Hacker News Reader

Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

Can the publication of a document which is very obvious be considered a sort of light joke? Is this an April Fools? This seems like the ideal sort of April Fools to be put in an RFC:

* Harmless

* Technically correct

* Hypothetically I guess it might be useful to have a specific rule related to something obvious if you are arguing with a real super-pedant.

View on HN

Yes, there are April Fools RFCs every year, and they're usually pretty great.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for...

There are some other great ones like "TCP/IP over Carrier Pidgeon" and "Scenic IPv6 Routing"

Where I come from scenic IPv6 routing is the default, not an extra option.

AFAIK there was an actual implementation of the IP over avian carriers that carried actual packets, with quite a few dropped ones.

Here's the writeup on that implementation: https://web.archive.org/web/20220401021424/https://www.blug....

If you extend the protocol to support SD-cards instead of rolls of paper as the data medium, and appropriate frame and packet sizes, you can get phenomenal bandwidth even if latency and packet drop are still not great.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ I got just the xkcd for that.

Another good one that is totally harmless and entirely functional is 1149: IP over avian carriers.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1149

they post one every year, iirc

one classic: A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1149

I read that as avian flu carriers.

I don't think anyone's yet written an RFC for IP over viral DNA … you can be the first!

It's definitely an April Fool's.

But is it though?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com