The Digital Dad

So the wife and I are watching an episode of Law & Order from 2003. (Yay re-runs! Thanks, writer’s strike!) In it, a bank transfer is initiated electronically and darned if those wily prosecutors don’t want to find out whodunnit. Fortunately for Sam Waterston, the bank has a crack team of one, count em, one nerdy-style lady who runs a “traceroute program” to “backtrack the IP address.” Say huh? You know, a traceroute program, “the same kind of software they use to nail internet hackers.” Oh! Thanks for the explanation. I’m guessing that’s different from the DOS command “traceroute.” The reason I make this summation is because it’s actually got a GUI that we get to see. (Yippee!)

This GUI, which clearly states the name of the application as IP Address Track 1.0.5 (Glad they got the upgrade from 1.0, even if it was mainly a bugfix patch.), lists a “Datastream” field (complete with Matrix-style rapid-streaming illegible text) and “Globalposit” graphic (which just seems to be a black sphere with gridlines overlaid). But the very best section of this IP Address Track is the IP address display itself, outfitted with a password-cracking-style IP box that ticks through the IP numbers one at a time (not as a whole octet) as if correctly “hacking” the IP – digit by digit.

And the very best part of this very best section? When the leet bank tech lady finally “backtracks” the IP, we get this statement from her: “392.163.1.104 – That’s a US address.”

I feel the time is right to interject a teensy bit of geek-school. IP addresses, the house numbers of the internet, are a combination of 4 8-bit binary octets separated by periods. Several blocks of these addresses are reserved for private use on non-routed networks. The most common of these reserved groups, the 16-bit block (192.168.0.0), is what most people would find on their home network. Each of the 4 numbers in an IP address is an 8-bit binary number, that’s 2 to the 8th power. Doing the math on that, we can see that with 8-bit binaries, there’s an available 2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2, or 256, numbers. Since these numbers start with zero, and zero is one of those 256, the possible values for IP octets are 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255. Even ignoring the tons of those values reserved for private networks and network infrastructures, the maximum number is 255.255.255.255!

And now back to our show. “392.163.1.104 – That’s a US address.” That’s not even possible! The last time I checked, 392 was waaay bigger than 256. Now I know in television and film writers often use (212) 555-XXXX non-real telephone numbers to keep psycho TV fans from drunk-dialing House’s cell phone to ask him if he’ll play doctor with them, only to rouse a very sleepy Bob the Exterminator at two o’clock in the stinkin’ morning! But using 392.163.1.104 as an IP address is like our hero tell his heroine to call his cell phone, (21543) 332237-298A99012$345. It’s just silly.

Although it’s not as silly as Las Vegas’s Danny McCoy pulling the image of a killer off of his reflection in another guy’s eye, himself reflected in a van’s rear-view mirror, all of this in a grainy traffic camera. WTF?