11 ms·

RFC-1149: IP over Avian Carriers

186 points by scottlocklin 7y ago

dang 7y ago
Surprisingly many posts and surprisingly few discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22Avian%20Carriers%22&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22Avian%20Carriers%22&sort=by... 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14531252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14531252 2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818955 The same was noted 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5999813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5999813
saagarjha 7y ago
Text of the RFC, which is one of the classic "April Fools" ones that the IETF does every year: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149
- the_duke 7y ago
  I just stumbled over this gem: Internationalizing IPv6 Using 128-Bit Unicode > This new 128-bit Unicode code point space can be leveraged by the IETF to address one of the lingering issues with IPv6: there's not much left to standardize. With the changes described in this document, the IETF will be kept busy for decades to come. It also enables new features and market opportunities, to help the global economy. This in turn will increase tax revenues for governments, which eventually may lead to increased funds for combating global warming. Therefore, the ultimate goal of this document is to reduce global warming.
3xblah 7y ago
What if used bees instead of birds?
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  How about both? Birds and the bees.
- BuildTheRobots 7y ago
  Considering I learnt this week bees have been shown to understand numerical symbols to the point of accociating them with quantity, using bees might be getting a little too close to Turing Complete for my liking. I mean, we all know how badly that turned out with PDFs, right? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20103292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20103292
  - codetrotter 7y ago
    > using bees might be getting a little too close to Turing Complete for my liking Doom on bees. NetBSD on bees. Linux on bees. TensorFlow on bees. Software as a hive. Bees as a service. All of that would be... the bee's knees.
    - rpeden 7y ago
      Bees as a service has existed for quite a long time and is a pretty interesting business: https://m.phys.org/news/2018-05-farmer-hiveinside-world-renting-bees.html https://m.phys.org/news/2018-05-farmer-hiveinside-world-rent...
  - gpvos 7y ago
    PDFs are not Turing complete (PostScript is).
    - BuildTheRobots 7y ago
      I knew about postcript (who doesn't lock up office printers by rendering mandlebrot sents?) but was absolutely convinced PDFs were as well. They're not and it seems they quite deliberately weren't as well. [1] - thanks for setting me straight :) [1] https://www.cs.odu.edu/~zeil/cs390/latest/Public/turing-complete/index.html https://www.cs.odu.edu/~zeil/cs390/latest/Public/turing-comp...
      - gpvos 7y ago
        Actually, you can have Javascript in PDF nowadays, so...
- m463 7y ago
  It would make it either much easier or much harder to implement a honeypot. Also, combining the two into a "birds and bees" protocol might be idea for some kinds of traffic.
berbec 7y ago
Someone implemented it, too https://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/writeup/ https://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/writeup/ 64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=6165731.1 ms
Ken_Adler 7y ago
Discussing RFC-1149 with Jon Postel is one of my favorite Internet memories... makes me think of him everytime this RFC is mentioned.
- dang 7y ago
  Can you share anything about the discussion?
- avianauthor 7y ago
  I am very (too) proud to have written Dr. Postel's favorite RFC. -david waitzman author rfc1149 and rfc2549
antoncohen 7y ago
I think more interesting than this RFC is the United States Army Pigeon Service. During WWII the force consisted of 54,000 pigeons. Over 90% of US Army messages sent by pigeons were received. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Pigeon_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Pigeon_Serv...
- nostrademons 7y ago
  They must've implemented RFC 2549: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549
  - billpg 7y ago
    I remember reading that thinking "You know, you've taken a good joke a bit too far."
  - dTal 7y ago
    Or just TCP/IP/Pigeon
  - fanf2 7y ago
    or IP over TCP (two carrier pigeons)
reaperducer 7y ago
Another gem from back when the internet was fun: HTTP Status 418: I'm a teapot - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418 Wasn't there also a protocol for checking vending machines for cold drinks?
- Papirola 7y ago
  finger
  - pklee 7y ago
    haha.. those were the days.. where you would get someone's resume over finger :)
  - ngcc_hk 7y ago
    I wonder if someone fill the column and it is not empty say 1 bottle left. Then it is still not cold if someone else got say the 2nd one. Any source code available to check :-)
- FactolSarin 7y ago
  Considering we actually have internet connected teapots now, I wonder if any mass market products have implemented this.
  - trp1 7y ago
    Nope, they recently removed that status code.
    - furyofantares 7y ago
      From the spec. Teapots or any other devices are free to send it anyway
