
RFC-1149: IP over Avian Carriers - scottlocklin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
======
berbec
Someone implemented it, too

[https://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/writeup/](https://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/writeup/)

64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=6165731.1 ms

------
antoncohen
I think more interesting than this RFC is the United States Army Pigeon
Service. During WWII the force consisted of 54,000 pigeons. Over 90% of US
Army messages sent by pigeons were received.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Pigeon_Serv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Pigeon_Service)

~~~
nostrademons
They must've implemented RFC 2549:

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549)

~~~
billpg
I remember reading that thinking "You know, you've taken a good joke a bit too
far."

------
k__
Well, at least sending data via flash-cards and pigeons isn't a joke.

 _" If 16 homing pigeons are given eight 512 GB SD cards each, and take an
hour to reach their destination, the throughput of the transfer would be 145.6
Gbit/s, excluding transfer to and from the SD cards."_

Today we have 1TB microSD cards, they only weight an 8th of an SD card.

If the capacity of a pigeon is 8 SD cards (1290,24cm³) then it can carry 64
microSD cards (1049,6cm³).

This means the capacity is now 64TB instead of 4TB. and the throughput would
be 18,6 Tbit/s.

~~~
Jedi72
I think you should include the time to copy the data to the SD cards as a 1Tb
copy is significant time.

~~~
betimsl
Here, an up-vote for you good Sir.

~~~
grepthisab
Please don't do this here.

~~~
nemosaltat
I found HN during Lent this year. I’m not religious, but had been toying with
the idea of leaving R quite for some time. Your 5 words express my exact
sentiment, and exactly why I find HN so refreshing.

------
paulddraper
> 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.

~~~
grkvlt
See also the famous quote about the bandwidth of a pickup truck filled with
magnetic tape... The modern equivalent would be AWS Snowmobile [0] which is
described as follows:

> Each Snowmobile is a secured data truck with up to 100PB storage capacity
> that can be dispatched to your site and connected directly to your network
> backbone to perform high-speed data migration

A Wired article [1] calculated the San Francisco to New York bandwidth of a
full Snowmobile as just under 5 Tbps which is pretty damn impressive, although
the offload network connection on the truck is (only) a 1 Tbps connection. And
it gets quite pricey, a fully loaded Snowmobile is USD 500K per month, plus
the 350 kW of electricity it needs.

According to the FAQ, if you need _more_ bandwidth, you can operate the
Snowmobile trucks in parallel to get multi Exabyte scale data transfers, but I
have difficulty imagining any of the use cases that would require that as a
solution...?!?

0\.
[https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/faqs/](https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/faqs/)

1\. [https://www.wired.com/2016/12/amazons-snowmobile-actually-
tr...](https://www.wired.com/2016/12/amazons-snowmobile-actually-truck-
hauling-huge-hard-drive/)

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

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

------
reaperducer
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](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418)

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

~~~
FactolSarin
Considering we actually have internet connected teapots now, I wonder if any
mass market products have implemented this.

~~~
trp1
Nope, they recently removed that status code.

~~~
grkvlt
Only from clients supporting HTTP only. Note that RFC 2324 [0] defines the
_Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol_ or HTCPCP, which is an extension of
HTTP and implementors of clients for this are free to return 418 if necessary.
Also, RFC 7168 [1] which extends the protocol as HTCPCP-TEA now fully supports
teapots, and is probably a better choice for modern clients. Also of interest
is the SNMP MIB for remote management of 'Drip-Type Heated Beverage Hardware'
which is defined in RFC 2325 [2] although this does not appear to have been
updated with teapot, samovar, urn or other non-filter-coffee management
data...

Implementing tea making device remote management would probably be a good
candidate for a GSoC project or even a startup if you can find a VC gullible
enough to fund you!

0\.
[https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2324.txt](https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2324.txt)

1\.
[https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc7168.txt](https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc7168.txt)

2\.
[https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2325.txt](https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2325.txt)

------
jedberg
I love it when a new generation finds all the fun RFCs.

~~~
freedomben
The company I'm at hires a lot of interns, and it's always fun to see years
old jokes make it into slack from people being exposed to it for the first
time. The classic Little Bobby Tables XKCD was recently discovered. Makes me
feel a little better about them trampling on my lawn.

------
zw123456
This reminds me of the old saying "never under estimate the through-put of a
station wagon full of hard drives". It looks like it has disappeared from the
internet but at one time someone had a calculator where you could enter the
number of hard drives your station wagon could hold, the size of the hard
drives and the time it took to drive across town from data center A to data
center B and would tell you what bandwidth you would need to transfer the same
amount of data using FTP. I suppose you could make the same calculation if you
could make the MTU size larger that the carrier pigeon was carrying.

