[HN Gopher] Can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)
___________________________________________________________________
Can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)
Author : dvrp
Score : 1067 points
Date : 2023-09-19 21:05 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (web.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.mit.edu)
| SnowProblem wrote:
| Fun read! Along the way I was trying to guess the cause and my
| best guess was TTL-related. However I don't quite understand the
| actual cause! If the connection timeout is 3ms in practice,
| shouldn't that be for a packet round-trip? So ~250 miles? And
| wouldn't we expect at least a small delay on the remote SMTP
| server to process the packet?
| baby_souffle wrote:
| The reply is it's own new packet with a new ttl.
| lang4d wrote:
| I love these sort of debugging stories! It sounds like that
| timeout would be based on the round trip travel time to the
| remote host rather than the one way distance, wouldn't that make
| a 250 mile cutoff?
| [deleted]
| throwaway2562 wrote:
| Does anybody think that limiting email to 500 miles might be a
| Good Thing?
|
| I don't have a very well-formed use-case in mind, but I strongly
| suspect there is one: suggestions welcome.
| krsdcbl wrote:
| If anything, that might actually be a damn interesting
| challenge to implement :D
| sakex wrote:
| > even of a relatively impoverished department like statistics
|
| It's not a statement you would read in 2023 :)
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| What I wonder is, wouldn't the signal would have to travel back
| and fort, i.e. about 1000 Miles, so the sender can receive the
| 200 OK signal?
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Does this add up? If the connection timeout is 3ms, then that
| means there's 3ms for a roundtrip, 1.5ms each way. So the maximum
| distance would actually be roughly 250 miles. But even then,
| packets don't actually travel at the speed of light in fiber
| optic cables. It also assumes that the cables are laid as the
| crow flies, which they aren't.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| Those are all in the FAQ that you can find at a different place
| where this story has been published
| (http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html).
| sudobash1 wrote:
| Every time I read this story the part that always surprises me
| again is the units command. Converting from 3 millilightseconds
| to miles is brilliant, and I am delighted every time that the
| units command can do this.
| dmckeon wrote:
| Anyone who likes the units command should plan an evening where
| they can sit in a comfortable chair with an appropriate
| beverage, and read all the comments in the data file in the
| source. It is like a novel about the history of measurement.
| WillAdams wrote:
| If only it had been written as a Literate Program, it would
| have been.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| kragen posted a several of excellent comments highlighting the
| capabilities of GNU Units a couple of months back, these two in
| particular:
|
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36988917>
|
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36995046>
|
| And Trey Harris's "500 mile email" story is what clued me on to
| GNU units and its capabilities.
|
| Reminder: if you're on MacOS, or one of the BSDs, your default
| units is from BSD, _not_ the GNU version, and is far less
| capable. GNU units can be installed on MacOS through Homebrew.
| The package is "gnu-units", the command is "gunits" once
| installed.
|
| _Edit:_ Corrected Homebrew package name.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| It's also in chocolatey for windows
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Should also be in Cygwin as well as be installable through
| WSL.
|
| (I've not touched MS Windows in a couple of decades now.)
| chungy wrote:
| GNU Units is also available in FreeBSD ports, just type "pkg
| install units" (or go to /usr/ports/math/units and "make
| install"). It likewise gets the binary name "gunits"
| dementik wrote:
| Actually,
|
| brew install gnu-units
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Gah! Thanks, corrected above.
|
| (I run the command far more often than I install the
| package.)
| ashton314 wrote:
| My units command (on macOS) doesn't have it. :/ Is there a
| better version out there?
| drpossum wrote:
| Yes, you want the gnu units. It's in homebrew as gnu-units
| (and you run it as gunits)
| searealist wrote:
| He made the story up. When confronted with the fact that units
| didn't convert some of the units from his story his response
| was essentially "Oh yeah, well of course I always supplemented
| my units definitions on all my machines with obscure units.".
| Cyphase wrote:
| Do you have a source for that?
|
| EDIT: #19 here https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-
| faq.html
| searealist wrote:
| Check his own FAQ.
| vore wrote:
| I don't think that's enough evidence to claim he made the
| whole story up.
| chungy wrote:
| These potential anachronisms are easy to insert when
| retelling a story. It doesn't really mean he "made it up",
| but reverse engineering how the diagnostic was determined
| might lead one to use tools/definitions that didn't exist
| at the time.
|
| It's also entirely plausible that a local definitions file
| was used to provide the unit that didn't come in the
| default install. Hence the anachronism is merely
| "potential" instead of "definite"
| blitz_skull wrote:
| This is one of my favorites of all time!
