Reverse Engineering a Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel (2016) • Hacker News Board

Dilettante_ wrote: post #13

This is the shortest, yet still fully complete example of an article that scratches that itch. Awakening the "intellectual curiosity", documenting the steps, and finding the actual end of the matter. The mundanity of the revelation is like the icing on the cake.

I wish there was a whole book of just random compiled stories like this.

Re: Reverse Engineering a Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel (2016)

#25

Post by gkbrk » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 3:58 AM UTC

VoidWhisperer wrote: post #21

Archive link as it seems the site is down: https://archive.is/afYvQ

Oops, picked a bad week to migrate from Cloudflare Pages to something custom in Rust.

Re: Reverse Engineering a Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel (2016)

#26

Post by Sophira » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 4:27 AM UTC

gkbrk wrote: post #12

nicelunch wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! Do you happen to have that elevator music saved? I'm curious what it sounded like.

I had it saved, but it was 3-4 computers ago. I don't think I still have it, and if I did I wouldn't know where. Aside from the article, I only found these scripts on my disk related to this project. listen_2046.py and send_2046.py https://gist.github.com/gkbrk/445929a854051203ee31afc7495c5a...

I'm curious now, did you develop the sending program at the same hotel, and if so, did it work?

(My guess is probably not, but you might DoS the other stream while you're sending your own.)

Re: Reverse Engineering a Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel (2016)

#27

Post by JSR_FDED » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 4:34 AM UTC

I love how tiny and to the point the Python scripts are. I bet if you asked AI to make these today the comments would be longer than these entire scripts. But I’m too bored by the idea to try it :-)

Re: Reverse Engineering a Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel (2016)

#28

Post by bobske4 » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 6:59 AM UTC

expecting a rick roll here

Re: Reverse Engineering a Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel (2016)

#29

Post by kogasa240p » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 7:02 AM UTC

nicelunch wrote: post #11

gkbrk wrote: post #3

Author here, hi :^)

Hi! Do you happen to have that elevator music saved? I'm curious what it sounded like.

Lol asked the same thing on his website

Re: Reverse Engineering a Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel (2016)

#30

Post by eru » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 1:06 PM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #2

I LOLed at the ending. Nicely done! I appreciate people posting negative results, too. The journey is the interesting part, and I like the humanity of saying "welp, at least now I know".

Though in this case, it's actually more of a positive result? The author figured out what the data was. It just wasn't very exiting.