Yesterday, as usual on 1 April, the internetworking community celebrated April Fools’ Day with a new “informational” Request for Comments. Richard Hay and Warren Turkal of Google, Inc. authored this year’s parody RFC, “TCP Option to Denote Packet Mood”.
For instance, a packet that is retransmitted to resend data for a packet for which no ACK was received could be described as an ‘angry’ packet, or a ‘frustrated’ packet (if it is not the first retransmission for instance). So how can these kinds of feelings be conveyed in the packets themselves. This can be addressed by adding TCP Options [RFC793] to the TCP header, using ASCII characters that encode commonly used “emoticons” to convey packet mood.
— RFC 5841
The day was also marked on various mailing lists. As an example, the RIPE Database Working Group received an initiative that the “inet6num” object in the RIPE database should be renamed in order “to make very clear that IPv6 is the primary Internet Protocol now”. The suggestion caused a debate that even became somewhat heated.
On the php.internals newsgroup, the decision was announced that PHP would go with “backslash as new separator for namespaces”.
What was your favourite April prank this year? Please post your comments!
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