| matt_daemon wrote:
| For those on a Mac the millilightseconds unit probably won't
| work, in which case you can try: 586 units, 56
| prefixes You have: 3 lightyear / 365.25 / 24 / 60 / 60 /
| 1000 You want: miles * 558.83525 /
| 0.0017894361
| tysam_and wrote:
| _The_ classic CS story (I personally think! ;) <3 :')))) ;'D). I
| think it will be hard to beat this one. :')
|
| Ah, the good ol' days....Wait, no, we're still living in 'em now!
| Just go to the edge of a quiet, non-hypey, but still expanding
| field.
|
| Tons of fun. ;)))) <3 <3 <3 <3 :)
| superfrank wrote:
| Definitely not the same level of WTF, but I worked on one of my
| favorite bugs I've ever seen super early on in my career.
|
| I joined a tiny digital agency maintaining wordpress sites and
| about a month in one of our customers files a ticket that their
| website was broken. Just a white page, no error, no nothing. I
| ask my boss if I should switch to work on it and he goes, "Nah,
| this customer does that every few months and there's never
| anything wrong. It's something with their hosting or something
| (they were self hosting a site we built and maintained). Just
| take a look at their site when you have time to say you did and
| close it as can't reproduce."
|
| Two days later I have some spare time so I take a look and sure
| enough, everything is working as expected. A few months pass,
| same ticket from the same customer, I pick it up a day or two
| later and everything is working as expected. A few months
| later, same thing, but this time I have nothing I'm working on
| so I pick the ticket up immediately and sure enough the website
| is broken. I immediately show my boss and he's like "well, I'll
| be damned" and then tells me to fix it. I poke around for a few
| hours, but can't figure it out, so I call it a day. When I get
| in the next morning, things are working as expected, so we're
| both like "wtf?"
|
| I don't remember how exactly I ended up figuring this out or
| even all the details of the bug, but the root of the issue
| ended up being that who ever wrote the code for the site had
| some code that revolved around the current date and they'd
| hardcoded that there was always 30 days in the month. When ever
| the current date was the 31st of the month this code broke and
| took down the website, but by the time the 1st rolled around
| the code worked again.
| akskos wrote:
| Does anyone else remember reading a longer version of this or am
| i mixing it with some other similar story?
| orisho wrote:
| Oh, I love this story! :D Always fun to read whenever I stumble
| upon it.
| omgmajk wrote:
| Somewhat related but not really. Back in 2007 when I worked for a
| large ISP as a second line support technician for various
| services, ADSL was very much still in vogue. And the technology,
| over copper wire, had a max distance of where it would be stable.
| Some clients were on a special plan that tried to up this
| distance by a bit, maybe 2-3 more km but really it was still
| quite unreliable but still usable for browsing the internet,
| generally.
|
| But during the summer I received a call from a client that had
| been unable to use his IPTV service during the day for almost a
| month without hickups and disturbances and his internet was slow
| as a glacier from time to time and as I was measuring the
| equipment, packet loss and all the usual stuff it struck me that
| he was very far away from his nearest telephone station. After
| some back and forth with a technician and lots of measuring we
| came to the conclusion that since it was so hot out during that
| summer the line just expanded over to a distance that was just
| far away enough that the line would become unstable during
| daytime when it became hotter outside.
|
| We could not really do anything to help him. I do not miss the
| copper net.
| MattSayar wrote:
| What about insulating the wire from the pole to his house more?
| ashton314 wrote:
| "You waited a few DAYS?" I interrupted, a tremor tinging my
| voice. "And you couldn't send email this whole time?"
| "We could send email. Just not more than--" "--500
| miles, yes," I finished for him, "I got that. But why didn't
| you call earlier?" "Well, we hadn't collected enough
| data to be sure of what was going on until just now."
| Right. This is the chairman of *statistics*. "Anyway, I
| asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it--"
| "Geostatisticians..." "--yes, and she's produced a
| map showing the radius within which we can send email to
| be slightly more than 500 miles.
|
| Pure gold. I love that the stats department put in such rigorous
| testing before submitting the ticket.
| [deleted]
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I imagine subsequent conversations included some extremely smug
| 'I told you so' moments.
| timmb wrote:
| Definitely bolsted my faith in statisticians.
| julioc wrote:
| There is a blog created to collect similar stories:
| https://500mile.email/
|
| This blog has also been discussed in a few other threads:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23908171
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29215383
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35708339
| asicsp wrote:
| See also: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/169713/whats-the-
| toughes...
| hmhrex wrote:
| Hey thanks for linking my site! I was wondering where the extra
| traffic was coming from :)
|
| If anyone has any stories that I should add, please send them
| my way!
|
| Also, I have been slacking a little with the newsletter because
| of life events. Since there have been several sign ups since
| this post, I'll be more active in getting the weekly newsletter
| out.
|
| Thanks for looking!
