July 30, 2026
Packets, pixels, and pure chaos
Bad Apple but It's Traceroute
The internet is losing it over a music video played through network maps
TLDR: A programmer turned an internet route display into a tiny screen for Bad Apple, continuing the web’s favorite tradition of making that video play on absurd devices. The comments were a mix of awe, apocalypse jokes, insults, and people bragging they’d already done similar tricks elsewhere.
A coder has done the absolutely unnecessary and therefore absolutely essential: made Bad Apple!! play through a tool that normally just shows the path your internet traffic takes. In plain English, they turned a boring network route display into a tiny black-and-white movie screen, one fake stop at a time. It took custom tweaks, a patched app, and a pile of rules big enough to make any normal person ask, "but... why?" The creator’s answer is basically: because the internet has a sacred tradition of making Bad Apple run on things that were never meant to show video.
And honestly? The community didn’t just clap — it performed. One commenter declared this is life after the apocalypse: we’ll still have Doom on random machines and Bad Apple on literally anything. Another simply called it "art," which may be the cleanest possible review of the whole stunt. Then the comment section swerved into full internet chaos, with one person firing off the wildly aggressive insult about needing "that stick up your colon surgically removed," while another deadpanned, "We’re all grownups here, we’ve seen sex before," turning the thread from clever nerd project into weird comedy club in seconds.
The funniest twist? Someone else jumped in with the classic one-up: they’d done something similar for DNS, the internet’s phonebook system, and even dropped a YouTube link. So the real vibe here is equal parts admiration, meme worship, and competitive hacker energy: yes, this is ridiculous, yes, everyone loves it, and yes, somebody already wants to top it.
Key Points
- •The article documents a method for rendering *Bad Apple!!* in traceroute output by injecting changing fake IPv6 hops.
- •The implementation uses nftables `numgen` with ICMPv6 packet generation so each response can return a different IPv6 address.
- •The Linux ICMPv6 egress rate limit must be disabled with `sysctl net.ipv6.icmp.ratelimit=0` to support the animation rate.
- •The author patched `mtr` to stop its normal multi-address-per-hop display from disrupting the visual output.
- •The source video was converted with ffmpeg to 8 fps, 30×11 PNG frames, then transformed by a Python script into an nftables ruleset of just over 1 MB.