    - grkvlt 7y ago
      Only from clients supporting HTTP only. Note that RFC 2324 [0] defines the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol or HTCPCP, which is an extension of HTTP and implementors of clients for this are free to return 418 if necessary. Also, RFC 7168 [1] which extends the protocol as HTCPCP-TEA now fully supports teapots, and is probably a better choice for modern clients. Also of interest is the SNMP MIB for remote management of 'Drip-Type Heated Beverage Hardware' which is defined in RFC 2325 [2] although this does not appear to have been updated with teapot, samovar, urn or other non-filter-coffee management data... Implementing tea making device remote management would probably be a good candidate for a GSoC project or even a startup if you can find a VC gullible enough to fund you! 0. https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2324.txt https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2324.txt 1. https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc7168.txt https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc7168.txt 2. https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2325.txt https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2325.txt
ARandomerDude 7y ago
"What kind of swallow?"
dbounds 7y ago
The good ol' days. Reminds me of this gem; a book review from 2000 of the book Ping The Duck on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2VDKZ4X1F992Q https://www.amazon.com/review/R2VDKZ4X1F992Q
jedberg 7y ago
I love it when a new generation finds all the fun RFCs.
- freedomben 7y ago
  The company I'm at hires a lot of interns, and it's always fun to see years old jokes make it into slack from people being exposed to it for the first time. The classic Little Bobby Tables XKCD was recently discovered. Makes me feel a little better about them trampling on my lawn.
- guessmyname 7y ago
  Indeed, it’s a classic XKCD-1053 — https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
chris_va 7y ago
Inspired by this, ~12 years ago we actually discussed encrypted reed solomon encoded Fedex UDP as a method for index updates instead of buying new fiber lines. Index update latency is a bit faster now.
paulddraper 7y ago
> Rafting photographers already use pigeons as a sneakernet to transport digital photos on flash media from the camera to the tour operator.[7] Over a 30-mile distance, a single pigeon may be able to carry tens of gigabytes of data in around an hour, which on an average bandwidth basis compares very favorably to current ADSL standards, even when accounting for lost drives. > Inspired by RFC 2549, on 9 September 2009, the marketing team of The Unlimited, a regional company in South Africa, decided to host a tongue-in-cheek "Pigeon Race" between their pet pigeon "Winston" and local telecom company Telkom SA. The race was to send 4 gigabytes of data from Howick to Hillcrest, approximately 60 km apart. The pigeon carried a microSD card and competed against a Telkom ADSL line. Winston beat the data transfer over Telkom's ADSL line, with a total time of two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds from uploading data on the microSD card to completion of download from card. At the time of Winston's victory, the ADSL transfer was just under 4% complete.
- grkvlt 7y ago
  See also the famous quote about the bandwidth of a pickup truck filled with magnetic tape... The modern equivalent would be AWS Snowmobile [0] which is described as follows: > Each Snowmobile is a secured data truck with up to 100PB storage capacity that can be dispatched to your site and connected directly to your network backbone to perform high-speed data migration A Wired article [1] calculated the San Francisco to New York bandwidth of a full Snowmobile as just under 5 Tbps which is pretty damn impressive, although the offload network connection on the truck is (only) a 1 Tbps connection. And it gets quite pricey, a fully loaded Snowmobile is USD 500K per month, plus the 350 kW of electricity it needs. According to the FAQ, if you need more bandwidth, you can operate the Snowmobile trucks in parallel to get multi Exabyte scale data transfers, but I have difficulty imagining any of the use cases that would require that as a solution...?!? 0. https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/faqs/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/faqs/ 1. https://www.wired.com/2016/12/amazons-snowmobile-actually-truck-hauling-huge-hard-drive/ https://www.wired.com/2016/12/amazons-snowmobile-actually-tr...
rodmena 7y ago
summary: ``` The IP datagram is printed, on a small scroll of paper, in hexadecimal, with each octet separated by whitestuff and blackstuff. The scroll of paper is wrapped around one leg of the avian carrier. A band of duct tape is used to secure the datagram's edges. The bandwidth is limited to the leg length. The MTU is variable, and paradoxically, generally increases with increased carrier age. A typical MTU is 256 milligrams. Some datagram padding may be needed. Upon receipt, the duct tape is removed and the paper copy of the datagram is optically scanned into a electronically transmittable form. ```
- hunter2_ 7y ago
  This is an abomination on mobile. Who can fix this presentation trap sooooo many people fall into?
staeiou 7y ago