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Hey I'm enjoying your site! It would be cool if there was a
| way to just get the stories. For example, Twitter is no
| longer capable of loading tweet replies on my machine for
| whatever hilarious reason, and so I could only read the
| teaser for the Twitter link.
|
| Anyway, I understand that's probably not the kind of site you
| had in mind. Thanks for the cool site!
| hmhrex wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion! Maybe I should add archive links
| from The Internet Archive for stories in case links die. In
| the case of tweets, I'd probably need to screenshot them or
| something.
| nzealand wrote:
| https://100parkingtickets.com/
| hmhrex wrote:
| This is a great story. Thanks for sharing!
| Nekhrimah wrote:
| > If anyone has any stories that I should add, please send
| them my way!
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9si6r9/postmortem.
| ..
|
| Worthy, but no where near as circulated!
| smrq wrote:
| That's terrific. I was worried that it was going to end at
| the terse OP, but the follow-up post has just the kind of
| play-by-play details that I can't get enough of in
| debugging stories.
| hmhrex wrote:
| Oh wow. That's a good one! Will add that one.
| jayrwren wrote:
| classic. I read this 20yrs ago.
| Royce-CMR wrote:
| The best part - the consultant who patched the server is on
| Hacker News! He commented on his part here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775404
| dang wrote:
| I'd forgotten about that! That part of the thread begins here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23777700.
|
| We put it in /highlights which may be of interest to people:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights
| redbell wrote:
| > We put it in /highlights..
|
| +1, After two years from joining HN I'm still learning about
| it. This is the first time I heard about _highlights_
| section! I couldn't find it in _lists_ nor on any other part
| of the site yet still interesting to read some comments there
| that do not show up in _best comments_ section. How exactly
| this works?
| dang wrote:
| The word "best" in /best and /bestcomments doesn't mean
| best, it means most-upvoted. Upvotes, unfortunately, happen
| for reasons other than bestness.
|
| It's always irritated me but I haven't changed it, out of
| deference to history and lack of a pithy alternate name.
| Anyone?
|
| Maybe /up and /upcomments?
| y42 wrote:
| what about /top or /topcomments?
| dang wrote:
| I like that!
| J_cst wrote:
| We do not have downvotes, so no risk of ambiguity: my
| love for clarity would suggest /voted /upvoted
| J_cst wrote:
| Thank you for correcting me, my bad.
| swores wrote:
| We do in fact have down votes, you just need 500 (I
| think?) karma to be able to use it. When you see comments
| that are not "dead" but are greyed out, they've been
| downvoted more than they've been upvoted.
| 3836293648 wrote:
| Downvotes do exist, but you need to reach 500 karma to
| unlock them, or at least that's what the rumours say.
|
| I don't have them, but I have seen comments in the
| negative, so there must be some truth to it
| redbell wrote:
| /bestcomments (or whatever name may become in the future)
| had a drawback, I believe. Technically speaking (and
| generally), the comments in this section are the ones
| that belong to stories from /best (or highest-upvoted).
| These stories obviously get more exposure and attention,
| so their top comments get more upvotes. For instance, a
| story with 2,000 points might have a comment with 200
| points (which is tenth the score of its parent story)
| that will obviously hit the /bestcomments, while a
| comment of, say, 50 points on a 150-point story (which is
| a third) may never have the chance to hit /bestcomments..
| Just some thoughts about my daily social network :)
| neovialogistics wrote:
| There is probably some sweet spot of n between 0.5 and 2,
| but not near 1, such that the quotient of comment score^n
| and thread score^n gives good results.
| arp242 wrote:
| /highlights isn't on https://news.ycombinator.com/lists - is
| that intentional?
|
| I knew this existed, and I was looking for it a few weeks
| ago; it's an interesting page to browse through every once in
| a while. But I just couldn't remember the name until now.
|
| Having a "highlight" people can't find doesn't seem much of a
| "highlight" to me?
| dang wrote:
| No, I just forgot.
|
| Edit: it's there now.
|
| Edit 2: I feel like adding an "I feel lucky" link on there
| that would give you a random sample from the list. It's in
| reverse chronological order and it would take quite a while
| to scroll back through all of the comments (there are over
| 400 at present).
| hashar wrote:
| I was wondering how I could have browsed to /lists and
| /highlights and eventually found the first one in the
| footer of the page. May I suggest to add /highlights
| there as well? Maybe just after FAQ and before Lists?
