title: April Fool's Day description: Even a RFC can be fun sometimes... date: April 1, 2015 categories: [misc] image: images/blog/pigeon.jpg layout: post toc: false comments: true hide: false search_exclude: false
Today is April 1st, so it is the occasion to shine a light on a few fake RFCs made on that day.
The most famous of all is the experimental RFC1149 of 1990, A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers. As the title suggests, the authors specified an entire protocol to send IP packets using pigeons as physical layer. The RFC has been updated and even tested in Norway.
There are a few others that made me laugh:
- RFC1605: SONET to Sonnet Translation by William Shakespear: where SONNET means "SONET Over Novel English Translation", a way to compress SONET's 810 bytes frames into 14 lines of 90 bytes frames.
- RFC1925: The Twelve Networking Truths. From this one I will only quote the following: "With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead."
- RFC2795: The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS) describes practical issues of having an infinite number of monkeys typing randomly on an infinite number of keyboard to eventually write a copy of shakespear's work.
This reminds me of a friend's video about the number (\pi)
- RFC3251: Electricity over IP which has a lot of cool accronyms in it.
- RFC6921: Design Considerations for Faster-Than-Light (FTL) Communication.
Wikipedia, from which all of these were found has a nice list of April fool's RFC which I encourage you to take a look at.