IP over Avian Carriers RFC 1149 event (2001) | Hacker News Reader

IP over Avian Carriers RFC 1149 event (2001)

blug.linux.no

77 pointstyropita36 comments

RFC 1149 was updated in RFC 6214 [1] to support IPv6 but adoption has been painstakingly slow among avian ISPs.

[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6214

Hey! We'll have none of that anti-pigeon bigotry here :-P

                             ---
        \                  /   @ )
          \             _/_   |~ \)
            \     ( ( (     \ \
             ( ( ( ( (       | \
    _ _=(_(_(_(_(_(_(_  _ _ /  )
                    -  _ _ _  /
                          _\___
                         `    "'

Do you have a source for this? I would imagine all of them would already support it if they are in to supporting a niche such as avian messaging.

Not so funny at times: an article from 2009, "In Africa, A Pigeon Transfers Data Faster Than The Internet":

* https://www.wired.com/2009/09/in-africa-a-pigeon-transfers-d...

* https://spectrum.ieee.org/carrier-pigeon-beats-internet-

A truck full of storage volumes can have a higher bandwidth than fiber. Just really bad latency.

Interesting how the analogy progressed over the years from "a station wagon filled with tapes" to "a truck full of storage volumes".

An A380 filled with micro SD cards would likely beat any conceivable fiber network in bandwidth, if not latency.

XKCD What If kinda answered your question, although it's for the real fleets and not a specific plane, https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/. From February 2013 though, so out-of-date even if you ignore how covid has messed with shipping.

A hyperloop full of DNA-based storage has more bandwidth than STM-1024 but less latency.

This is roughly the idea behind Amazon snowball and similar products.

Strap the pigeon with 100 1TB microSD cards (~250 mg per card) and the bandwidth will approach the transfer speed of the microSD card itself — nearly gigabit speed for UHS-III cards.

It will be able to approach even faster than that, just have multiple card readers at both ends.

As long as your name isn't google, transfer by pigeon will always be faster (regardless of africa, silicon valley or downtown New York). The reason people use the internet for data transfer has little to do with transfer speed and everything to do with latency.

The vast majority of "packets dropped" were completely unrelated to IP traffic.

> with ping times varying from 3211 to 6389 seconds. I guess this is a new record for ping times…

Hmm, T-mobile's network comes close, but not quite that high, I think. /s

Somewhat more seriously, I have seen ping times approaching 20,000 ms on their network. Given the light-distance to the moon is ~1.3 seconds, this ping clearly went significantly further than the moon's orbit, and back; very clearly some routes need tweaking.

That or one hop involved a somewhat speedier avian.

More likely than moving far or moving slow the ping spent a long time being buffered at a radio lower layer retransmit where, much like Wi-Fi, having an issue sending the packet can result in multiple retries instead of an immediate drop.

There are some instances of real data taking much more than 6,389 seconds to travel. Voyager 2 was contacted in November 2020[1], being at the time 18.8 billion km away from Earth. Light takes about 62,000 seconds or 17h25m to travel this distance… each way! Almost a 35-hour ping.

Voyager 1 is further away and still sending data, although I don't think that it has received commands for a very long time.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/11/04/voya...

It recieved commands as recently as December 2017, when the TCM thrusters were activated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Future_of_the_probe

There is clearly an issue with the network protocol if the packets run the risk of starting to socialize with each other!

Funny that this would come up. This event was what inspired the last picture in a book I'm working on.

In the same vein, I actually built a device once that allowed you to send http messages via black and white marbles rolling down a tube. It was very slow (and the simplest message required refilling the hopper many times).

I used some drawings of an old gumball machine to design the dispenser, and I used an Arduino with a color sensor and an LED in a 3d printed tunnel to detect the marble color. I had to bury the sensor inside a tunnel with several twists and turns to block out enough ambient light to get a reliable signal.

https://www.networksfromscratch.com/1.html#whats-next

I have proudly used RFC 1149s and 2549 many times over the years, (as straight faced as possible) as learning aids for INFOSEC and Help desk n00bs. Being able to introduce intentionally humorous material (that is documented within a scientific document process) has been a huge help.

What a kinder and gentler internet we missed. I for one would support the "pigeoneer" position for my own small tech firm.

When I read that RFC, I imagined that a barcode would be more reliable to read in and process than printing the hex characters.

Typical 1D barcode has a size limit, and the RFC is from 1990. Nowadays you could just use a QR code, which would be comfortable enough to have a 1500 MTU in a single QR code. It probably warrants an additional layer so multiple QR codes can be transmitted by a single carrier.

Looked into using paper as an archival for small amounts of data as a long-term backup of very important data, and found this[1], which would allow encoding ~200kB of data per A4 page. Should be applicable for avian IP as well.

[1]: https://blog.za3k.com/paper-archival/

Interesting, many thanks. Currently enjoying the fall down the Golay code rabbit hole.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_Golay_code

There is Avian and Sneakernet, any other esoteric RFCs?

I've always wondered if you could send data on migrating shoals of fish like Salmon?

Here's a list of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for...

Let's see what's being added there in two days...

My favorite is RFC 6919, "Further Key Words for Use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels"[1], which adds more keywords in the same spirit as MUST and SHOULD, such as,

> The phrase "OUGHT TO" conveys an optimistic assertion of an implementation behavior that is clearly morally right, and thus does not require substantiation.

[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6919

r/BirdsArentReal will definitely get a kick out of this

Sure, it's all fun & games when everyone is in on the joke. Just like the flat earthers, up until some musician gets into a twitter spat with Neil Degrasse Tyson over the flatness (or lack thereof) of the Earth.

Only with birds, we'll have non-ironic activists burning down chicken coops and claiming the so-called "meat" we buy in supermarkets is some kind of mind control or Soylent Green, and all evidence that it started as a joke will be taken as evidence of a coverup.

Where the claims that meat is mind control or Soylent Green?

That was speculation of where the fledgling #BirdsArentReal movement could end up, but I'm really not serious about my criticism of the meme.

As a sibling comment to yours pointed out, true believers of things like a flat earth are an extreme minority and I'm not particularly concerned that a parody conspiracy theory will cause much harm. I doubt the few true believers will be burning chicken coops any more than flat earthers are blowing up globes. (I really hope I'm not wrong about that, I do like chicken quite a bit).

And we, as a society & individuals, can't and shouldn't be 100% serious about everything 100% of the time. We should be able to laugh at things, even very serious things. For example I find it pretty funny that some Russian tanks are being abducted by Ukrainian farmers w/ tractors. I can also see how deadly serious it is: It's not like they're just a few viral videos made by influencers, it's everyday people like farmers trying to take deadly resources out of the hands of an invading army.

The united states consumer protection twitter has been championing humor in this area https://mobile.twitter.com/USCPSC/status/1478844214574305282?

I like your points about the necessity of humor and i think its the only way to the future for us without mass psychosis and cultural schizming. When biomorphic-engineered bird-drones can fly autonomously, and pigeons have been carrying IP for the ruling class for thousands of years, we are going to need some comedy to settle the #birdsarereal issue

True, unironic Flat earthers are still an extreme fringe of mostly mentally ill people. If anything, the most common conspiracy theory about flat earth is that it's a psyop to discredit...other conspiracy theories lol. You'd be considered as a complete weirdo for believing in flat earth even amongst qanon types.

It's funny though since the "5g tower burning, covid denying flat earther" caricature has become so overused that some believe that it's actually a real thing. But in reality it's so incredibly uncommon

Reply on news.ycombinator.com