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X-Clacks-Overhead
- cyberpunk 1y agomozilla.org doesn't do it anymore: < HTTP/2 301 < server: nginx < date: Sat, 05 Jul 2025 13:36:11 GMT < content-type: text/html < content-length: 162 < location: https://www.mozilla.org/ < strict-transport-security: max-age=60; includeSubDomains < x-backend-server: TS < cache-control: max-age=3600 < via: 1.1 google < alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=2592000,h3-29=":443"; ma=2592000 Edit: Nope. I was wrong, if you follow that 301 it does: < x-clacks-overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Dave_wick111 1y ago[flagged]
- MrGilbert 1y agoIt's been a while I heard about X-Clacks-Overhead. I added it to my own page to commemorate everyone I lost along the way. After reworking my site from a custom blog engine to plain web, I forgot to re-add the custom headers. Thanks for the reminder today! There are also browser extensions, which show when a website broadcasts the "X-Clacks-Overhead" - header.
- kawsper 1y agoI added it to all the sites at my old workplace when I was there after a discussion on HN. One day I noticed that it disappeared, but then it returned, so someone on the inside cared and brought it back, that made me smile :)
- sublinear 1y agoMy cynical mind would assume someone was trying to debug an unrelated issue and saw this header in a last known good version.
- xg15 1y ago[flagged]
- Normal_gaussian 1y ago> The idea of sending a header to remember a tech person is a great one, but I think the name should be something neutral, or something that has some relation to the person and not a random fantasy reference. You made me laugh - this has 'old man shakes fist at cloud' vibes, which is concerning as it seems we are about the same age! If you wanted to add a header `X-In-Memorium` to any site that you control, go ahead. If anyone adds `X-Clacks-Overhead` to their site, its not going to affect you. The My Little Pony thing seems, from an outsiders quick look, like it does meaningfully affect other people.
- mathgradthrow 1y agoobviously the difference is between the artistic merit of MLP and discworld.
- shadowgovt 1y agoThis is probably not a loose thread we should be pulling on the grand sweater that is the nature of art. ;)
- mathgradthrow 1y agoThat's ridiculous, this is a discussion abour taste. It will obviously depend on your taste.
- KaiserPro 1y agoI tried making "real" clacks https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/2025/03/12/gnu-terry-prachett/ https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/2025/03/12/gnu-terry-prachet... I need more time and motivation to make a full network though.
- Normal_gaussian 1y agoThat is really quite a cool project and write-up. (I used to administer a laser link. go on, ask me why they aren’t very popular) I spent a lot of time working out how to create low powered laser transducer, capable of working on something battery powered. This is my favourite part; very real. I think you're right; I suspect Terry would have been tickled by the header, but if there were any physical world implementations I think he would have been overjoyed. One of my favourite Terry stories is of him making his sword, which feels similar.
- kurisufag 1y agofor a while I thought I might go to one of those uniquely nerdy colleges where they let you fuck around with dorm infrastructure. i back-of-napkin'd a whole packet-over-laser relay system based conceptually on the clacks that'd give every room/station its own serial-interfacible (up|down) link. you could link buildings out of windows and stuff. horribly impractical and prohibitively expensive, but the kind of thing that could only happen in a university on-campus environment.
- xena 1y agoMy website returns a random person in a list for every X-Clacks-Overhead response header: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/877872b4d7db92b602683ecb4e9934cbc4340079/dhall/package.dhall#L15-L33 https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/877872b4d7db92b602683ecb4e99... I figured this was one of the best ways to do it. That way I'm letting people that were significant to me live on forever, one random HTTP response header at a time. $ curl https://xeiaso.net --head | grep clacks x-clacks-overhead: GNU Satoru Iwata
- skowalak 1y agoSeeing Kris Nóva in that list hit hard. It is a beautiful idea, thank you Xe.
- WJW 1y agoLove this idea. Maybe I'll make a gem or something to make enabling that easier.
