April Fools' Day RFC

Almost every April Fools' Day (1 April) since 1989, the Internet Engineering Task Force has published one or more humorous RFC documents, following in the path blazed by the June 1973 RFC 527 entitled ARPAWOCKY. The following list also includes humorous RFCs published on other dates.

List of April 1st RFCs

• RFC 748—TELNET RANDOMLY-LOSE option. M.R. Crispin. 1 April 1978. A parody of the TCP/IP documentation style. Due to some people taking it seriously, for a long time it was specially marked in the RFC index with "note date of issue".
• RFC 1097—TELNET SUBLIMINAL-MESSAGE option. B. Miller. 1 April 1989.
• RFC 1149—Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on Avian Carriers. D. Waitzman. 1 April 1990. Updated by RFC 2549; see below. A deadpan skewering of standards-document legalese, describing protocols for transmitting Internet data packets by homing pigeon.
  • In 2001, RFC 1149 was actually implemented [1] by members of the Bergen (Norway) Linux User Group.
• RFC 1216—Gigabit Network Economics and Paradigm Shifts. Poorer Richard, Prof. Kynikos. 1 April 1991.
• RFC 1217—Memo from the Consortium for Slow Commotion Research (CSCR). Vint Cerf. 1 April 1991.
• RFC 1313—Today's Programming for KRFC AM 1313 Internet Talk Radio. C. Partridge. 1 April 1992. Certain portions of this RFC are obsolete: Doppler shift while flying on the Concorde is no longer a problem - the Concorde has retired from service.
• RFC 1437—The Extension of MIME Content-Types to a New Medium. N. Borenstein, M. Linimon. 1 April 1993.
• RFC 1438—Internet Engineering Task Force Statements Of Boredom (SOBs). A. Lyman Chapin, C. Huitema. 1 April 1993.
• RFC 1605—SONET to Sonnet Translation. William Shakespeare. 1 April 1994.
• RFC 1606—A Historical Perspective On The Usage Of IP Version 9. J. Onions. 1 April 1994.
• RFC 1607—A VIEW FROM THE 21ST CENTURY. Vint Cerf. 1 April 1994.
• RFC 1776—The Address is the Message. Steve Crocker. 1 April 1995. Without content, would we need information security?
• RFC 1924—A Compact Representation of IPv6 Addresses. R. Elz. 1 April 1996.
• RFC 1925—The Twelve Networking Truths. R. Callon. 1 April 1996.
• RFC 1926—An Experimental Encapsulation of IP Datagrams on Top of ATM. J. Eriksson. 1 April 1996.
• RFC 1927—Suggested Additional MIME Types for Associating Documents. C. Rogers. 1 April 1996.
• RFC 2100—The Naming of Hosts. J. Ashworth. 1 April 1997.
• RFC 2321—RITA -- The Reliable Internetwork Troubleshooting Agent. A. Bressen. 1 April 1998.
• RFC 2322—Management of IP numbers by peg-dhcp. K. van den Hout et al. 1 April 1998.
• RFC 2323—IETF Identification and Security Guidelines. A. Ramos. 1 April 1998.
• RFC 2324—Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0). L. Masinter. 1 April 1998.
• RFC 2325—Definitions of Managed Objects for Drip-Type Heated Beverage Hardware Devices using SMIv2. M. Slavitch. 1 April 1998.
• RFC 2549—IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service. D. Waitzman. 1 April 1999. Updates RFC 1149, listed above.
• RFC 2550—Y10K and Beyond. S. Glassman, M. Manasse, J. Mogul. 1 April 1999.
• RFC 2551—The Roman Standards Process -- Revision III. S. Bradner. 1 April 1999.
• RFC 2795—The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS). S. Christey. 1 April 2000.
• RFC 3091—Pi Digit Generation Protocol. H. Kennedy. 1 April 2001.
• RFC 3092—Etymology of "Foo". D. Eastlake 3rd, C. Manros, E. Raymond. 1 April 2001.
• RFC 3093—Firewall Enhancement Protocol (FEP). M. Gaynor, S. Bradner. 1 April 2001.
• RFC 3251—Electricity over IP. B. Rajagopalan. 1 April 2002.
• RFC 3252—Binary Lexical Octet Ad-hoc Transport. H. Kennedy. 1 April 2002.
• RFC 3514—The Security Flag in the IPv4 Header (Evil Bit). S. Bellovin. 1 April 2003.
• RFC 3751—Omniscience Protocol Requirements. S. Bradner 1 April 2004.
• RFC 4041—Requirements for Morality Sections in Routing Area Drafts. A. Farrel. 1 April 2005.
• RFC 4042—UTF-9 and UTF-18 Efficient Transformation Formats of Unicode. M. Crispin. 1 April 2005. Notable for containing PDP-10 assembly language code nearly 22 years after the PDP-10 architecture was canceled by its manufacturer.
• RFC 4824—The Transmission of IP Datagrams over the Semaphore Flag Signaling System (SFSS). Jogi Hofmueller, Aaron Bachmann, IOhannes zmoelnig. 1 April 2007.
• RFC 5241—Naming Rights in IETF Protocols. A. Falk, S. Bradner 1 April 2008.
• RFC 5242—A Generalized Unified Character Code: Western European and CJK Sections. J. Klensin, H. Alvestrand 1 April 2008.

Other humorous RFCs

• RFC 439—PARRY encounters the DOCTOR. V. Cerf. 21 January 1972.
• RFC 527—ARPAWOCKY. R. Merryman, UCSD. 22 June 1973.
• RFC 968—Twas the night before start-up. V.G. Cerf, 1 December 1985.
• RFC 1882—The 12-Days of Technology Before Christmas. B. Hancock. December 1995.

Non-RFC IETF humor

• An announcement on the IETF list [2] about the appointment of Bert[3] as member of the IAB appears to have been the April Fools' Day 2006 stunt.

Submission of April Fools' Day RFCs

The IETF accepts submission of properly formatted April Fools' Day RFCs from the general public, and considers them for publication in the same year if received at least two weeks prior to April, 1st.^[1]

Sources

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.

Additional sources:

• RFC Editor home page, retrieved 2008-04-01, hosts individual RFCs

References

1. ^ IETF RFC-Editor FAQ, Q19: How can I submit an April 1st RFC?

External links

• Carolyn Duffy Marsan (2005-03-28). "Yet another foolish network protocol", Network World.  on RFC 3751 and April Fools' Day RFCs in general
• Limoncelli, Thomas A.; Peter H Salus (2007). The Complete April Fools' Day RFCs. Peer-to-Peer Communications. ISBN 9781573980425.