| dang wrote:
| It would make the footer too long. /lists is there as
| basically a &rest pointer to everything else.
| croes wrote:
| So the article says
|
| >Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and
| rebooted it. But I called him, and he said he didn't touch the
| mail system.
|
| But the comment
|
| >Since my preference to wipe and reload was unacceptable - too
| much downtime and too many billable hours - the obvious thing
| to do was update sendmail
|
| Must be the part where
|
| >The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty
| searealist wrote:
| Or it's just one of the many things that don't add up because
| he made the story up.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| See the official FAQ, point 1:
| http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
| searealist wrote:
| "Trust me I'm not lying"?
| ultim8k wrote:
| Only if the sender is The Proclaimers :P
| major505 wrote:
| Thats why when you get a weird ticket it pays to check for
| yourself before calling your user crazy.
| chenster wrote:
| Can't have enough of this story. Learned 'unites' command too.
| swyx wrote:
| i think about this story often and i find that the person who
| figured out that it was 500 miles actually deserves more credit
| than they get in the story. have to really think out of the box
| to figure that one
| rational_indian wrote:
| It was a geostatistician. It is what they do.
| BMorearty wrote:
| One of my favorite bug stories to tell people.
| kibwen wrote:
| I've wondered how feasible it would be to do something like this
| to have a website that could only be accessed when a client is
| within a certain physical proximity of the host. Could make for a
| fun CTF!
| nneonneo wrote:
| I've played CTF challenges where the latency to the host was a
| key factor in determining if you could get a flag or not. For
| those, I've often found it useful to spin up a cloud machine in
| a datacenter near the target (or, better yet, _in_ the same
| datacenter if we can figure it out).
|
| A very common case is when the challenge has a short timeout
| but requires a lot of interaction, e.g. you only get ten
| seconds but you have to perform 10000 queries for a heap spray
| or something.
|
| The most insidious case I remember was a read() call that
| didn't check the result, causing it to return short if the
| fragments of the input didn't arrive fast enough.
| de-moray wrote:
| So... if you're referring to a challenge that did that during
| one of the DDTEK years of DEFCON-CTF, that was one of mine.
|
| The expectation wasn't to buy time in an adjacent cloud, but
| to use out of order ip fragmentation or tcp segments, having
| the servers network stack reassemble the packets such that
| the read was coherent in one go.
|
| My goal was to teach competitors to model real world
| challenges of exploitation.
| vidarh wrote:
| Didn't do that, but one of my earliest "dynamic" websites ca
| mid 90's would have a CGI try to ping the client with a short
| timeout, and if we got an answer that indicated a leased line
| or something rather than dialup and we'd serve up a heavy
| animated version of our logo instead of a static image... But
| could be used as a vague indicator of distance too.
|
| Trickiest part of doing that today is so many fewer hosts are
| reachable via icmp, so you'd probably be better off serving up
| an initial response with some JS to measure more accurately.
|
| (Another silly little thing we added was a link back to a users
| own ISP from the top ten or so of our competitors based on net
| block - got us a worried phone call from one of them who
| thought we'd been hacked and wanted to make sure we didn't
| think he was responsible)
| escapecharacter wrote:
| My quick hack would be to establish a websocket connection, and
| send a random stream of numbers to the client. If the client
| didn't return the number within a ping threshold, block their
| access.
| nneonneo wrote:
| Sadly I imagine this would also block people on poor
| connections such as cellular, satellite or Tor.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| Or Wi-Fi, I've had atrocious pings between two systems on
| the same AP https://www.benkuhn.net/wireless/
| skeaker wrote:
| I feel that wouldn't be a concern in this case, given that
| the goal to begin with is to block the majority of the
| planet on a geographic basis
| pdpi wrote:
| Sure, but then you have the really interesting challenge
| of trying not to block your next door neighbour who's
| accessing your service via tor/satellite.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Then they aren't your neighbor if their route goes half
| way around the world, are they?
| kibwen wrote:
| Depends on the satellite; the ISS orbits at 211 miles,
| which means that it would be close enough to send a
| 500-mile email if it's flying directly overhead. :P
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| hm but it would block your crazy next-door neighbor who only
| uses curl.
|
| To get a good server-client-server roundtrip with only
| HTTP/1.1, I'd personally try using a temporary redirect,
| maybe a 307.
| linsomniac wrote:
| Great story!
|
| At lunch today I was just talking about Sendmail, which I can
| assure you is a rather rare occurrence. I was talking about the
| first time I set up sendmail, back in '91 or '92. I was using the
| bat book and nearly tore my hair out over a week getting that
| first setup working. I eventually came to understand and
| appreciate the m4 config, but I ended up moving to qmail and
| postfix in the mid '90s and never looked back.
