Should I upload a dead cat or dog? Make a funny about that? Don't post this shit.
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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Wasn't there recently some guy that encoded images into a bird singing?
Sort of, yes, but I've seen it mis-represented a lot.
I have seen headlines like "man stores PNG file on bird!" which categorically did not happen, the image was analog.
A common tool that is used in amateur radio practice is called a Waterfall Display. It works a little bit like the visualizer in Windows Media Player if you remember those, you get a window that shows a section of radio (or audio) spectrum. A signal (or sound) at a particular frequency will make that spot on the graph glow, the louder the signal, the brighter that spot will glow. The entire chart continuously scrolls to represent the passage of time, so you end up with kind of a graph of what signals are being made over a brief amount of time.
If you made a signal that swept up in frequency over time, it would be seen as a diagonal line on the waterfall. Using that concept, you can make all kinds of weird signals to draw pictures in the waterfall. Youtuber Ringway Manchester shows off several examples of this that he recorded that were played as part of the Ukraine/Russia conflict. this video. Here it was done out of jamming military communication frequencies, propaganda and trolling. See also UVB-76 for a tangentially related rabbit hole to fall down. If you play these sounds out of a radio's speaker, they just sound like a strange warbling noise.
Play that strange noise to a bird that is good at mimicking, like a mockingbird or starling, and it'll mimic that sound. Point a microphone hooked up to a waterfall display at the mimicking bird, and the bird will draw the image on the waterfall display when it sings.
It's categorically the same as printing out a PNG onto a sheet of paper. I can see how you might call that "storing", even if it's a lossy process.
I need a bird who can record a Commodore 64 tape for me. :p That’s what I want.
Yup - Super obscure steganography! (Shitty baud/bandwidth though)
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.
and whether the Internet is doomed to be slow in locations where the only avian carriers available are flightless.
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.
I suppose this is one way to keep the CIA spy drones from becoming E-waste when they introduce the new models.
hope it goes better than when they carried it in tubes.
Its a series of tubes.
Its seared in my brain.
It's not a dump truck!
The part I hate is how many overconfident internet technicians will be like "well ackshually the metaphor isn't that far off" completely missing the very important difference between an information channel and a power channel and what the capacity limits are for each.
For example, free space is a pretty great information channel, but it absolutely sucks for reliably transmitting fluids.
Also, the fact that in context, it was coming from an ignorant old man ranting on the floor of Congress while trying to pass an anti-net nutrality bill. The fact that the analogy even kinda works is an accident and missing the bigger problem.
What is the bandwidth of a cargo plane? You fill the hold with data storage disks, fly them to the destination and then read them in.
But shitty round trip time.
Is there a published date on there somewhere? I didn't see one but I'm curious. It cites an estimate that total internet throughput is 167 terabits per second but I can't imagine it's that low these days.
archive.org suggests that What-If #31 appeared sometime around the 10th of February, 2013. That fits with one of the links in the article which first appeared (again, according to archive.org) in 2008 and ceased to be valid around 2015.
Randall has (or his team has) updated the formatting on the What-If site, but they haven't bothered to fix the links.
That's kinda how aws got companies into cloud storage.
A truck that would duplicate a companies disks, then drive to a data center and make the data available on s3 or whatever.
Retired now, tho.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/aws-retires-snowmobile-truck-based-data-transfer-service/
Honey, I’ve come into some money, and I’m going to need a new sandwich