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Comment by Rooster61 | Hacker News Reader

I'm skeptical of this. Did they provide any proof to that effect? The odds are indeed INCREDIBLY low, low enough for me to suspect Roku doing something lazy in their network traffic sanitization.

EDIT: Nope, nothing. They just stated it as fact and left it it at that. I'm calling shenanigans. Amusing theory, but it really is too incredulous to believe without any evidence.

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yeah I mean why don't you also provide some kind of lengthy code (probably 128 characters for that?) I mean in no way does nintendo send multiple big packets for network discovery. and a reboot command should not be a single udp/tcp packet, I mean wtf.

Look at the name of the subreddit.

Yes, it's called ProgrammerHumor. No, that doesn't automatically mean someone's posting something sarcastic/bullshit.

I'd find a collision of such low probability very humorous if it actually happened.

It’s more than humorous - assuming the signature is secure, nothing that amazing has yet happened in the history of the universe.

It probably happens all the time. We just realize its astronomically low and assume the easier to understand, safer explanation in our own incompetence instead and go back to saying we never see that sort of thing.

"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." - Richard Feynman

It makes it very likely it's a joke. There's really no reason to treat it as anything else, just because it got mistaken for not-a-joke.

If it is a joke, it is very elaborate. Roku published a service alert about it: https://support.roku.com/article/115012351368

The joke is the explanation not the fact that this issue exists.

What is the size of an accepted message in bytes?

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