| nicbou wrote:
| I love those stories. I can then engineer bedtime stories. Is
| there a place where I can find more?
| suzzer99 wrote:
| I love this kind of stuff. When you're sure the thing that seems
| to be happening couldn't possibly be happening, and then you find
| out that literally the speed of light is coming into play.
|
| We had a similar problem at one of my first jobs where I was a
| programmer and backup network support guy. One employee was
| having a problem with his CRT monitor flickering. It was very
| subtle, but just enough to drive him nuts.
|
| So we replaced the monitor with one that worked fine on another
| machine. Same problem. We tried replacing cables, power cords,
| and did a bunch of other troubleshooting things. Problem
| persisted. Eventually we replaced his entire computer. Same
| problem.
|
| Finally I put his computer and monitor on a cart with an
| extension cord and wheeled it out into the hallway. The problem
| went away. It turned out to be bad electrical shielding in his
| office.
| sizeofchar wrote:
| I once worked in a lab where all computers had its own
| electrical stabilizer, but they were so poor that probably they
| did more harm than good. When someone turned on a stabilizer,
| the nearest CRT monitors would distort for a second, then
| flicker and colors would be degraded.
|
| Luckily, my place was by the wall, so the effect was
| diminished, but it gave me big headaches. I lasted only 6
| months in that company this being the biggest reason.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The stabilizer was triggering the degausser on the CRT.
| Turning on speakers or putting cellphones where a call was
| coming in would sometimes do this too.
| vidarh wrote:
| > The problem went away. It turned out to be bad electrical
| shielding in his office.
|
| My Commodore 64 started "typing" of its own accord. We sent it
| to be repaired twice only for it to work perfectly when they
| tested it. Turned out after we got a bigger TV, we kept it too
| close to it, and the static electricity eventually caused the
| effect.
|
| By the time the repair people got to it, it'd presumably
| discharged enough for it to stop, and it worked fine for a
| while.
| c-oreills wrote:
| Reminds me of the "magic" switch at MIT's AI lab:
| http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
| pixl97 wrote:
| Heh, reminds me of a cursed user I was trying to help in the
| mid 90s.
|
| Sold a person a computer, they said it bluescreened when they
| used it. So we picked it up and tested it. No problems. Sent it
| back, bluescreening again. So they came to the office with the
| computer. I set it up and used it for 30 minutes with them
| there, not a single issue. The moment they touched the mouse
| the computer bluescreened. Replaced the mouse and the problem
| went away.
| pestatije wrote:
| > our campus network at the time was that it was 100% switched
|
| is this realistic, or a writers license?
| itscodingtime wrote:
| What does this mean anyway ? I tried googling but no dice.
| savolai wrote:
| I needed reminding too.
|
| "In a "switched" network, when Device A wants to send data to
| Device B, the switch directly connects these two devices so
| they can chat. Think of it like a train switcher that
| directly links Track A to Track B for a specific train,
| instead of sending it through a maze of tracks where other
| trains are moving.
|
| In contrast, a "hub-based" network is like a party line in
| old telephone systems. When Device A talks, EVERY device
| hears it, but only Device B cares and listens. This is less
| efficient and can be slower because all devices get the data,
| which clogs up the network.
|
| Another option is a "routed" network, where a router decides
| the best path for the data. This is like GPS choosing the
| best route based on current traffic conditions. It's more
| flexible but can introduce more delays because the data might
| go through multiple steps to reach its destination.
|
| It's called "switched" because the switch acts like a
| railroad switch operator, making a direct track connection
| from one device to another for each piece of data. It
| "switches" the pathway specifically for that data to make the
| communication as direct as possible."
| [deleted]
| brazzy wrote:
| No routers, only switches.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I thought it meant no hubs, only switches...
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| I thought it meant circuit-switched, because that's the
| other option next to packet-switched, which is, of course,
| how TCP/IP works.
|
| Layer 2 switches were a rare animal indeed during
| 1994-1997. There sure wouldn't be any VLANs.
| morley wrote:
| There's a bit of storytelling embellishment. I believe it's
| covered in the FAQ:
|
| https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > is this realistic, or a writers license?
|
| Realistic. And, believe it or not, I know of at least one
| organization that plans to convert an entire literal skyscraper
| of office space from routed networks to a single, flat switched
| network for all the employees of all the subcompanies. In 2023.
|
| Obviously everyone with a bit of braincells left tells them to
| _not_ do that because it 's utterly dumb, but hey, strategic
| decision by the holding company to save on costs...
