A US government timeserver has a bizarre service running on a nonstandard port that will output sweet, random coded jump-rope poems and numbers:
% telnet time.nist.gov 78
Trying 192.43.244.18…
Connected to time.nist.gov.
Escape character is '^]'.P: P: My name is Patsy: and my husband's name is Paul:
We come from Pittsburgh: and we sell Peaches::
880-223-821-266-590-908-785
$ 0 875 3000 8 1 0 0
Connection closed by foreign host.
(Thanks, Sean!)
Update: Ethan sez, "That non-standard port on the US time server is actually the long forgotten Finger protocol. On Linux or Mac, type finger root@192.43.244.18"
Update 2: Dave sez, "From this document, it looks like this is simply an automated monitoring tool used by the adminstrators of the time service to check on the status of the servers. If you look for the list of servers given, you can finger some (but not all) of them and get the same info.
"In particular, the second number of the second groupings appears simply to be a second count, though what the rest of the numbers mean is unclear. It's possible that the CIA is sending encryption keys to its spies this way, but it seems unlikely. A few of the numbers in the first grouping barely change at all over repeated pings, which would make it extremely poor key material generator."
Update 3: Matthew points out a NIST employee's explanation of the codes:
Let me explain what you are seeing.
1. The first text is a pseudo-random text designed to confuse automated search engines (note the strategic colons). There are 16 poems and they are sent in a random sequence. The text is derived from a jump-rope game and has no special meaning.2. The remaining digits provide internal information on the operation of the server and are used for automated remote monitoring. All NIST servers do this.
3. Most of the digits relate to complicated internal parameters. However, the first 3 values after the $ sign are easy to explain the first is the overall state of the server (0=ok,>0=various failures) the second is the time since the server was last calibrated (in sec), and the third is the nominal interval between calibrations (in sec) the remaining parameters have to do with the internal clock control of the system.
