💾 Archived View for the-brannons.com › ericwayne captured on 2024-12-17 at 09:48:31. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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(Copied over from my normyweb blog):
I posted this to the Fediverse way back in late 2023. It was almost lost, because I switched Fediverse accounts. But thanks to the life-changing magic of archived PostgreSQL dumps, I found it. I'm putting it here for the sake of permanence.
I was capturing traffic being sent to my Raspberry Pi today, attempting to debug a SIP problem. And I noticed a really weird packet from someone’s Google Home Max on my network:
IPv4 source address: 10.4.20.172 IPV4 destination address: 255.255.255.255 UDP source port: 9487 UDP destination port: 9478 Data bytes as hex: 34373666366636373663363534653530343535663435373236393633356635373631373936653635 Data bytes as ASCII: 476f6f676c654e50455f457269635f5761796e65
So this is a packet containing a 40-byte payload, and the 40 bytes just happen to be ASCII hex digits. That string of hex digits looks suspiciously like even more text encoded in hex, and it is. The original string was: GoogleNPE_Eric_Wayne.
Every minute or so, this device sends out a broadcast packet to UDP port 9478, containing the rather enigmatic string GoogleNPE_Eric_Wayne encoded in hex.
That begs some questions. What the fuck is a Google NPE, and who the fuck is Eric Wayne?
For clarification, the line labeled "data bytes as hex" is the 40 byte raw payload of the packet, represented unambiguously as 80 hex digits. Then that 40 byte raw payload is a string of ASCII hex digits that decodes to GoogleNPE_Eric_Wayne.
After I made that original post, a friend speculated that perhaps NPE stood for "null pointer exception", I.E., from Java. That theory holds a lot of water, because Google writes a lot of Java. But what does it have to do with Eric Wayne? Is Eric so bloody incompetent that his code is always throwing null pointer exceptions, so everyone calls him NPE Eric Wayne? I hope not! Is some component of the Google Home Max crashing every minute with a null pointer exception, and Eric is the guy who is expected to fix it? Maybe this is a debugging aid that got included in the published software by mistake. All I have is speculation for now.