The April Fools RFCs - The H Open Source: News and Features

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Over 30 years of April Fools

As mentioned previously, RFCs on April 1st have often included amusing pranks in the form of a request for comment. To avoid accidentally referring to one, The H has collated the known April Fools RFCs.

RFC 748 Telnet randomly-lose option. M.R. Crispin. 1978.
RFC 1097 Telnet subliminal-message option. B. Miller. 1989.
RFC 1149 Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avian carriers. D. Waitzman. 1990.
RFC 1216 Gigabit network economics and paradigm shifts. P. Richard, P. Kynikos. 1991.
RFC 1217 Memo from the Consortium for Slow Commotion Research (CSCR). V.G. Cerf. 1991.
RFC 1313 Today's Programming for KRFC AM 1313 Internet Talk Radio. C. Partridge. 1992.
RFC 1437 The Extension of MIME Content-Types to a New Medium. N. Borenstein, M. Linimon. 1993.
RFC 1438 Internet Engineering Task Force Statements Of Boredom (SOBs). A. Lyman Chapin, C. Huitema. 1993.
RFC 1605 SONET to Sonnet Translation. W. Shakespeare. 1994.
RFC 1606 A Historical Perspective On The Usage Of IP Version 9. J. Onions. 1994.
RFC 1607 A VIEW FROM THE 21ST CENTURY. V. Cerf. 1994.
RFC 1776 The Address is the Message. S. Crocker. 1995.
RFC 1924 A Compact Representation of IPv6 Addresses. R. Elz. 1996.
RFC 1925 The Twelve Networking Truths. R. Callon. 1996.
RFC 1926 An Experimental Encapsulation of IP Datagrams on Top of ATM. J. Eriksson. 1996.
RFC 1927 Suggested Additional MIME Types for Associating Documents. C. Rogers. 1996.
RFC 2100 The Naming of Hosts. J. Ashworth. 1997.
RFC 2321 RITA -- The Reliable Internetwork Troubleshooting Agent. A. Bressen. 1998.
RFC 2322 Management of IP numbers by peg-dhcp. K. van den Hout, A. Koopal, R. van Mook. 1998.
RFC 2323 IETF Identification and Security Guidelines. A. Ramos. 1998.
RFC 2324 Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0). L. Masinter. 1998.
RFC 2325 Definitions of Managed Objects for Drip-Type Heated Beverage Hardware Devices using SMIv2. M. Slavitch. 1998.
RFC 2549 IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service. D. Waitzman. 1999.
RFC 2550 Y10K and Beyond. S. Glassman, M. Manasse, J. Mogul. 1999.
RFC 2551 The Roman Standards Process -- Revision III. S. Bradner. 1999.
RFC 2795 The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS). S. Christey. 2000.
RFC 3091 Pi Digit Generation Protocol. H. Kennedy. 2001.
RFC 3092 Etymology of "Foo". D. Eastlake 3rd, C. Manros, E. Raymond. 2001.
RFC 3093 Firewall Enhancement Protocol (FEP). M. Gaynor, S. Bradner. 2001.
RFC 3251 Electricity over IP. B. Rajagopalan. 2002.
RFC 3252 Binary Lexical Octet Ad-hoc Transport. H. Kennedy. 2002.
RFC 3514 The Security Flag in the IPv4 Header. S. Bellovin. 2003.
RFC 3751 Omniscience Protocol Requirements. S. Bradner. 2004.
RFC 4041 Requirements for Morality Sections in Routing Area Drafts. A. Farrel. 2005.
RFC 4042 UTF-9 and UTF-18 Efficient Transformation Formats of Unicode. M. Crispin. 2005.
RFC 4824 The Transmission of IP Datagrams over the Semaphore Flag Signaling System (SFSS). J. Hofmueller, Ed., A. Bachmann, Ed., IO. zmoelnig, Ed.. 2007.
RFC 5241 Naming Rights in IETF Protocols. A. Falk, S. Bradner. 2008.
RFC 5242 A Generalized Unified Character Code: Western European and CJK Sections. J. Klensin, H. Alvestrand. 2008.

April 1st 2006 RFCs

In April of 2006, there appeared to be no April Fool RFC. This has lead some to suspect that there was either no April Fool that year or the RFC is incredibly subtle and hasn't disclosed itself as an obvious prank. Can you spot if there's a joker in the pack of the April 2006 RFCs?

