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Comment by ralmeida | Hacker News Reader

This. Once an episode of Criminal Minds had a criminal whose IP started with 300-something. That would be immediately corrected if the writing was minimally revised by an specific consultant, which suggests it wasn't. So I'm going with s_henry_paulson and the Hanlon's Razor on this one.

On a side note, isn't the term "freetard" extremely pejorative?

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That's probably not an error. It's like phone numbers starting with 555, so that it isn't accidentally someones' phone.

There are IP ranges reserved for that, much like example.com.

That seems a little overzealous for an IP, but indeed I hadn't considered this possibility.

It seems overzealous, until you're the one whose IP has been published in a mainstream media outlet, resulting in bored crackers probing around to see what's there.

In an age where television shows regularly incorporate "real world" tie-ins and easter eggs, it makes perfect sense to use an invalid IP address to save everyone some trouble. Not to mention, if someone were really attacked as a result of their IP address being randomly used on some television show, the lawsuit that follows would be unwelcome.

"Freetard" is more or less a meme at El Reg.

Unsurprisingly I'm also in agreement, it's just stupidity and laziness that will only get picked up by a few nerds. Still, nerdrages can be very therapeutic!

> On a side note, isn't the term "freetard" extremely pejorative?

This is The Register we're talking about. I see it as no coincidence that it has a red banner, it is a "Red Top" of tech journalism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_tops#Red_top

Woundn't it actually make sense that a consultant would recommend using the 555 equivelant for an ip addresses since anyone could try to attack it after watching the movie.

Any qualified consultant would be aware of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserved_IP_addresses

Edit: To save a click-through, if the movie/show producers actually cared, a seemingly innocent IP like 203.0.113.42 would not only be fine as "random computer number" for the general audience but also it would be a valid IP and furthermore instead of causing nerdrages would cause nerdgasms as people "in the know" can revel in their shared secret. It's not "correct" in the sense that the IP goes somewhere in real life but it's not flat out wrong.

I considered suggesting using 127.0.0.1, but I felt that at least a meaningful portion of the audience might know that that is the local host. 203.0.113.42 is good as are the other test nets. I wasn't aware of these before though.

But if you're looking at the logs of connection over the 'net, as it's usually the case in those shows, a reserved IP would be wrong too. It's rather irrelevant which one you use.

An obviously fake IP address breaks the suspension of disbelief for those who know what an IP address should look like: four octets of 0-255 each. There's a much smaller population who both knows what an IP address looks like and what IP addresses are assigned and publicly routable. By your logic, IP addresses might as well contain only three dot-separated numbers, such as "350.897.260"... since if there are no degrees of wrongness, why even try to get it minimally authentic looking?

Wouldn't bother me.

Agreed, I hadn't considered this. I take that back.

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