He stores data in ICMP ping packets, but also Tetris board states, among others. If you are not familiar with Tom7, let this be an introduction to a heavyweight whimsical internet nerd
> There was a desperate search for better memory. We seriously considered. at one stage. renting a television microwave link from Boston to Buffalo and back so that one could store something like 3,000 bits in the 3 milliseconds of round-trip transit time.
Though I'm not sure why they wouldn't have just used a delay line for that task: that form of memory was already in use in computers, as discussed by Forrester himself from 11:15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZLpbhsE72I&t=675s .
Imagine mailing somebody a letter with data; once they receive the letter they send it back. The information is stored within the postal system.
In some applications, using an ICMP payload and getting a quote of the IP header + 8-bytes of the original packet back in ICMP error messages is part of the application. For example, traceroute utilises the fact that it gets part of the payload back in a ICMP TTL exceeded message to identify _which_ traceroute request was being responded to.
[1] https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/how-do-wood-finishes-hold-up
Heh. Anyone remember the ping of death[0]? A lot (most?) of computers on the early internet didn't properly handle large packets, _especially_ from ICMP pings. Once upon a time, you could send a single ping w/ a packet size of 65536 and crash the remote.
Srsly... the ram inside a core router is some of the most precious resources around... this is an ooold idea.. people were doing at least as far back as the 2000s.. i showed them how our router (Avici TSR) worked and said "please don't use the super fancy fabric temporary store for this."
This kills the router designer.
lysace•1mo ago