Two9A
That’s actually the topic of the talk! Around 1995-96, HTTP was picking up all kinds of use outside the academic community, and people were tacking extensions on left and right; one of the biggest was file upload support, which was done by throwing HTTP and email into a room and having them fight it out. Which is how we ended up with the monstrosity that is “sending emails over HTTP”, also known as “posting a form”.
The author of HTCPCP decided to codify some of his concerns with these, partly as a joke; I noticed long afterward that his joke was only standardized for coffee, which Personally Offended me as a citizen of a tea-drinking nation.
I always rather enjoyed the double entendre of “420 Enhance Your Calm”, which was an unofficial response from Twitter’s original API before “429 Too Many Requests” was standardized.
But I can’t think of any codes which aren’t already in there, that I’d use; there are a bunch that don’t see much use, like “410 Gone”, so the list could do with trimming down if anything.
The fact that otherwise non-technical people joke about staying in hotel room 404 just shows how pervasive the modern Internet has become. As an aside, it also shows the importance of a good error message; there are some errors (like “Not Found”) in HTTP that are simple and clear, and some (“Bad Gateway”?) that are more impenetrable.
No-one jokes about staying in room 504, and the room service never arriving.
(And perhaps one of the larger Lemmies can get a hold of Victoria, get these AMAs going for real.)
A little lower down the stack, I always liked the Evil Bit in TCP, a standard which removes all need for firewalls heuristics by requiring malware or packets with evil intent to set the Evil Bit. The receiver can simply drop packets with the Evil Bit set, and thus be entirely safe forever from bad traffic.
At the physical interface layer where data meets real life, I especially enjoy IP over Avian Carrier; that link in particular is to the QoS definition which extends the original spec for carrying packets by carrier pigeon.
For real though, the shortest license is probably the WTFPL:
- You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.
Might’ve used it a couple of times myself.
I think it’s excellent out here. I was stuck on Reddit for the longest time, and this recent debacle has pushed me to explore the networks at the edge; this feels a lot more like the Internet of old. The analogy of email is apt, I think, with the accounts on multiple servers and the interplay between.
