[Backup] PHR Ch. 2: UDP Packets

Backup of https://joelrees-novels.blogspot.com/2017/10/phr-02-udp-packets.html.

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Ch. 1: Paperboy

Ch. 2: UDP Packets

"Mom!"

Of course, I don't really need defenses with Mom. She is not my enemy. She's my best friend in the world.

Dad is my best friend in the world, too -- and on the 'net. I wish they wouldn't argue.

No, it's not that I need defenses against Mom, it's just that my defenses were so far gone. It's not every day you just happen to be outside your new house when the good-looking newscarrier comes by and you find out he runs a local server.

 "Never mind, I'm sure I'll meet him soon enough. What should we do for dinner?"

"Pizza?"

"Are you gonna make it?"

"Can't we order out?"

"You know we can't afford that. Especially not until your Dad sells the house."

We had tofu and tossed salad and rice. And we split a can of tuna. Mom and I fixed the salad together after I cleaned up in the computer room and she finished some more paperwork.

"It's kind of lonely without Dad, isn't it?"

"Oh, Mom. How long is it going to take?"

"I wish I knew."

"Is it really about selling the house?"

Mom didn't answer, she just took my hand and squeezed it. I don't know what Mom was thinking, and I'm not sure what I was thinking. But we sat there for a while.

"Rusty said I could give him a ping."

"Mmmm?"

"The paperboy. Send him a message so we can talk. Should I?"

"How should I know? Should we look at the news?"

"I wanna see what that neighborhood SNS is all about."

We got on the internet again, and Mom logged on to slashdot and her aggregator, which I don't mention, and she doesn't mind if I don't. While she read to me from the firehose, I logged in to the ISP's modem's control page. It was cool enough (barely) for one fan to cover both of us and our two PCs in the living room. Still not dark. Daylight savings? Get serious. Totally unnecessary here.

The modems that ISPs provide are hardly worth the plastic they're housed in. NAT and port forwarding in name only. What logging? No fine tuning, and only a hundred lines. Just enough filtering to keep Universal Plug and Play from letting your neighbor own everything you dare leave open to UPnP.

I had already set the password and the inside IP address to something not default, so we could safely get our mail. And I had put a real firewall between the modem and our inside router. Nice little low-power semi-custom ARM box running openBSD. Lots of space to keep logs. Dad's job has some perks. Updating the firewall can be a panic sometimes, because the box is semi-custom and there's no place for the drivers in the project source tree.

I wanted to check out our superpaperboy's SNS server before we signed up, and I don't mean the end-users' agreement. That would come after, so I could at least have plausible deniability. Mom would be my witness that I hadn't thought to read it first.

I mapped all the modem ports to the firewall and dropped all the filters the modem would let me. Then I started probing Superpaperboy's servers. I was very impressed. He knew what he was doing. So I gave Mom the thumbs-up and she typed in the URL for the local news and started reading the legal stuff to me.

"Nice of the newspaper company to provide both the news and the SNS in the same service," she commented an hour later.

"Smart business, too. Wait, Mom. Don't sign us up yet, I see something strange in the logs."

Superpaperboy was sending me messages in raw UDP packets.

{Hey, Cute Geek. Uninvited probes are not considered polite.}

I was impressed.

{Hey, superpaperboy. I practice safe hex.}

{Cut it out or I'll come over and tell your mom what you just said.}

{Mom is riding shotgun.}

{I'm coming over.}

{Don't you dare.}

Mom laughed. "Guess I get to find out how cute he is."

"Mo-om!" I whined. I admit it. I whined.

{See you in ten.}

{Won't be here.}

But he had already set the message to repeat every ten seconds, counting down in English, no less, and was not responding.

"Where do you plan to go?"

"Well, I'm not going to answer the door!"

Mom just laughed as I ran into my room to change clothes and get some of the dust out of my hair.

Ch. 3: Invitation

TOC

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Backup at https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2017/10/bk-phr-02-udp-packets.html.