Almost every April Fools' Day

April Fools' Day

April Fools' Day is celebrated in different countries around the world on April 1 every year. Sometimes referred to as All Fools' Day, April 1 is not a national holiday, but is widely recognized and celebrated as a day when many people play all kinds of jokes and foolishness...

 (1 April) since 1989, the Internet Engineering Task Force

Internet Engineering Task Force

The Internet Engineering Task Force develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite...

 has published one or more humorous RFC

Request for Comments

In computer network engineering, a Request for Comments is a memorandum published by the Internet Engineering Task Force describing methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems.Through the Internet Society, engineers and...

 (Request for Comments) documents, following in the path blazed by the June 1973 RFC 527 entitled ARPAWOCKY, which parodied Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...

's nonsense poem

Nonsense verse

Nonsense verse is a form of light, often rhythmical verse, usually for children, depicting peculiar characters in amusing and fantastical situations. It is whimsical and humorous in tone and tends to employ fanciful phrases and meaningless made-up words. Nonsense verse is closely related to...

 Jabberwocky

Jabberwocky

"Jabberwocky" is a nonsense verse poem written by Lewis Carroll in his 1872 novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, a sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...

. The following list also includes humor

Humour

Humour or humor is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement...

ous RFCs published on other dates.

List of April 1st RFCs

A parody of the TCP/IP

Internet protocol suite

The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols used for the Internet and other similar networks. It is commonly known as TCP/IP from its most important protocols: Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol , which were the first networking protocols defined in this...

 documentation style. For a long time it was specially marked in the RFC index with "note date of issue" because some people apparently took it seriously.

(see IP over Avian Carriers

IP over Avian Carriers

In computer networking, IP over Avian Carriers is a humorously intended proposal to carry Internet Protocol traffic by birds such as homing pigeons. IP over Avian Carriers was initially described in RFC 1149, a Request for Comments issued by the Internet Engineering Task Force written by D....

)

Updated by RFC 2549; see below. Describes protocol for transmitting IP packets by homing pigeon

Homing pigeon

The homing pigeon is a variety of domestic pigeon derived from the Rock Pigeon selectively bred to find its way home over extremely long distances. The wild rock pigeon has an innate homing ability, meaning that it will generally return to its own nest and its own mate...

.

In 2001, RFC 1149 was actually implemented by members of the Bergen (Norway) Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 User Group.

See also RFC 6214, as noted below. Describes the adaptation of RFC 1149 for IPv6 .

Attributed to William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

, but actually the work of Craig Partridge.

(see Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol

Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol

The Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol is a protocol for controlling, monitoring, and diagnosing coffee pots.HTCPCP is specified in the jocular RFC 2324, published on 1 April 1998. Although the RFC describing the protocol is an April Fools' Day joke, it specifies the protocol accurately enough...

)

Updates RFC 1149, listed above.

Concerning the practicalities of the infinite monkey theorem

Infinite monkey theorem

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare....

.

(see UTF-9 and UTF-18

UTF-9 and UTF-18

UTF-9 and UTF-18 were two April Fools' Day RFC joke specifications for encoding Unicode on systems where the nonet is a better fit for the native word size than the octet, such as the 36-bit PDP-10...

)

Notable for containing PDP-10

PDP-10

The PDP-10 was a mainframe computer family manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation from the late 1960s on; the name stands for "Programmed Data Processor model 10". The first model was delivered in 1966...

 assembly language code nearly 22 years after the manufacturer ceased production of the PDP-10.

implemented on Facebook

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

 Ipv6 over Facebook.

Other humorous RFCs

Makes humorous statements about the NULL encryption algorithm

Null function

In computer science, a null function is subroutine that returns no data values and leaves the program state unchanged. When it is part of the instruction set of a processor, it is called a NOP or NOOP ....

.

Non-RFC IETF humor

• An announcement on the IETF list about the appointment of the Sesame Street character Bert as member of the IAB appears to have been the April Fools' Day 2006 stunt.

Submission of April Fools' Day RFCs

The IETF accepts submission of properly formatted April Fools' Day RFCs from the general public, and considers them for publication in the same year if received at least two weeks prior to April 1st.

Sources

Additional sources:

• RFC Editor home page, retrieved April 1, 2008, hosts individual RFCs