See also IP over Xylophone Players (IPoXP), which we actually built: ACM DL: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2212785 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2212785 Open PDF: http://stuartgeiger.com/papers/ipoxp-archive.pdf http://stuartgeiger.com/papers/ipoxp-archive.pdf
zw123456 7y ago
This reminds me of the old saying "never under estimate the through-put of a station wagon full of hard drives". It looks like it has disappeared from the internet but at one time someone had a calculator where you could enter the number of hard drives your station wagon could hold, the size of the hard drives and the time it took to drive across town from data center A to data center B and would tell you what bandwidth you would need to transfer the same amount of data using FTP. I suppose you could make the same calculation if you could make the MTU size larger that the carrier pigeon was carrying.
- zaphod4prez 7y ago
  A similar calculator exists here! https://cable.ayra.ch/pigeon/ https://cable.ayra.ch/pigeon/
- saganus 7y ago
  I seem to remember that the old saying comes from Tanenbaum's "Operating Systems Design and Implementation". Or not?
  - JasonFruit 7y ago
    Close: > Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. — Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1989). Computer Networks. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. p. 57. ISBN 0-13-166836-6.
    - saganus 7y ago
      Ahhh, you are correct. Thanks!
    - zw123456 7y ago
      Ha ! I own that book, that is where it wormed into my brain from :) Thank you!
- kevan 7y ago
  And clearly it still holds true because things like AWS Snowmobile[1] exist. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/
rplst8 7y ago
Don't forget the updated RFC: "IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service" https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549
VectorLock 7y ago
If you could load a few pigeons with microSD cards that would be something. The latency might be rough but the bandwidth would be killer!
rossdavidh 7y ago
The wikipedia article on April 1 RFC's generally, is a treacherous time-sink of hilarity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for_Comments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for...
karmakaze 7y ago
Wasn't there also a DARPA failsafe communication protocol painting digits on the sides of tanks?
sridca 7y ago
In the name of moderation groupthink is being encouraged here!
Cieplak 7y ago
During the last 20 years, the information density of storage media and thus the bandwidth of an avian carrier has increased 3 times as fast as the bandwidth of the Internet.
danrl 7y ago
Fun fact: I ported "IP over Avian Carriers" over to the web. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03aEf26YupY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03aEf26YupY
k__ 7y ago
Well, at least sending data via flash-cards and pigeons isn't a joke. "If 16 homing pigeons are given eight 512 GB SD cards each, and take an hour to reach their destination, the throughput of the transfer would be 145.6 Gbit/s, excluding transfer to and from the SD cards." Today we have 1TB microSD cards, they only weight an 8th of an SD card. If the capacity of a pigeon is 8 SD cards (1290,24cm³) then it can carry 64 microSD cards (1049,6cm³). This means the capacity is now 64TB instead of 4TB. and the throughput would be 18,6 Tbit/s.
- Jedi72 7y ago
  I think you should include the time to copy the data to the SD cards as a 1Tb copy is significant time.
  - betimsl 7y ago
    Here, an up-vote for you good Sir.
    - grepthisab 7y ago
      Please don't do this here.
      - militaryguy-63 7y ago
        Please don't do _this_ here as well
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - betimsl 7y ago
        World's is going to shit anyways...so whatever you say :)
      - nemosaltat 7y ago
        I found HN during Lent this year. I’m not religious, but had been toying with the idea of leaving R quite for some time. Your 5 words express my exact sentiment, and exactly why I find HN so refreshing.
stesch 7y ago
From the good old times, when IT people were allowed to laugh.
ratel 7y ago
I am all in favor of Plague-DSL: Municipal broadband by rat. The speed is not great, but bandwidth is and at least you get 100% coverage.
gioscarab 7y ago
See PJON: https://github.com/gioblu/PJON https://github.com/gioblu/PJON
decoyworker 7y ago
RFC April Fools' jokes are good for a few laughs. https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt
DarkWiiPlayer 7y ago
Disappointed that the link is to wikipedia and not the actual RFC. I think there's more value in reading the RFC first, specially if you don't immediately realize that "avian carriers" really does refer to pigeons.
charliebrownau 7y ago
With the amount of censorship going on these days We might have to do IP over pidgon and BBS mail
tempodox 7y ago
What with the NSA and colleagues ramming their noses into everything, this protocol has a future.
kwhitefoot 7y ago
> In 2019, Cellular Tracking Technologies of Rio Grande, NJ demonstrated VultureNet, a component of the Internet of Wildlife. VultureNet is a system that uses very small tags ... on small birds and animals, and these are detected by receivers in devices on larger animals and birds ... data was transmitted from the device on the vulture to the Internet using the cellular network. A store and forward network could be implemented on that.

