The day my ping took countermeasures
The author recounts a surprising experience with the ping utility after returning from vacation. Upon running ping, they discovered it had implemented countermeasures due to a backward clock adjustment. This led to an exploration of how ping handles erroneous measurements and its historical context.
- ▪The author experienced unexpected behavior from the ping utility after their computer clock was adjusted backward.
- ▪Ping marked erroneous measurements as zero milliseconds, which the author referred to as 'taking countermeasures'.
- ▪Ping was originally developed in 1983 by Mike Muuss for the U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory.
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Record
| Original publisher | The Cloudflare Blog |
| Canonical URL | https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-day-my-ping-took-countermeasures/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 24 May 2026 02:02:05 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-24T02:27:29.442Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-24T02:50:54.455Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | CmbPc_-D1UbA |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The day my ping took countermeasures2023-07-11Marek Majkowski8 min read Once my holidays had passed, I found myself reluctantly reemerging into the world of the living. I powered on a corporate laptop, scared to check on my email inbox. However, before turning on the browser, obviously, I had to run a ping. Debugging the network is a mandatory first step after a boot, right? As expected, the network was perfectly healthy but what caught me off guard was this message: I was not expecting ping to take countermeasures that early on in a day. Gosh, I wasn't expecting any countermeasures that Monday!Once I got over the initial confusion, I took a deep breath and collected my thoughts. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what has happened.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Cloudflare Blog.
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