~~~
petschge
This is still true in astronomy. Data between radio telescopes for VLBI or the
EHT is shipped in disk packs. I am not sure how Ice cube gets their data back
from antartika, but I don't think it is over the thin and expensive satellite
internet. Data from the gamma ray telescopes HESS and Magic are transported to
their data centers on tapes.

~~~
timthorn
EHT uses the next iteration of these, I believe:
[https://conduant.com/products/product/mark5c/](https://conduant.com/products/product/mark5c/)

A talk I attended by Heino Falcke stated that each site is now recording data
at 64Gbps. Astounding metrics.
[https://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/talk_archive/H...](https://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/talk_archive/HeinoFalcke_18apr19.pdf)

------
rossdavidh
The wikipedia article on April 1 RFC's generally, is a treacherous time-sink
of hilarity:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for_Comments)

------
dbounds
The good ol' days. Reminds me of this gem; a book review from 2000 of the book
Ping The Duck on Amazon:
[https://www.amazon.com/review/R2VDKZ4X1F992Q](https://www.amazon.com/review/R2VDKZ4X1F992Q)

------
DarkWiiPlayer
Disappointed that the link is to wikipedia and not the actual RFC. I think
there's more value in reading the RFC first, specially if you don't
immediately realize that "avian carriers" really does refer to pigeons.

------
chris_va
Inspired by this, ~12 years ago we actually discussed encrypted reed solomon
encoded Fedex UDP as a method for index updates instead of buying new fiber
lines. Index update latency is a bit faster now.

------
rodmena
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.

```

~~~
hunter2_
This is an abomination on mobile. Who can fix this presentation trap sooooo
many people fall into?

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

~~~
avianauthor
I am very (too) proud to have written Dr. Postel's favorite RFC.

-david waitzman author rfc1149 and rfc2549

------
dang
Surprisingly many posts and surprisingly few discussions:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22Avian%20Carriers%22&sort=by...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22Avian%20Carriers%22&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

2017
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14531252](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14531252)

2009
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818955)

The same was noted 6 years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5999813](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5999813)

------
rplst8
Don't forget the updated RFC: "IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service"

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549)

------
Cieplak
_During the last 20 years, the information density of storage media and thus
the bandwidth of an avian carrier has increased 3 times as fast as the
bandwidth of the Internet._

------
decoyworker
RFC April Fools' jokes are good for a few laughs.

[https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt](https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt)

------
stesch
From the good old times, when IT people were allowed to laugh.

------
kwhitefoot
> In 2019, Cellular Tracking Technologies of Rio Grande, NJ demonstrated
> VultureNet, a component of the Internet of Wildlife. VultureNet is a system
> that uses very small tags ... on small birds and animals, and these are
> detected by receivers in devices on larger animals and birds ... data was
> transmitted from the device on the vulture to the Internet using the
> cellular network.

A store and forward network could be implemented on that.

------
ratel
I am all in favor of Plague-DSL: Municipal broadband by rat. The speed is not
great, but bandwidth is and at least you get 100% coverage.

------
karmakaze
Wasn't there also a DARPA failsafe communication protocol painting digits on
the sides of tanks?

------
saagarjha
Text of the RFC, which is one of the classic "April Fools" ones that the IETF
does every year:
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149)

~~~
the_duke
I just stumbled over this gem:

Internationalizing IPv6 Using 128-Bit Unicode

> This new 128-bit Unicode code point space can be leveraged by the IETF to
> address one of the lingering issues with IPv6: there's not much left to
> standardize. With the changes described in this document, the IETF will be
> kept busy for decades to come. It also enables new features and market
> opportunities, to help the global economy. This in turn will increase tax
> revenues for governments, which eventually may lead to increased funds for
> combating global warming. Therefore, the ultimate goal of this document is
> to reduce global warming.

------
danrl
Fun fact: I ported "IP over Avian Carriers" over to the web.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03aEf26YupY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03aEf26YupY)

------
gioscarab
See PJON: [https://github.com/gioblu/PJON](https://github.com/gioblu/PJON)

------
tempodox
What with the NSA and colleagues ramming their noses into everything, this
protocol has a future.

------
3xblah
What if used bees instead of birds?

~~~
BuildTheRobots
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20103292)

~~~
codetrotter
> 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.

~~~
rpeden
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...](https://m.phys.org/news/2018-05-farmer-hiveinside-world-renting-
bees.html)

------
ARandomerDude
"What kind of swallow?"

------
VectorLock
If you could load a few pigeons with microSD cards that would be something.
The latency might be rough but the bandwidth would be killer!