186 points by scottlocklin 7y ago

dang 7y ago

Surprisingly many posts and surprisingly few discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22Avian%20Carriers%22&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22Avian%20Carriers%22&sort=by... 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14531252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14531252 2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818955 The same was noted 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5999813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5999813

saagarjha 7y ago

Text of the RFC, which is one of the classic "April Fools" ones that the IETF does every year: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149

the_duke 7y ago
I just stumbled over this gem: Internationalizing IPv6 Using 128-Bit Unicode > This new 128-bit Unicode code point space can be leveraged by the IETF to address one of the lingering issues with IPv6: there's not much left to standardize. With the changes described in this document, the IETF will be kept busy for decades to come. It also enables new features and market opportunities, to help the global economy. This in turn will increase tax revenues for governments, which eventually may lead to increased funds for combating global warming. Therefore, the ultimate goal of this document is to reduce global warming.

3xblah 7y ago

What if used bees instead of birds?

quickthrower2 7y ago
How about both? Birds and the bees.
BuildTheRobots 7y ago
Considering I learnt this week bees have been shown to understand numerical symbols to the point of accociating them with quantity, using bees might be getting a little too close to Turing Complete for my liking. I mean, we all know how badly that turned out with PDFs, right? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20103292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20103292
- codetrotter 7y ago
  > using bees might be getting a little too close to Turing Complete for my liking Doom on bees. NetBSD on bees. Linux on bees. TensorFlow on bees. Software as a hive. Bees as a service. All of that would be... the bee's knees.
  - rpeden 7y ago
    Bees as a service has existed for quite a long time and is a pretty interesting business: https://m.phys.org/news/2018-05-farmer-hiveinside-world-renting-bees.html https://m.phys.org/news/2018-05-farmer-hiveinside-world-rent...
- gpvos 7y ago
  PDFs are not Turing complete (PostScript is).
  - BuildTheRobots 7y ago
    I knew about postcript (who doesn't lock up office printers by rendering mandlebrot sents?) but was absolutely convinced PDFs were as well. They're not and it seems they quite deliberately weren't as well. [1] - thanks for setting me straight :) [1] https://www.cs.odu.edu/~zeil/cs390/latest/Public/turing-complete/index.html https://www.cs.odu.edu/~zeil/cs390/latest/Public/turing-comp...
    - gpvos 7y ago
      Actually, you can have Javascript in PDF nowadays, so...
m463 7y ago
It would make it either much easier or much harder to implement a honeypot. Also, combining the two into a "birds and bees" protocol might be idea for some kinds of traffic.