- xena 1y agoThe code is pretty trivial but in case it helps: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/internal/clackset.go https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/internal/clackset.go
- remus 1y agoThat's really nice. I hope you don't mind, but I run this website https://climbing-history.org/ https://climbing-history.org/ and have borrowed your idea, except for climbers who have passed away.
- xena 1y agoNot in the slightest! Do it, it helps the names of those who are no longer with us never be forgotten.
- philbo 1y agoMinor nit, but you've spelt Stephen Hawking's name wrong in the clackset. It's "Stephen", not "Steven".
- podlp 1y agoI saw this header recently while profiling headers from feature phones. I think Opera Mini or another browser might’ve injected this header, which is odd because it’s meant to reduce bandwidth and sending it with each request goes against that
- atemerev 1y agoThis is obviously the most important HTTP header, but HTTP is application-level, and clacks is a packet routing system. Perhaps something like IPv6's Hop-by-Hop Options can be used to pass names with every packet? Or, even better, we can use LoRa repeaters for something close to the actual clacks network.
- MrGilbert 1y agoSomeone drafted a RFC some years ago, for Clacks-over-HTTP: https://github.com/clacks-overhead/clacks-protocol https://github.com/clacks-overhead/clacks-protocol
- masfuerte 1y ago> In Terry Pratchett's science-fantasy Discworld series, "The Clacks" is a network infrastructure of Semaphore Towers, that operate in a similar fashion to telegraph - named "Clacks" because of the clicking sound the system makes as signals send. Surely named "Clacks" because of the clacking sound the system makes.
- rfmoz 1y agoThe Clacks is a copy of an optical telegraph system that was used in Sweden https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Niclas_Edelcrantz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Niclas_Edelcrantz Also UK used a system close to that. And a lot of countries along Europe developed their networks with different signaling devices.
- rhet0rica 1y agoSorry; it's more likely they were named in tribute to the Chappe telegraph towers of France. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappe_telegraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappe_telegraph The stations were more elaborate and there is even a recorded instance of a secret signal being passed on illicitly: https://blog.franceinfo.fr/deja-vu/2017/10/10/le-piratage-du-systeme-chappe-ancetre-des-cyber-attaques-modernes.html https://blog.franceinfo.fr/deja-vu/2017/10/10/le-piratage-du...
- rfmoz 1y agoA good related book written by Gerard Holzmann and Bjorn Pehrson: The early history of data networks https://archive.org/details/earlyhistoryofda0000holz https://archive.org/details/earlyhistoryofda0000holz
- jihadjihad 1y agoIt makes for an interesting subplot in the (unabridged) version of The Count of Monte Cristo, which is mentioned in the Wikipedia article above.
- robocat 1y ago
- pdpi 1y agoThe thing that struck me about "GNU John Dearheart" was how it feels like it _really_ deeply captures hacker culture, like Pterry wasn't just referencing the culture, but that he really got it. Which is remarkable, because he gave me that impression about many, many topics. Such a loss.
- bombcar 1y agoTerry loved his characters in a way that's hard to express - unless they were pure evil (and he had a few) he did his best to understand their motivations in such a way that he came to portray them sympathetically. This is most noticeable in his caricatures that became characters that became badasses over multiple novels; the Watch has a few of these, but there are others.
- pdpi 1y agoYup. Vimes going full-on berserker mode while screaming "Where is my cow?" should, by all rights, be extremely silly. Instead, it sent shivers down my spine.
- riffraff 1y agoWhen clacks got introduced, the description of people who just enjoyed being there and spending time on coding messages and talking to unknown remote people.. well, it felt like early internet, fidonet, perhaps AM radio amateurs. It really seemed like Pratchett knew something of this niche cultures, way more than I expected.
- pdpi 1y ago> It really seemed like Pratchett knew something of this niche cultures, way more than I expected. He was definitely an early adopter of the internet, (and e.g. very active on alt.fan.pratchett), so that's no big surprise.
- bregma 1y agoHe was active on Usenet. I remember seeing his messages.