|
| At least they're not using hubs. (For the younger generation: a
| hub is an Ethernet device that takes any packet it ingests in
| one port and sends it out to all other ports, with no
| consideration at all if the device that the packet is destined
| for actually is on that port - something a switch does, by
| maintaining a mapping of MAC addresses to ports. Extremely dumb
| devices, but used to be way faster and especially cheaper than
| switches in the 90's/early '00s)
| [deleted]
| Terr_ wrote:
| I still keep an old 4-port hub in my junk-box because that
| way I can diagnose/snoop on network traffic... Although so
| much of it is encrypted these days that it's harder to see
| what's going on.
|
| P.S.: Yes, modern alternatives would be to to buy a switch
| and that can be configured to "mirror" packets onto a chosen
| port, or a smalls Ethernet network tap unit... But why buy
| more stuff if I don't really need to?
| wink wrote:
| bonus fact: multicast was still being done via broadcast in
| some switches ~10y ago, also extremely dumb :P
| searealist wrote:
| He made the story up while looking for a job.
| hcks wrote:
| I don't get why this story is so popular here. None of the
| technical details adds up.
|
| Multiple back and forth due to protocol handshakes and router
| delays would add enough latency to prevent any connection from
| happening at all if the timeout was set to 0 as stated.
|
| I guess people just like the "it was the time light took to
| travel" vibe.
| Sakos wrote:
| Addressed here: http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-
| faq.html
|
| You might want to ask yourself why you're so bitter and
| critical of others with that conclusion.
| relaunched wrote:
| Every few years this story resurfaces and always makes me smile.
| janandonly wrote:
| I came to say this.
| Vipsy wrote:
| This and the "My car won't start after I buy vanilla ice cream"
| RHSeeger wrote:
| Whenever I see the email story, I think of the ice cream
| story. It's another one of my favorites.
| Recursing wrote:
| And "OpenOffice cannot print on Tuesdays" https://bugs.launch
| pad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...
| scanny wrote:
| For those who are curious as I was:
| https://www.managementpro.com/my-car-wont-start-after-i-
| buy-...
| gottorf wrote:
| Car Talk is such a legend. RIP Tom, and may Ray enjoy his
| retirement.
| fergie wrote:
| At this point its a part of the HN lore...
| RichieAHB wrote:
| I read it every time!
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| I read it evey time I'm flying Mach 3 high above the
| southwestern US.
| tempestn wrote:
| A person could farm karma with an annual calendar reminder to
| post this. Perhaps someone even is!
| hutzlibu wrote:
| That would be easy to check. But are people really that
| desperate for virtual points?
| waynesonfire wrote:
| I had to install a Greasemonkey script to remove them. I
| found myself constantly monitoring them. I'm cured now.
| iambateman wrote:
| Ah, well, not to give a junkie a fix...but...939. ;)
| master-lincoln wrote:
| why would anybody want to do that? I thought karma points
| above a certain low number don't offer benefits and the
| number is not visible to anybody but you.
|
| EDIT: I just realized it's visible in profiles :facepalm:
| sampo wrote:
| The story would be better, if they had kept the real numbers,
| and not added fake numbers afterwards (maybe they didn't keep
| notes, and forgot the real numbers).
|
| At the end of the story, that 3 millilightseconds is the one-
| way distance, and that can't be correct.
| bonzini wrote:
| Yes, that part doesn't add up. The time from sending SYN to
| receiving SYN+ACK would be six milliseconds assuming
| lightspeed between the source and a destination 500 miles
| away.
|
| That said: I know the ending, and by now the details about
| SunOS and sendmail aren't too interesting, but the "This is
| the chairman of _statistics_ " line always gets me laughing
| out loud.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| See point 8 in the official FAQ
| http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
| leoh wrote:
| Yup. Guess this is yet another moment to tell the next
| generation about it.
| rolfus wrote:
| I'm pretty new to this community and this was my first
| exposure to this story. It's definitely going into my
| "anecdotes from the internet" mental repository.
| metaphor wrote:
| Incidentally, appears to be only the second time it's been
| resubmitted in the month of September. The timing is
| thematically apt.
| nemo8551 wrote:
| Tremendous, it's almost as if this was planned.
|
| I await next week's deployment.
| alexfoo wrote:
| > I await next week's deployment.
|
| Feelgood-karma-whoring-post-as-a-service
| blauditore wrote:
| > The timing is thematically apt.
|
| What do you mean by that?
