My thinking was more along the lines of Eric Wayne being someone who registered a “Non-Person Entity” account for developing some sort of Home Max integration, didn’t know what to name it (maybe they develop more than one thing using the API), and so decided to slap their own name on it.
I know absolutely nothing about the Home Max, so the preceding sentence is entirely spitballing.
Perhaps it’s dynamically created, even. Like how your phone and MacBook are named by you, maybe they take the owner name and add it to this string, assuming it’s gonna be unique enough within a single home.
The question then is how did it get to the OPs RasPi. (I’m assuming the RasPi is in a local network.)
I somehow doubt “NPE” stands for “null pointer exception”, especially if it’s not sending any more debug information. If I were to guess, I’d suppose at least the “PE” might be “packet explorer” or something, but to be honest, I think the most probable answer is that it doesn’t stand for anything. I’d guess it’s just someone snooping around open ports on the internet and sending some arbitrary, but unique and specific signature for some unknown reason, and decided to try to make it look “legitimate” by composing it out of the symbols “Google”, a random 3 letter acronym that probably doesn’t stand for anything, and maybe the user’s favorite author or something. You’d be surprised at how boring a lot of real-world mysteries are.
It’s the Google Home Max generating this traffic, not someone scanning ports on the Internet. One UDP packet every minute or so, consistently.
Since Google has a monorepo, I’m tentatively hopeful that an employee will grep for that string and let us know why it’s being sent. Though it’s pretty unlikely.
Huh. What’s that for ? I looked up RFC 6890 and it just said “Limited Broadcast”. Wikipedia has a bit more: (never knew !)
A special definition exists for the IP address 255.255.255.255. It is the broadcast address of the zero network or 0.0.0.0, which in Internet Protocol standards stands for this network, i.e. the local network. Transmission to this address is limited by definition, in that it is never forwarded by the routers connecting the local network to other networks.
I deployed TCP/IP onto my company’s network in about 1992 or 1993 (in addition to the primary protocols, DECnet and IPX/SPX) and I remember this was a thing then. Not seen it used since.
I think this is the Google Home Max trying to auto-discover other Home Max devices on the local network. It supports multi-speaker groups, so the devices would need to coordinate with each other when playing audio to stay in sync, and I imagine they do that automatically rather than having a user manually configure IP addresses.
By sending to the 255.255.255.255 address, all devices on the local subnet can receive a UDP packet without knowing about each other before hand. E.g. the Home Max device will both listen & send on UDP port 9478 and if it gets a packet with this content it’d know that there’s another friendly device on the network it can work with. The payload is probably a “magic” value, but that doesn’t answer the question of who Eric Wayne is!
I had discovered this independently a while ago and the only mention of it was on a Mastodon post by @teiresias
Thanks for posting this! It’s definitely one for the ages.
https://csrc.nist.gov/glossary/term/non_person_entity
Oh! So Eric Wayne is an unperson? It fits with the whole Orwellian vibe given off by devices like the Google Home Max.
My thinking was more along the lines of Eric Wayne being someone who registered a “Non-Person Entity” account for developing some sort of Home Max integration, didn’t know what to name it (maybe they develop more than one thing using the API), and so decided to slap their own name on it.
I know absolutely nothing about the Home Max, so the preceding sentence is entirely spitballing.
Perhaps it’s dynamically created, even. Like how your phone and MacBook are named by you, maybe they take the owner name and add it to this string, assuming it’s gonna be unique enough within a single home.
The question then is how did it get to the OPs RasPi. (I’m assuming the RasPi is in a local network.)
I somehow doubt “NPE” stands for “null pointer exception”, especially if it’s not sending any more debug information. If I were to guess, I’d suppose at least the “PE” might be “packet explorer” or something, but to be honest, I think the most probable answer is that it doesn’t stand for anything. I’d guess it’s just someone snooping around open ports on the internet and sending some arbitrary, but unique and specific signature for some unknown reason, and decided to try to make it look “legitimate” by composing it out of the symbols “Google”, a random 3 letter acronym that probably doesn’t stand for anything, and maybe the user’s favorite author or something. You’d be surprised at how boring a lot of real-world mysteries are.
It’s the Google Home Max generating this traffic, not someone scanning ports on the Internet. One UDP packet every minute or so, consistently.
Since Google has a monorepo, I’m tentatively hopeful that an employee will grep for that string and let us know why it’s being sent. Though it’s pretty unlikely.
I’m going to guess New Product Experience.
Huh. What’s that for ? I looked up RFC 6890 and it just said “Limited Broadcast”. Wikipedia has a bit more: (never knew !)
[Insert “I was there, Gandalf” meme]
I deployed TCP/IP onto my company’s network in about 1992 or 1993 (in addition to the primary protocols, DECnet and IPX/SPX) and I remember this was a thing then. Not seen it used since.
This was included in Cisco CCNA classes in the mid-2000s; I think even until recently I’ve used
ping 255.255.255.255as a quick look-around on a LAN.I think this is the Google Home Max trying to auto-discover other Home Max devices on the local network. It supports multi-speaker groups, so the devices would need to coordinate with each other when playing audio to stay in sync, and I imagine they do that automatically rather than having a user manually configure IP addresses.
By sending to the 255.255.255.255 address, all devices on the local subnet can receive a UDP packet without knowing about each other before hand. E.g. the Home Max device will both listen & send on UDP port 9478 and if it gets a packet with this content it’d know that there’s another friendly device on the network it can work with. The payload is probably a “magic” value, but that doesn’t answer the question of who Eric Wayne is!
No clue how the A11Y and slides tags got added. But I fail at web hard enough to not be able to remove them.
I think it’s more likely that Lobsters’s tagging UI fails at being fully accessible with screen readers.
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Perhaps NPE stands for Near Pure Evil? Term used to describe those that exhibit extreme malevolence but posses minor redeeming qualities.
Is this just a dig at Google, or do you have a reason it really would plausibly mean that?