RFC-1149: IP over Avian Carriers • Hacker News Board

Re: RFC-1149: IP over Avian Carriers

#21

Post by paulddraper » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 12:30 AM UTC

> 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.

Re: RFC-1149: IP over Avian Carriers

#22

Post by pklee » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 12:30 AM UTC

Papirola wrote: post #13

reaperducer wrote: post #11

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 Wasn't there also a protocol for checking vending machines for cold drinks?

finger

haha.. those were the days.. where you would get someone's resume over finger :)

Re: RFC-1149: IP over Avian Carriers

#23

Post by rodmena » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 12:33 AM UTC

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.

```

Re: RFC-1149: IP over Avian Carriers

#24

Post by codetrotter » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 12:40 AM UTC

BuildTheRobots wrote: post #17

3xblah wrote: post #3

What if used bees instead of birds?

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

> 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.

Re: RFC-1149: IP over Avian Carriers

#25

Post by staeiou » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 12:48 AM UTC

See also IP over Xylophone Players (IPoXP), which we actually built:

ACM DL: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2212785 Open PDF: http://stuartgeiger.com/papers/ipoxp-archive.pdf

Re: RFC-1149: IP over Avian Carriers

#26

Post by nostrademons » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 12:52 AM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #11

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 Wasn't there also a protocol for checking vending machines for cold drinks?

Which is actually used in a few places. Google always return it from https://www.google.com/teapot, and Binance uses that status code if you've been IP-banned for exceeding rate limits.

Re: RFC-1149: IP over Avian Carriers

#27

Post by dang » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 1:06 AM UTC

Ken_Adler wrote: post #8

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

Can you share anything about the discussion?

Re: RFC-1149: IP over Avian Carriers

#28

Post by m463 » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 1:23 AM UTC

3xblah wrote: post #3

What if used bees instead of birds?

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.

Re: RFC-1149: IP over Avian Carriers

#29

Post by sam_bristow » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 1:27 AM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #11

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 Wasn't there also a protocol for checking vending machines for cold drinks?

You're probably thinking of 'The "Only" Coke Machine on the Internet'

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt

Re: RFC-1149: IP over Avian Carriers

#30

Post by rpeden » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 1:34 AM UTC

codetrotter wrote: post #24

BuildTheRobots wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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.

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-rent...