wish I had the spare time to do stuff like that ! Must have taken quite a few hours.

  9. bob, mon!
    Mushroom

    On a ten-by-ten playing field?

    For added obscurity you code encode everything in BCD....

    And one abbreviation for a battleship is "BB", so you'd be playing

    BB in BCD over BGP.

    1. Jock in a Frock

      Re: On a ten-by-ten playing field?

      Do it while cooking a BBQ

    2. Scott Marshall

      Re: On a ten-by-ten playing field?

      Interviewed on the BBC. Interrogated by the DoD.

  10. heyrick Silver badge

    Didn't Doctrow's Little Brother reference the idea of streaming video through the DNS protocol? That's a little more far fetched (given the latency and throughput issues of video), but it's the same premise - hiding unrelated information within an existing protocol...

    1. Christian Berger

      Well Dan Kaminski actually ran audio streams over DNS

      way back when he was cool. The great advantage is that DNS is extremely well cached, so you could run a web radio station from a measly little ISDN line.

      BTW back when ISDN was introduced in Germany, there was a manufacturer of ISDN equipment demonstrating chess over "User to User Signaling", an obscure feature of ISDN which allowed you to send free data while establishing a call.

  11. Christian Berger

    What I wonder is...

    since this apparently works without changing the protocol. Would it be possible to use those 16 bits to transmit some cryptographic hash for that route. Obviously you need more than 16 bits for that so you'd combine more messages to some sensible length.

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