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I'm the author of an April Fool's Internet Standard, AMA (self.asklemmy)

submitted 2 years ago by Two9A to c/[email protected]

183 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Let's get the AMAs kicked off on Lemmy, shall we.

Almost ten years ago now, I wrote RFC 7168, "Hypertext Coffeepot Control Protocol for Tea Efflux Appliances" which extends HTCPCP to handle tea brewing. Both Coffeepot Control Protocol and the tea-brewing extension are joke Internet Standards, and were released on Apr 1st (1998 and 2014). You may be familiar with HTTP error 418, "I'm a teapot"; this comes from the 1998 standard.

I'm giving a talk on the history of HTTP and HTCPCP at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin later this month, and I need an FAQ section; AMA about the Internet and HTTP. Let's try this out!

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What other such joke standards (by you or others) do you like?

[–] Two9A 83 points 2 years ago (5 children)

A little lower down the stack, I always liked the Evil Bit in TCP, a standard which removes all need for firewalls heuristics by requiring malware or packets with evil intent to set the Evil Bit. The receiver can simply drop packets with the Evil Bit set, and thus be entirely safe forever from bad traffic.

At the physical interface layer where data meets real life, I especially enjoy IP over Avian Carrier; that link in particular is to the QoS definition which extends the original spec for carrying packets by carrier pigeon.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Someone tested the evil bit and found a selection of real-world networks that react to its presence

[–] Commanderoptimism 5 points 2 years ago

Fun read, thanks for the link!

[–] LeberechtReinhold 22 points 2 years ago (1 children)

With the advances on SDcards, IPoAC is getting better and better.

[–] Two9A 28 points 2 years ago

As the saying goes, "for bandwidth, nothing beats a truck full of ~~tapes~~ 1TB MicroSDs hurtling down the highway".

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

The Evil Bit sounds like the real Do Not Track header field

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What's wild is that IPoAC was actually tested, and shown to have a higher throughput than the local ISP. Source

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Relevant what if: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

There really is an xkcd for everything....

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Wow. Never knew about these :)