Yet another foolish network protocol

The Internet engineering community has proposed a new communications protocol designed to help prosecutors track down people who illegally download copyrighted material from peer-to-peer Web sites.

The so-called Omniscience Protocol would be installed on all Internet-enabled devices that can be used to play protected material, including computers and MP3 players.

The protocol will work even when a user's Internet connection fails. "Since the evil-doer might try to hide his or her evil-doing by disconnecting the computer from the network, the Omniscience Protocol must be able to continue to communicate even under these circumstances," writes protocol author Scott Bradner , a senior technical consultant at Harvard University.

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The Internet engineering community has proposed a new communications protocol designed to help prosecutors track down people who illegally download copyrighted material from peer-to-peer Web sites.

The so-called Omniscience Protocol would be installed on all Internet-enabled devices that can be used to play protected material, including computers and MP3 players.

The protocol will work even when a user's Internet connection fails. "Since the evil-doer might try to hide his or her evil-doing by disconnecting the computer from the network, the Omniscience Protocol must be able to continue to communicate even under these circumstances," writes protocol author Scott Bradner , a senior technical consultant at Harvard University.

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This April Fool's joke was published last year by the Internet engineering community, which issues a phony computer network RFC every year. The RFC Editor, the publisher of Internet standards and best practices, has been publishing April 1 RFCs since 1983.

Every year, network engineers worldwide await the release of the latest April Fool's Day RFC (here's the one for 2005 ). These documents feature satire that would make Jonathan Swift proud (if he could understand the technical references).

"The best April Fool's Day RFCs reveal truth by telling a lie," Bradner writes in the introduction of a soon-to-be-published archive of April 1 RFCs. These RFCs "play it straight but describe something that could not or should not be done."

Bradner has authored or co-authored three April 1 RFCs and been the butt of another. "There were other attempts that did not see the light of day and probably should not have," he quips.

The trick in writing a good April 1 RFC is to make it look and sound real. Many of these documents have fooled network engineers into trying to implement them.

"I take pride in the fact that about half of the many comments I received about each of the last two April 1st RFCs I've been involved in thought that I was serious," Bradner says. The Omniscience Protocol "even got Slashdotted."

The RFC Editor started its April Fool's Day tradition more than 20 years ago, when Internet pioneer Jon Postel was in charge of standards publication. Since Postel's death in 1998, the RFC Editor shop at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute has carried on the beloved tradition.

The RFC Editor solicits submissions for April 1 RFCs from the IETF , which is the Internet's premier standards-setting body. Submissions are accepted until mid-March, then the six-person RFC Editor team reads them and decides which is funniest.

"It has to be something technical that you want to believe in," says Joyce Reynolds, Internet Services Manager for the RFC Editor. "It has to be written in a very tongue-in-cheek manner."

The format of April 1 RFCs is the same as regular RFCs, and publication is announced by the IETF just like any other RFC. The only clue to readers that the document is a joke is the publication date of April 1. Regular RFCs list only the month of publication.