Corrupted

Corrupted

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The flavortext refers to the camp/drama game "Wanna buy a duck?" but the hints here are that the duck in question was invented by Marjorie Flack (author of the children's book The Story About Ping) and that the duck's quack "kinda" echoes. If you ping the IP address 64.225.124.150, you'll (unusually) get back only eight response packets, rather than an unlimited number. These echo-response packets are also "truncated" from the `ping` utility's point of view: they are all significantly too short and don't actually contain the original payload of the echo-request packets that your computer transmitted. Instead, each one contains a single-byte payload (which can be viewed with a packet sniffer like Wireshark). The bytes of these single-byte payloads are 0x41, 0x4E, 0x053, 0x3D, 0xFE, 0x1D, 0x2A, and 0xB1. In ASCII the first four of these correspond to the string `ANS=`, while the last four concatenate to form the (otherwise meaningless) answer **FE1D2AB1**.