RFC 4292 IP Forwarding Table MIB. B. Haberman. April 2006.
RFC 4293 Management Information Base for the Internet Protocol (IP). S. Routhier, Ed.. April 2006.
RFC 4294 IPv6 Node Requirements. J. Loughney, Ed.. April 2006.
RFC 4295 Mobile IPv6 Management Information Base. G. Keeni, K. Koide, K. Nagami, S. Gundavelli. April 2006.
RFC 4329 Scripting Media Types. B. Hoehrmann. April 2006.
RFC 4346 The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol Version 1.1. T. Dierks, E. Rescorla. April 2006.
RFC 4347 Datagram Transport Layer Security. E. Rescorla, N. Modadugu. April 2006.
RFC 4366 Transport Layer Security (TLS) Extensions. S. Blake-Wilson, M. Nystrom, D. Hopwood, J. Mikkelsen, T. Wright. April 2006.
RFC 4389 Neighbor Discovery Proxies (ND Proxy). D. Thaler, M. Talwar, C. Patel. April 2006.
RFC 4390 Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) over InfiniBand. V. Kashyap. April 2006.
RFC 4391 Transmission of IP over InfiniBand (IPoIB). J. Chu, V. Kashyap. April 2006.
RFC 4392 IP over InfiniBand (IPoIB) Architecture. V. Kashyap. April 2006.
RFC 4405 SMTP Service Extension for Indicating the Responsible Submitter of an E-Mail Message. E. Allman, H. Katz. April 2006.
RFC 4406 Sender ID: Authenticating E-Mail. J. Lyon, M. Wong. April 2006.
RFC 4407 Purported Responsible Address in E-Mail Messages. J. Lyon. April 2006.
RFC 4408 Sender Policy Framework (SPF) for Authorizing Use of Domains in E-Mail, Version 1. M. Wong, W. Schlitt. April 2006.
RFC 4409 Message Submission for Mail. R. Gellens, J. Klensin. April 2006.
RFC 4429 Optimistic Duplicate Address Detection (DAD) for IPv6. N. Moore. April 2006.
RFC 4435 A Framework for the Usage of Internet Media Guides (IMGs). Y. Nomura, R. Walsh, J-P. Luoma, H. Asaeda, H. Schulzrinne. April 2006.
RFC 4438 Fibre-Channel Name Server MIB. C. DeSanti, V. Gaonkar, H.K. Vivek, K. McCloghrie, S. Gai. April 2006.
RFC 4444 Management Information Base for Intermediate System to Intermediate System (IS-IS). J. Parker, Ed.. April 2006.
RFC 4445 A Proposed Media Delivery Index (MDI). J. Welch, J. Clark. April 2006.
RFC 4446 IANA Allocations for Pseudowire Edge to Edge Emulation (PWE3). L. Martini. April 2006.
RFC 4447 Pseudowire Setup and Maintenance Using the Label Distribution Protocol (LDP). L. Martini, Ed., E. Rosen, N. El-Aawar, T. Smith, G. Heron. April 2006.
RFC 4448 Encapsulation Methods for Transport of Ethernet over MPLS Networks. L. Martini, Ed., E. Rosen, N. El-Aawar, G. Heron. April 2006.
RFC 4452 The "info" URI Scheme for Information Assets with Identifiers in Public Namespaces. H. Van de Sompel, T. Hammond, E. Neylon, S. Weibel. April 2006.
RFC 4453 Requirements for Consent-Based Communications in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). J. Rosenberg, G. Camarillo, Ed., D. Willis. April 2006.
RFC 4455 Definition of Managed Objects for Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) Entities. M. Hallak-Stamler, M. Bakke, Y. Lederman, M. Krueger, K. McCloghrie. April 2006.
RFC 4456 BGP Route Reflection: An Alternative to Full Mesh Internal BGP (IBGP). T. Bates, E. Chen, R. Chandra. April 2006.
RFC 4457 The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) P-User-Database Private-Header (P-Header). G. Camarillo, G. Blanco. April 2006.
RFC 4458 Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) URIs for Applications such as Voicemail and Interactive Voice Response (IVR). C. Jennings, F. Audet, J. Elwell. April 2006.
RFC 4459 MTU and Fragmentation Issues with In-the-Network Tunneling. P. Savola. April 2006.
RFC 4460 Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) Specification Errata and Issues. R. Stewart, I. Arias-Rodriguez, K. Poon, A. Caro, M. Tuexen. April 2006.
RFC 4461 Signaling Requirements for Point-to-Multipoint Traffic-Engineered MPLS Label Switched Paths (LSPs). S. Yasukawa, Ed.. April 2006.
RFC 4463 A Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP) Developed by Cisco, Nuance, and Speechworks. S. Shanmugham, P. Monaco, B. Eberman. April 2006.
RFC 4466 Collected Extensions to IMAP4 ABNF. A. Melnikov, C. Daboo. April 2006.
RFC 4469 Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) CATENATE Extension. P. Resnick. April 2006.
RFC 4470 Minimally Covering NSEC Records and DNSSEC On-line Signing. S. Weiler, J. Ihren. April 2006.
RFC 4472 Operational Considerations and Issues with IPv6 DNS. A. Durand, J. Ihren, P. Savola. April 2006.
RFC 4478 Repeated Authentication in Internet Key Exchange (IKEv2) Protocol. Y. Nir. April 2006.
RFC 4486 Subcodes for BGP Cease Notification Message. E. Chen, V. Gillet. April 2006.
RFC 4489 A Method for Generating Link-Scoped IPv6 Multicast Addresses. J-S. Park, M-K. Shin, H-J. Kim. April 2006.