CSI is usually a show that takes delight in being as accurate as possible in its portrayal of forensic science, but the CSI:Miami episode I saw last night, “Big Brother”, had some awful flubs. Aside from the requisite cheesy Bejeweled-like graphical interface of “Grave Robber”, a fictitious file recovery program, and a bizarre looking command line ping program (that helpfully tells its user that an IP is spoofed with a blinking red “Forged” indicator), they also showed two malformed IP addresses.
The IP addresses went something like this: 301.101.28.1108. All valid network addresses must have their first octet between 0 and 223; “301” is way out of this range. As for “1108” at the end there, let’s just say only a number between 1 and 254 is valid.
But then they may have done this on purpose. In the same way that all fictitious phone numbers on TV have NPAs of 555, the producers felt they need fictitious IP addresses too.