- marviel 1y agoI'm almost to this one in my read through! I'm excited to get to the "information age" arc
- twatbastard 1y ago[flagged]
- offbyone 1y agoIf you happen to nominate or vote on the Hugo Awards, you may have seen this turn up.
- gardnr 1y agoI try to add this to every project I work on.
- Animats 1y ago"We're obligated to inform you that this site uses cookies to do things like maintain your session and deliver personalised content. We also use third-party services from partners such as Google, who may also place cookies on your computer. Without cookies this site cannot function correctly. Please allow cookies from this website, otherwise features may not work." Amusingly, that's not true. The only cookie they send is Google Analytics, which has zero value to the user. The site works fine with it blocked.
- MagnumOpus 1y agoAbsolutely. It is a disrespectful, shameful lie by the authors of the site.
- echelon 1y agoNo it's not. It's dealing with the red tape of EU cookie legislation. Do you want to know how many human years my last company had to devote to regulation? We could have built a hundred startups with all that effort. I'm not saying GDPR right to be forgotten and data dump/portability isn't important, but it comes with a steep cost that everyone pays everywhere. So much time and money was spent on it. Easily billions of dollars. And the cookie stuff? How useful has that been?
- wizzwizz4 1y agoHave you read the EU cookie legislation? It actually requires you to not lie to users about what your cookies are for. Whatever the reason for a message like this, you can't blame EU legislation. ePrivacy and GDPR compliance are cheap. Trying to rules-lawyer them to keep illegal business models going, while dodging regulatory scrutiny, is expensive.
- echelon 1y ago> ePrivacy and GDPR compliance are cheap. Try running a business that has to maintain GDPR compliance and KYC / AML / FINRA compliance. That is not cheap.
- lxgr 1y agoI love the idea! But to be true to the original, shouldn't the message be self-propagating? > [...] header that can be transmitted from server to server [...] How so? In HTTP, there's always one client and one server. Am I missing some way to make this sticky or self-propagating, e.g. browsers or other clients that will cache received headers and then send them to other servers?
- achillean 1y agoAround 40,000 services on the Internet are currently including the header: https://www.shodan.io/search/report?query=x-clacks-overhead+-tag%3Ahoneypot https://www.shodan.io/search/report?query=x-clacks-overhead+... For some reason, a lot of honeypots are also using that header so I filtered those out. The number of services has slowly increased over time: https://trends.shodan.io/search?query=x-clacks-overhead+-tag%3Ahoneypot#overview https://trends.shodan.io/search?query=x-clacks-overhead+-tag...
- zipping1549 1y agoThe result is very strange. It's saying that South Korea has the most number of websites with the header and yet I don't see ANY search result in Korean. No writeup or whatsoever. Wonder what those websites would be.
- styanax 1y agoFlying by the seat of my pants, this page of information has details which we can guess at - 27,799 are South Korea, 27,690 are Korea Telecom (so close that I'll say it's a 1-to-1 match). Wikipedia tells me as of 2015, KT ran more than 140,000 Wifi hotspots.[1] Further down the info, we see 28,587 (almost the same number as above) HTTP titles are "Gargoyle Router Management Utility" - which is an opensource variant of the OpenWRT world which patches the code to include the Clacks header.[2] I'm going to conclude that there's a direct correlation in this data (it all being one and the same endpoint/device pattern) and that 30,000 KT Wifi hotspots across South Korea have their management UI open on the public interface and not locked to the internal network or a VPN, etc. running this Gargoyle patch. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KT_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KT_Corporation [2] https://github.com/ericpaulbishop/gargoyle/blob/master/patches-generic/008-gtp.patch https://github.com/ericpaulbishop/gargoyle/blob/master/patch...
- zipping1549 1y agoInteresting. Thanks for the insight.
- protocolture 1y agoI always read this as something that would need to be done at a lower level, like forwarding some arbitrary information in a BGP update.
- bonezed 1y agogreat idea, just added it to my site