The Internet

the internet is such a weird thing. It's just a mess of wires connecting everyone together, where machines send information in small units, packets of data. These packets often get lost, the path is hard with all that infrastructure, cables, and even sharks in the worst cases. There are standard ways to realize you missed a packet in the tcp protocol, so it's no big deal in most cases.

One hobby of mine is to collect said lost packets, and analyse them. I'm what people know as a packet angler. If there's something personal or dangerous, I leave it be, I'm not a bad person, and most of it is encrypted anyways, but sometimes I find the weirdest of things. They are usually parts of documents, hard to understand by themselves, but from time to time I find a packet with all the information I need.

Interempidence

The hobby of packet fishing (not phishing, that's completely different) is interesting on its own, but there's one phenomena that makes it, in my opinion, better than any other hobby or activity. You know about radio atmospheric propagation? When a radio is emiting on very high frequency (VHF), the signal often doesn't get too far (no longer than ~50km on a hill). But when the atmospheric conditions are just right, a part of the atmosphere bounces the radio signals, making it go much farther. The phenomena of interempidence is similar, but applied in a whole galactic level. The internet is, as I've said previously, a gigant mess of wires, like a gigant antenna around the Earth. When the conditions are just right (cosmic radiation, network load... ), a packet from "our side" might swap for another from "another side". That might be anywhere in the world, anywhere in time, anywhere in the diferent routes this world might take. I'm no expert, I've learned this not too long ago from a co-worker, but I think it's a really interesting field of study. Plus, anyone with a decent internet connection can try it!

The need for this page

Searching on the web, I've realized there isn't almost anything about packet fishing online, not in ourtube, nor in Y (formerly chirper) nor anywhere else except for obscure forums. So I made this place! (See? It's not obscure, it has bright colors!). I hope that we packet anglers can start sharing our cool finds and even forming together pieces of our past, present, and future history, and learn along the way.

If you want to read about interesting packets I find on the internet, just pick one that sounds interesting:

• future bird packet