On Tue, 11 Sep 2001, Stephen Robert Norris wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 11, 2001 at 11:53:04AM +1000, DaZZa wrote:
> > On Mon, 10 Sep 2001, Rick Moen wrote:
> >
> > > > Only those who have cheap junk modems, or who don't know how to set them
> > > > up properly.
> > >
> > > Well, look, folks, I hate to have to spell it out for you guys, but...
> >
> > Please, spell. I'm anxious to see how good your english is.
> >
> > > Have you ever looked, raw, at a binary file, e.g. cat'ed it to screen by
> > > accident? That sort of stuff is, of course, what comes whizzing past
> > > your modem every time you, for example, transfer a binary file over a
> > > telephone line. You will note that you can find just about any pattern
> > > you please of characters in there, if you scroll far enough -- rather
> > > like looking for patterns in clouds, except with less healthy exposure
> > > to the outdoors.
> >
> > There's a couple of things wrong with this assumption.
> >
> > 1) The chance of a combination of binary code coming out in the exact
> > format of "+++ath0" is literally staggering. Winning lotto, by comparison,
> > would be an every day event.
>
> Yes, 1 in 72057594037927936.
or more nicely 2 ^ 56. Which means in every 16.7 million 4 gig chunks of
data you download you will see 1 of these. Which you might get away with on
a cable modem it would take around 39846.040000579829 (assuming I got my maths
right)[1] years to encounter that string randomly.
Benno.
[1]
>>> (2.0 ** 56) / (56 * 1024) / 60 / 60 / 24/ 365
39846.040000579829
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