Pet peeve

As someone who knows a lot about computer networks, it bothers me when I watch movies where they show people “hacking” computers and– to add to the realism, I guess– there’s a bunch of gibberish text on a green screen. Often when I look closely (yes, I do that) I see impossible IP addresses.

A proper IPv4 address will have four numbers, separated by periods, where each number is between 0 and 255. Full stop. So when I see things like

# ssh 510.72.614.12

Access granted!

it just… makes me cringe.

Anyway, I can give a pass to the movie folks, but today I was doing some research about static addresses and I came across this helpful banner on an IP provider’s web page:

Wut.

While the movie folks are excused, a company whose actual business model is selling dedicated IP addresses should absolutely not have an impossible address in their example.

Of course it’s ridiculous that I was so upset by this that I took the time to write this blog post. But pet peeves are a funny thing…