berbec 7y ago

Someone implemented it, too https://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/writeup/ https://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/writeup/ 64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=6165731.1 ms

Ken_Adler 7y ago

Discussing RFC-1149 with Jon Postel is one of my favorite Internet memories... makes me think of him everytime this RFC is mentioned.

dang 7y ago
Can you share anything about the discussion?
avianauthor 7y ago
I am very (too) proud to have written Dr. Postel's favorite RFC. -david waitzman author rfc1149 and rfc2549

antoncohen 7y ago

I think more interesting than this RFC is the United States Army Pigeon Service. During WWII the force consisted of 54,000 pigeons. Over 90% of US Army messages sent by pigeons were received. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Pigeon_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Pigeon_Serv...

nostrademons 7y ago
They must've implemented RFC 2549: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549
- billpg 7y ago
  I remember reading that thinking "You know, you've taken a good joke a bit too far."
- dTal 7y ago
  Or just TCP/IP/Pigeon
- fanf2 7y ago
  or IP over TCP (two carrier pigeons)

reaperducer 7y ago

Another gem from back when the internet was fun: HTTP Status 418: I'm a teapot - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418 Wasn't there also a protocol for checking vending machines for cold drinks?

Papirola 7y ago
finger
- pklee 7y ago
  haha.. those were the days.. where you would get someone's resume over finger :)
- ngcc_hk 7y ago
  I wonder if someone fill the column and it is not empty say 1 bottle left. Then it is still not cold if someone else got say the 2nd one. Any source code available to check :-)
FactolSarin 7y ago
Considering we actually have internet connected teapots now, I wonder if any mass market products have implemented this.
- trp1 7y ago
  Nope, they recently removed that status code.
  - furyofantares 7y ago
    From the spec. Teapots or any other devices are free to send it anyway
  - grkvlt 7y ago
    Only from clients supporting HTTP only. Note that RFC 2324 [0] defines the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol or HTCPCP, which is an extension of HTTP and implementors of clients for this are free to return 418 if necessary. Also, RFC 7168 [1] which extends the protocol as HTCPCP-TEA now fully supports teapots, and is probably a better choice for modern clients. Also of interest is the SNMP MIB for remote management of 'Drip-Type Heated Beverage Hardware' which is defined in RFC 2325 [2] although this does not appear to have been updated with teapot, samovar, urn or other non-filter-coffee management data... Implementing tea making device remote management would probably be a good candidate for a GSoC project or even a startup if you can find a VC gullible enough to fund you! 0. https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2324.txt https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2324.txt 1. https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc7168.txt https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc7168.txt 2. https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2325.txt https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2325.txt

ARandomerDude 7y ago

"What kind of swallow?"

dbounds 7y ago

The good ol' days. Reminds me of this gem; a book review from 2000 of the book Ping The Duck on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2VDKZ4X1F992Q https://www.amazon.com/review/R2VDKZ4X1F992Q

jedberg 7y ago

I love it when a new generation finds all the fun RFCs.

