It feels odd to look at the ping man page.
Only these Russians and I have apparently seen the below:
$ ping -c 1 -s 56 www.google.com
PING www.google.akadns.net (64.233.171.104): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 64.233.171.104: icmpseq=0 ttl=243 time=62.874 ms
— www.google.akadns.net ping statistics
—1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 62.874/62.874/62.874 ms
$ ping -c 1 -s 57 www.google.com
PING www.google.akadns.net (64.233.171.104): 57 data bytes
64 bytes from 64.233.171.104: icmpseq=0 ttl=243 time=63.659 ms
wrong data byte #56 should be 0x38 but was 0x0
41 9c 25 ae 0 8 60 28 8 9 a b c d e f 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f
20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 2a 2b 2c 2d 2e 2f 30
--- www.google.akadns.net ping statistics
---1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 63.659/63.659/63.659 ms
When I have a packet size larger than 56, something in the packet gets corrupted. Could it be my Linksys router? OS X? Bellsouth? It’s a mystery.