octets

A technical note: Twitter carries unicode messages; the limit is not 140 octets but 140 code points [0].

That's it - they redacted everything except for the ports and the first two octets of the destination IP addresses.

Foo: Hello_______\r ____\r would still simplify to: Foo: Hello_______[one or more SP octets]\r and then what?

Second, why octets specifically instead of numbers (or, more precisely, non-negative integers) more generally?

Generally the tuple (<length>,<hash>) is unique since the attacks on MD5 all involve changing the number of octets in the hashed source.

And hystorically, the bytes weren't even necessarily octets, but some other group of bits.

The length of any one label is limited to between 1 and 63 octets.

I just pasted both into my UTF8-encoded Linux terminal running `od -tx1` and got the same hex octets.

One might as well claim that C++ has no syntax, as its source code is nothing but a linear series of undifferentiated octets.

A full domain name is limited to 255 octets (including the separators).

This may be handled by your %octets-to-string handler though.

But as your sibling comment points out twitter is not based on octets but on code points so there is actually a lot more information in there.

Mo: un méga-octet, un million d'octets Mo/s: méga-octet par seconde meaning "Megabyte per second".

As in "octets of bits," bit being a unit of information.

"a string of labels each containing up to 63 8-bit octets, separated by dots, and with a maximum total of 255 octets." This makes it impossible to satisfy the "1-KB" requirement.

Unix established the "file descriptor" metaphor: a seekable stream of blocks-of-octets, some of which (files) existed persistently on disk, some of which (pipes) existed ephemerally between processes and only required resources proportional to the unconsumed buffer, some of which (sockets) existed between processes on entirely separate hosts.