| badcppdev wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
|
| Every September (in the 90s) a new cohort of University
| students would start and gain access to the internet,
| such as it was. Hence the reference to timing
| Sharlin wrote:
| As the Wikipedia article states, it's more about the
| specific period of late 1993-early 1994 when some large
| online service providers in the US started providing
| access to the greater internet, the USENET in particular,
| and masses of new (and usually clueless wrt established
| norms and netiquette) internet users flooded newsgroups
| and forever changed and disrupted their character and
| culture.
| retsibsi wrote:
| Yeah, but that was given the name 'Eternal September' as
| a reference to the literal Septembers of the preceding
| years, when there would be a regular influx of newbies.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Ah, indeed.
| gwill wrote:
| tangentially related: 15 or maybe 20 years ago i worked at a
| repair shop and someone brought in a TV that they said switched
| to spanish every night at 5pm.
|
| they were watching over the air channels and there was only a
| setting in the tv for menu language. sure enough though, at 5pm
| that night we watched as the tv started speaking in spanish. we
| tried a few more channels and found that all but one or two were
| in spanish.
|
| as it turns out, some stations broadcast audio in multiple
| languages and some tvs allow you to change the preference. sadly
| for this person, the used tv they bought came from a spanish
| speaking country and didn't have anyway to change that
| preference.
| nicbou wrote:
| My Bluetooth speaker switched to Chinese after a few years of
| use. I have no idea of how it did it and no idea of how to
| revert it. There is no reference to it in the manuals.
|
| A few days before, I brought a robot vacuum home. It was made
| and purchased in China. When I started it for the first time,
| it bumped into my server and unplugged it.
|
| Therefore a state-sponsored cyberattack is not out of the
| question.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Sounds like one of your friends is a troll
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| [dead]
| theodric wrote:
| I have a pair of Bluetooth headphones that indexes through 3
| languages (Mandarin, Korean, English) on startup when you
| also hold down some other button besides power (play/pause
| IIRC). I don't think it's documented. Maybe your speaker is
| similar.
| nicbou wrote:
| I found a solution today in an Amazon review. I had to
| press 3 buttons at once, and the language switched back to
| English.
| lgats wrote:
| what caused the switch at 5pm?
| temporalparts wrote:
| Spain is 7 hours ahead of Central Time currently. Maybe the
| TV automatically reset at midnight Spain time?
| lampiaio wrote:
| My guess is that it was set to always prefer the Spanish
| audio track, and the 5pm program was the first to have it.
| gwill wrote:
| yea, it was just when the stations in that area started
| broadcasting in spanish. we tested it with another tv where
| that control was accessible.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "At a loss, I telnetted into the SMTP port."
|
| Ah the days when the internet was innocent.
| roygbiv2 wrote:
| You can still telnet into SMTP and send mail. Gets tricky if
| you need to do starttls though.
| kapitanjakc wrote:
| I still telnet to ports, but they're not default anymore.
|
| Quite handy telnet is
| snewman wrote:
| This excellent tale has appeared many times on HN; here's dang,
| in 2021, listing some of the past threads:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29213472
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Indeed. Seeing this on the front page is a good reminder I've
| been on this site far too long.
| antod wrote:
| I think my first exposure to it was on Slashdot, and I
| suspect that time wasn't its first post (pun intended).
| kibwen wrote:
| Sometimes you just need to gather all the young'uns around the
| campfire and regale them with the tales of old, like The
| 500-Mile Email, or The Story of Mel.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Today's lucky 10,000 https://xkcd.com/1053/
| zeristor wrote:
| Is this September Endless?
| Aloha wrote:
| Endless September, the time of the year we retell the old
| tales.
| audiodude wrote:
| Wake me up when September ends?
| jihadjihad wrote:
| A "modern" addition I'd make to this list is the Grug Brained
| Developer [0]
|
| 0: https://grugbrain.dev/
| withinboredom wrote:
| This is when I learn I'm grug brained. Great.
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _The case of the 500-mile email (2002)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29213064 - Nov 2021 (93
| comments)
|
| _We can 't send email more than 500 miles (2002)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775404 - July 2020 (135
| comments)
|
| _500 miles (2002)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18675375 - Dec 2018 (32
| comments)
|
| _The case of the 500-mile email (2002)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14676835 - July 2017 (56
| comments)
|
| _The 500-mile email (2002)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338708 - April 2015 (139
| comments)
|
| _The case of the 500-mile email_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2701063 - June 2011 (18
| comments)
|
| _The case of the 500-mile email_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1293652 - April 2010 (24
| comments)
|
| _The case of the 500-mile email_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385068 - Dec 2008 (28
| comments)
|
| _The case of the 500-mile email_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123489 - Feb 2008 (7
| comments)
| dvrp wrote:
| oh! do submissions of same link stop being "linked" after a
| year or so?