freedomben 7y ago
The company I'm at hires a lot of interns, and it's always fun to see years old jokes make it into slack from people being exposed to it for the first time. The classic Little Bobby Tables XKCD was recently discovered. Makes me feel a little better about them trampling on my lawn.
guessmyname 7y ago
Indeed, it’s a classic XKCD-1053 — https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/

chris_va 7y ago

Inspired by this, ~12 years ago we actually discussed encrypted reed solomon encoded Fedex UDP as a method for index updates instead of buying new fiber lines. Index update latency is a bit faster now.

paulddraper 7y ago

> Rafting photographers already use pigeons as a sneakernet to transport digital photos on flash media from the camera to the tour operator.[7] Over a 30-mile distance, a single pigeon may be able to carry tens of gigabytes of data in around an hour, which on an average bandwidth basis compares very favorably to current ADSL standards, even when accounting for lost drives. > Inspired by RFC 2549, on 9 September 2009, the marketing team of The Unlimited, a regional company in South Africa, decided to host a tongue-in-cheek "Pigeon Race" between their pet pigeon "Winston" and local telecom company Telkom SA. The race was to send 4 gigabytes of data from Howick to Hillcrest, approximately 60 km apart. The pigeon carried a microSD card and competed against a Telkom ADSL line. Winston beat the data transfer over Telkom's ADSL line, with a total time of two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds from uploading data on the microSD card to completion of download from card. At the time of Winston's victory, the ADSL transfer was just under 4% complete.

grkvlt 7y ago
See also the famous quote about the bandwidth of a pickup truck filled with magnetic tape... The modern equivalent would be AWS Snowmobile [0] which is described as follows: > Each Snowmobile is a secured data truck with up to 100PB storage capacity that can be dispatched to your site and connected directly to your network backbone to perform high-speed data migration A Wired article [1] calculated the San Francisco to New York bandwidth of a full Snowmobile as just under 5 Tbps which is pretty damn impressive, although the offload network connection on the truck is (only) a 1 Tbps connection. And it gets quite pricey, a fully loaded Snowmobile is USD 500K per month, plus the 350 kW of electricity it needs. According to the FAQ, if you need more bandwidth, you can operate the Snowmobile trucks in parallel to get multi Exabyte scale data transfers, but I have difficulty imagining any of the use cases that would require that as a solution...?!? 0. https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/faqs/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/faqs/ 1. https://www.wired.com/2016/12/amazons-snowmobile-actually-truck-hauling-huge-hard-drive/ https://www.wired.com/2016/12/amazons-snowmobile-actually-tr...

rodmena 7y ago

summary: ``` The IP datagram is printed, on a small scroll of paper, in hexadecimal, with each octet separated by whitestuff and blackstuff. The scroll of paper is wrapped around one leg of the avian carrier. A band of duct tape is used to secure the datagram's edges. The bandwidth is limited to the leg length. The MTU is variable, and paradoxically, generally increases with increased carrier age. A typical MTU is 256 milligrams. Some datagram padding may be needed. Upon receipt, the duct tape is removed and the paper copy of the datagram is optically scanned into a electronically transmittable form. ```

hunter2_ 7y ago
This is an abomination on mobile. Who can fix this presentation trap sooooo many people fall into?

staeiou 7y ago

See also IP over Xylophone Players (IPoXP), which we actually built: ACM DL: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2212785 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2212785 Open PDF: http://stuartgeiger.com/papers/ipoxp-archive.pdf http://stuartgeiger.com/papers/ipoxp-archive.pdf

zw123456 7y ago

This reminds me of the old saying "never under estimate the through-put of a station wagon full of hard drives". It looks like it has disappeared from the internet but at one time someone had a calculator where you could enter the number of hard drives your station wagon could hold, the size of the hard drives and the time it took to drive across town from data center A to data center B and would tell you what bandwidth you would need to transfer the same amount of data using FTP. I suppose you could make the same calculation if you could make the MTU size larger that the carrier pigeon was carrying.

