[cnorthwood]

When I worked at the BBC, there was a substantial proportion of all traffic to the homepage which were just some devices checking for an internet connection. I believe as part of the move to HTTPS-only there was serious discussion over whether or not there was a public service responsibility to not break some random devices out there, as moving from a 200 to 301 response on http://www.bbc.co.uk might have broken some things.

[jameshart]

Given that nuclear subs were supposed to use the ability to pick up BBC Radio 4 as a signal to determine if London had fallen, I think, no matter how improbable, it would at least be prudent to check the MOD didn’t have any alarms set to go off if the BBC website stopped responding on port 80.

[neruthes]

XKCD 1172 is both fun and realistic

[luckylion]

There should be official services for that. I'm sure Google (or in Germany, heise.de, which publishes multiple IT-related magazines since forever) sees a lot of that as well. The BBC's home page currently weighs in at around 45kb compressed or 230kb uncompressed. Imagine how much traffic is needlessly generated just by connectivity checks, not to speak of the amount of computing power.

[neurostimulant]

Some internet connectivity check endpoints I see in my home networks:

- http://detectportal.firefox.com

- http://ping.manjaro.org/check_network_status.txt

- http://connectivitycheck.gstatic.com/generate_204

- http://captive.apple.com

- http://www.msftconnecttest.com/connecttest.txt

- http://api.ipify.org

The manjaro one will respond with "NetworkManager is online" when accessed from curl, but redirect to manjaro homepage when accessed from a browser.

[xxpor]

A good use case for using HEAD instead of GET

[alex_suzuki]

Ancient wisdom… easily forgotten.

[rtkwe]

There are alternatives like simply pinging the servers or one of the many alternative DNS servers like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 that are out there.

[forgotusername6]

I was on the phone with my BT customer support a while back and part of their debug process was to ask me to ping bbc.co.uk.