| dang wrote:
| Correct! https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
|
| That's on purpose--we want good articles to get multiple
| chances at attention, and we want the 'classics' to pop up
| periodically (just not too often), so newer cohorts of users
| get some exposure to them. So you did well :)
|
| The purpose of linking to past threads is not to imply
| anything bad about the repost (if it were a bad repost, we
| would handle it differently) - rather, it's to point curious
| readers to other discussions on the same topic that may
| interest them.
| dvrp wrote:
| good to know, and it makes sense!
|
| ty
| cpfohl wrote:
| I love this feature of HN. Between this, the onion
| salesman, C+- and a few other favorites I'm on a roughly 2
| times a year cadence of getting to reread old favorites!
| bradrn wrote:
| I haven't heard of C+-, and searching for it seems
| difficult... which story was that?
| cpfohl wrote:
| https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/c+-.en.html
|
| Enjoy!
| cpfohl wrote:
| I apparently mis-remembered this showing up on HN. It's
| only ever been posted once. So I re-posted just now.
| qup wrote:
| Do you have a script to do this work for you?
| dang wrote:
| Kind of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35668525
| zerojames wrote:
| Thank you for sharing, dang! Onward to find the next
| curiosity!
| vghaisas wrote:
| Also relevant here is the FAQ the author wrote about this story:
| https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
|
| (Tries to answer a lot of the questions folks have in the
| comments, so definitely a good /F/AQ!)
| charles_f wrote:
| Great story, fantastically well written
| gerdesj wrote:
| "I choked on my latte. "Come again?""
|
| That sentence is a rather decent: double entendre.
| roydivision wrote:
| Vaguely related - this reminded me of a support call I had where
| similarly the real world apparently merged into the digital
| world.
|
| I was doing IT support for a small Australian company back in
| '98. A guy called me from a remote office, and after a few
| pleasantries he explained that the screen saver had fallen off
| the monitor of his dumb terminal, bounced on one of the keys on
| his keyboard, and now terminal was locked up. He wanted to know
| what key to press to unlock the terminal.
|
| Eh?
|
| I knew the guy, and although he wasn't trained in IT, he knew his
| way around the basics, he wasn't completely clueless.
|
| I asked him to explain the problem again as I wasn't sure I'd
| understood. He repeated exactly what he'd said the first time.
|
| I replied "What do you mean the screen saver fell off the
| monitor, that's impossible? Besides, it's a dumb terminal, they
| don't have screen savers."
|
| After a little more fumbling around this weird upside-down world
| he was presenting me with, it suddenly clicked. He was talking
| about the physical CRT anti-glare screen filter [0] that used to
| be common around then, that literally hung in front of the
| screen. This has come unstuck and hit the scroll lock on the
| terminal. He called this a screen saver.
|
| Since then the phrase "Screen saver" seems to have now morphed to
| mean what I used to call a desktop wallpaper, but that's a
| separate topic.
|
| [0]
| https://dylbs6e8mhm2w.cloudfront.net/productimages/500x500/E...
| zerr wrote:
| Can anyone summarize in a couple of sentences?
| zepolen wrote:
| No, read the damn thing.
| zerr wrote:
| I don't want to re-read it.
| akskos wrote:
| paste to gpt and prompt to summarize
| BjoernKW wrote:
| Ah, the true mother of all leaky abstractions:
|
| The actual underlying transmission protocol of the relativistic
| universe shining through when trying to send an email.
| [deleted]
| cmos wrote:
| I did a startup making a mp3 player that was attached to whole
| house audio distribution systems. We got an angry email from a
| customer saying he woke up to ABBA playing full blast at 3:00am.
| While it was likely an integration/timer issue, he was wondering
| 'why ABBA? what is the player trying to tell me?"
|
| The control system was sending 'play' with nothing else, which
| was more of an edge case based on our UI, and so it started at
| the beginning of the list of artists, and ABBA was at the
| beginning of that list.
|
| Other players might have started at the beginning of the list of
| songs, but for some reason (25 years ago) we chose the beginning
| of the list of artists. Later on it was configurable - random,
| favorite playlist, etc.
| [deleted]
| unlog wrote:
| My memory is vague. Anyone remember the related one about wife
| reporting some office app won't print on $day?
|
| edit: here it is
| https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Probably the "Openoffice can't print on Tuesdays" one:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171956
| nashashmi wrote:
| Here is the guy who came up with this:
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/treyharris
|
| And here is the other webpage that has this article:
| https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| This sort of kind should be [1997] rather than 2002, but then
| even Trey can't remember:
| https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
| jaboutboul wrote:
| Love when this story comes up on HN.
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