[eastbound]

In fact, it’s a common tactic to do something unusual, in a recurrent way, so people aren’t alerted when it happens for real. (When the Mossad stole 7 boats from a French port (that they had fully paid), they prepared a few months in advance by having the pilots start the engines every night at 23:00, pretending they needed it against the cold temperatures. When they day came, they started the engines and left, no-one saw it coming).

[vintermann]

It could also be a test to look for surprising things that break, in case they want to do this permanently at some later point.

[woooooo]

Hanlon's and Occam's razors point to it being a mistake by the GFW operators, imo.

If it's on purpose, I think you have the most likely motivation.

[account42]

You shouldn't use razors haphazardly or you might cut yourself.

A mistake that also weirdly increments some TCP fields for the three subsequent RST packets when that's not how the existing GFW devices behave would need some explanation before you could conclude it to be the most likely explanation.

[woooooo]

A new hardware/software rollout is one of the more common breakage situations, though. It definitely could have been on purpose but my gamble is still on a fuckup with a new system rollout.

[mschuster91]

It was five boats [1], an good story nonetheless. Think whatever you want about Mossad, it can not be denied that these guys have balls.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherbourg_Project

[cibyr]

One might even say they have chutzpah.