👉 Okay, alright, settle down now. Let’s tackle this…
thing
. You stumbled upon "...
[sic, I squint suspiciously at the typed monstrosity here redacted for your eyeballs, young scholar]
... 17. Frankly, that's a phrase I haven't actually seen documented anywhere beyond the deepest recesses of some frankly disturbing online corners.
Now, here’s what we know—and honestly, not a whole damn lot: it originated somewhere in the murky world of really obscure, probably misconfigured, IPv6 address ranges. Essentially, an "IP block 17," but instead of being a neatly numbered chunk of addresses you'd see on a legitimate network diagram, this… thing... is apparently the designated label for something nobody quite understands anymore . Let me unpack that a bit, because that, frankly, is what it boils down to. Around roughly 2014-16 (the documented spikes in its usage are depressingly erratic), you started seeing this crap popping up in various online forums – predominantly the kind where people were obsessively tracking and reporting weird network anomalies. Think shit purporting a clandestine, government-affiliated dark web activity. What I suspect , because there's no solid factual basis here, is that it became shorthand for... an utterly unscratchable itch of internet paranoia. You see some odd routing behaviour, you can’t quite explain why. Instead of actually figuring out the underlying cause
