What Happened to TCP Flags URGENT, MSG_OOB, and SIGURG? (2007)

What the what? I knew of the URGENT flag but had no idea the client discarded the last byte. What is the rationale behind that?

A misunderstanding of what the "Urgent Pointer" field in the header means. I go into it in more detail here: http://blog.mecheye.net/2017/10/urg/

RFC 6093 [1] provides a bit more insight into this and other behavior.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6093

WinNuke! Those were the days... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinNuke

as a network engineer the best way is to have excess bandwidth on your entire path on a dedicated link. there is no other way to guarantee anything across the public Internet, yes you can make best effort assumptions but if you are doing something critical there are no guarantees over public networks.