I'm the author of an April Fool's Internet Standard, AMA

Let’s get the AMAs kicked off on Lemmy, shall we.

Almost ten years ago now, I wrote RFC 7168, “Hypertext Coffeepot Control Protocol for Tea Efflux Appliances” which extends HTCPCP to handle tea brewing. Both Coffeepot Control Protocol and the tea-brewing extension are joke Internet Standards, and were released on Apr 1st (1998 and 2014). You may be familiar with HTTP error 418, “I’m a teapot”; this comes from the 1998 standard.

I’m giving a talk on the history of HTTP and HTCPCP at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin later this month, and I need an FAQ section; AMA about the Internet and HTTP. Let’s try this out!

stardust,

What are some of your favorite accounts to follow on mastodon?

Also, will your talk be recorded?

Two9A,

My following list; of note is Lisa Melton, whose bio says “Follow me and I’ll fill your timeline with boosts”. She ain’t lying.

Looks like some of the talks from last year were released on the conference’s YouTube, so: hard to say if the recording will be available. I’ll (see if I can) remember to ask on the day.

Erk,

I had been an advocate of getting just an ordinary person to do the first Lemmy ama but apparently we’ve got an absolute legend.

Have you ever had a favourite reference to your joke come up?

Two9A,

I did go to a conference once where they were handing out laptop stickers, and in the pack was a 418 teapot.

Of course, a week after I stuck that to my machine, it died. Telling the laptop it was a teapot didn’t agree with it, I guess.

iamak,

What other such joke standards (by you or others) do you like?

Two9A,

A little lower down the stack, I always liked the Evil Bit in TCP, a standard which removes all need for firewalls heuristics by requiring malware or packets with evil intent to set the Evil Bit. The receiver can simply drop packets with the Evil Bit set, and thus be entirely safe forever from bad traffic.

At the physical interface layer where data meets real life, I especially enjoy IP over Avian Carrier; that link in particular is to the QoS definition which extends the original spec for carrying packets by carrier pigeon.

LeberechtReinhold,
@LeberechtReinhold@lemmy.world avatar

With the advances on SDcards, IPoAC is getting better and better.

Two9A,

As the saying goes, “for bandwidth, nothing beats a truck full of tapes 1TB MicroSDs hurtling down the highway”.

boonhet,

I have no questions, but I want to let people here know that there are two excellent websites related to this: http.cat and http.dog, for looking up HTTP status codes.

For an example, if http.cat/418 doesn’t brighten your day, I don’t think there’s much that can.

j4k3,
@j4k3@lemmy.world avatar

What’s your take on the fediverse frontier?

Two9A,

I think it’s excellent out here. I was stuck on Reddit for the longest time, and this recent debacle has pushed me to explore the networks at the edge; this feels a lot more like the Internet of old. The analogy of email is apt, I think, with the accounts on multiple servers and the interplay between.

breakingcups,

How do you feel about 418 being included in many legitimate http libraries?

Two9A,

It’s great: the Internet should have a bit of that sense of whimsy, and knowing that there’s official support in many libraries for “you’re asking me for coffee, but I’m a teapot” is one of those things that gets me through the day.

madjo,
@madjo@geddit.social avatar

What was the inspiration for these internet standards?

Two9A,

That’s actually the topic of the talk! Around 1995-96, HTTP was picking up all kinds of use outside the academic community, and people were tacking extensions on left and right; one of the biggest was file upload support, which was done by throwing HTTP and email into a room and having them fight it out. Which is how we ended up with the monstrosity that is “sending emails over HTTP”, also known as “posting a form”.

The author of HTCPCP decided to codify some of his concerns with these, partly as a joke; I noticed long afterward that his joke was only standardized for coffee, which Personally Offended me as a citizen of a tea-drinking nation.

M_Reimer,

The number one question I would ask about HTTP would be: Why was the “Referer” header initially added and why wasn’t it removed from standard to this day. In my opinion the server, I’m going to, should never know where I came from.

Two9A,

I’ve just done some quick browsing to see if there’s a written-down motivation for Referer existing, and there’s this on the Wikipedia: “Many blogs publish referrer information in order to link back to people who are linking to them, and hence broaden the conversation.”

Which I guess makes sense, in the context of the original use of HTTP as an academic publishing protocol, but it’s gained cruft and nefariousness since wider adoption came about.

There are good arguments for stripping Referer from the standard, and yours is one of the most cogent; if Referer is still a thing in another 30 years, I’d be surprised.

PlasmaK,

I hope that user agent will be gone too. It does nothing except demand that you install chrome or spy on you

Supermariofan67,

There are far more robust methods of fingerprinting to spy on users anyway (adding up all the details of screen size, available fonts, language, os, etc, etc), so I don’t think removing the user agent would have much impact in reducing fingerprinting alone. It’s also useful as a quick and simple way to check the type of device, os, or browser the user is on and serve the correct content (download link for one’s OS) or block troublesome clients (broken bots)

PlasmaK,

(adding up all the details of screen size, available fonts, language, os, etc, etc),

not if you just simply turn off javascript.

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