this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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That series of RFCs (1149, 2549, 6214) keeps getting rediscovered by new generations of technical folk. Among other issues that have never been completely addressed are accidental encapsulation of packets in hawks, and whether the Internet is doomed to be slow in locations where the only avian carriers available are flightless.
There has been one successful implementation of the protocol to date. 55% of ping attempts went through.
(As April Fools RFCs go, the only one that's arguably more popular than IPoAC is the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, the source of
418 I am a teapot
).The coffee pot protocol is such an interesting anachronism. Nobody would make a hardware control protocol by extending HTTP like that anymore.
For good reasons, really. It's unnecessary to do it that way.
That was kind of the author's point: that HTTP is so broadly specified, and at that point had so many unnecessary RFCs extending it, that you could halfway-sensibly write a hardware control protocol by HTTP alone even if that was a terrible idea.
Source: I wrote the tea-brewing extension to HTCPCP, which takes it another notch into the ridiculous.
Where would that be? Even inland Antarctica has skuas.
I think it was supposedly New Zealand or something. It's been a long time since I've read the full texts.