zaphod4prez 7y ago
A similar calculator exists here! https://cable.ayra.ch/pigeon/ https://cable.ayra.ch/pigeon/
saganus 7y ago
I seem to remember that the old saying comes from Tanenbaum's "Operating Systems Design and Implementation". Or not?
- JasonFruit 7y ago
  Close: > Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. — Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1989). Computer Networks. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. p. 57. ISBN 0-13-166836-6.
  - saganus 7y ago
    Ahhh, you are correct. Thanks!
  - zw123456 7y ago
    Ha ! I own that book, that is where it wormed into my brain from :) Thank you!
kevan 7y ago
And clearly it still holds true because things like AWS Snowmobile[1] exist. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/

rplst8 7y ago

Don't forget the updated RFC: "IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service" https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549

VectorLock 7y ago

If you could load a few pigeons with microSD cards that would be something. The latency might be rough but the bandwidth would be killer!

rossdavidh 7y ago

The wikipedia article on April 1 RFC's generally, is a treacherous time-sink of hilarity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for_Comments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for...

karmakaze 7y ago

Wasn't there also a DARPA failsafe communication protocol painting digits on the sides of tanks?

sridca 7y ago

In the name of moderation groupthink is being encouraged here!

Cieplak 7y ago

During the last 20 years, the information density of storage media and thus the bandwidth of an avian carrier has increased 3 times as fast as the bandwidth of the Internet.

danrl 7y ago

Fun fact: I ported "IP over Avian Carriers" over to the web. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03aEf26YupY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03aEf26YupY

k__ 7y ago

Well, at least sending data via flash-cards and pigeons isn't a joke. "If 16 homing pigeons are given eight 512 GB SD cards each, and take an hour to reach their destination, the throughput of the transfer would be 145.6 Gbit/s, excluding transfer to and from the SD cards." Today we have 1TB microSD cards, they only weight an 8th of an SD card. If the capacity of a pigeon is 8 SD cards (1290,24cm³) then it can carry 64 microSD cards (1049,6cm³). This means the capacity is now 64TB instead of 4TB. and the throughput would be 18,6 Tbit/s.

Jedi72 7y ago
I think you should include the time to copy the data to the SD cards as a 1Tb copy is significant time.
- betimsl 7y ago
  Here, an up-vote for you good Sir.
  - grepthisab 7y ago
    Please don't do this here.
    - militaryguy-63 7y ago
      Please don't do _this_ here as well
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - betimsl 7y ago
      World's is going to shit anyways...so whatever you say :)
    - nemosaltat 7y ago
      I found HN during Lent this year. I’m not religious, but had been toying with the idea of leaving R quite for some time. Your 5 words express my exact sentiment, and exactly why I find HN so refreshing.

stesch 7y ago

From the good old times, when IT people were allowed to laugh.

ratel 7y ago

I am all in favor of Plague-DSL: Municipal broadband by rat. The speed is not great, but bandwidth is and at least you get 100% coverage.

gioscarab 7y ago

See PJON: https://github.com/gioblu/PJON https://github.com/gioblu/PJON

decoyworker 7y ago

RFC April Fools' jokes are good for a few laughs. https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt

DarkWiiPlayer 7y ago

Disappointed that the link is to wikipedia and not the actual RFC. I think there's more value in reading the RFC first, specially if you don't immediately realize that "avian carriers" really does refer to pigeons.

charliebrownau 7y ago

With the amount of censorship going on these days We might have to do IP over pidgon and BBS mail

tempodox 7y ago

What with the NSA and colleagues ramming their noses into everything, this protocol has a future.

kwhitefoot 7y ago

> In 2019, Cellular Tracking Technologies of Rio Grande, NJ demonstrated VultureNet, a component of the Internet of Wildlife. VultureNet is a system that uses very small tags ... on small birds and animals, and these are detected by receivers in devices on larger animals and birds ... data was transmitted from the device on the vulture to the Internet using the cellular network. A store and forward network could be implemented on that.