Book collects the funniest Internet standards proposals

Cory Doctorow 12:50 pm Fri May 4, 2007

"The Complete April Fools' Day RFCs" is a nigh-perfect geek reader for the top of your favorite nerd's toilet tank. It collects the jokey proposed standards that are have been an annual tradition in in the Internet Engineering Task Force since 1969. This is engineer humor at its finest — geeks making up stuff to amuse other geeks, from IP-over-Carrier-Pigeon to the "Evil Bit" proposal (all malicious network traffic has to be tagged with a bit denoting that it's evil so that firewalls know to ignore it). This is the Internet at its finest — unlike the staid, boring International Telecommunications Union or ISO, the IETF is a kind of zany funhouse. You can download all of these for free, but it's nice to have them between covers for those times when you don't want to take your laptop into the can.

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