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Comment by mindslight

20 hours ago

Probes create much more traffic locally than it takes to backhaul a summary of their results.

1TB still smells like a bug

  • My naive assumption would be it's looking for events in time, like sign of occupancy. For example, when your phone leaves the wifi network.

    But still must be a bug.

  • I was thinking that repeated small probes add up quicker than you'd expect. But this is ~1.1MB/sec, which still seems a few orders of magnitude off.

    Now I'm left wondering what this traffic actually is - assuming probe (arp/icmp) packet size of 64 byte, that's 17kpps. I don't think an ESP32 class Internet-of-Trash chip can even do that. Even bulk transfers rather than small probes would be pushing it.

    Perhaps this thing found some fellow-traveler device streaming video on a port it happened to connected to?

    ... the linked xit says it "broadcast 1TB of data". So maybe some protocol with a much larger packet than icmp, spammed in a hard loop without any delay?