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A comment on Smart ovens shouting out to servers in Russia and China. Parent comment

Re:Smart ovens shouting out to servers in Russia and China by cnorthwood on Thursday January 26, 2023 @11:58AM (#34534452)
When I worked at the BBC, there was a substantial proportion of all traffic to the homepage which were just some devices checking for an internet connection. I believe as part of the move to HTTPS-only there was serious discussion over whether or not there was a public service responsibility to not break some random devices out there, as moving from a 200 to 301 response on http://www.bbc.co.uk might have broken some things.
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Re:Smart ovens shouting out to servers in Russia and China by jameshart on Thursday January 26, 2023 @12:16PM (#34534779)
Given that nuclear subs were supposed to use the ability to pick up BBC Radio 4 as a signal to determine if London had fallen, I think, no matter how improbable, it would at least be prudent to check the MOD didn’t have any alarms set to go off if the BBC website stopped responding on port 80.
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Re:Smart ovens shouting out to servers in Russia and China by neruthes on Friday January 27, 2023 @01:20AM (#34543194)
XKCD 1172 is both fun and realistic
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Re:Smart ovens shouting out to servers in Russia and China by luckylion on Thursday January 26, 2023 @12:13PM (#34534737)
There should be official services for that. I'm sure Google (or in Germany, heise.de, which publishes multiple IT-related magazines since forever) sees a lot of that as well. The BBC's home page currently weighs in at around 45kb compressed or 230kb uncompressed. Imagine how much traffic is needlessly generated just by connectivity checks, not to speak of the amount of computing power.
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Re:Smart ovens shouting out to servers in Russia and China by xxpor on Thursday January 26, 2023 @12:26PM (#34534992)
A good use case for using HEAD instead of GET
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Re:Smart ovens shouting out to servers in Russia and China by alex_suzuki on Thursday January 26, 2023 @12:29PM (#34535065)
Ancient wisdom… easily forgotten.
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Re:Smart ovens shouting out to servers in Russia and China by rtkwe on Thursday January 26, 2023 @01:22PM (#34536158)
There are alternatives like simply pinging the servers or one of the many alternative DNS servers like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 that are out there.
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Re:Smart ovens shouting out to servers in Russia and China by neurostimulant on Thursday January 26, 2023 @03:53PM (#34538670)
Some internet connectivity check endpoints I see in my home networks:

- http://detectportal.firefox.com

- http://ping.manjaro.org/check_network_status.txt

- http://connectivitycheck.gstatic.com/generate_204

- http://captive.apple.com

- http://www.msftconnecttest.com/connecttest.txt

- http://api.ipify.org

The manjaro one will respond with "NetworkManager is online" when accessed from curl, but redirect to manjaro homepage when accessed from a browser.

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Re:Smart ovens shouting out to servers in Russia and China by forgotusername6 on Thursday January 26, 2023 @01:01PM (#34535753)
I was on the phone with my BT customer support a while back and part of their debug process was to ask me to ping bbc.co.uk.
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