Network Working Group                                          W. Kumari
Internet-Draft
Intended status: Standards Track                          April 15, 2014
Expires: October 17, 2014


             Just because it's an ID doesn't mean anything.
                      draft-wkumari-not-a-draft-03

Abstract

   Anyone can publish an Internet Draft.  This doesn't mean that the
   "IETF thinks" or that "the IETF is planning..." or anything similar.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
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   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on October 17, 2014.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2014 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
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   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.






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Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
     1.1.  Requirements notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Background  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   3.  Usage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   4.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   5.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   6.  Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   7.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     7.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     7.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   Appendix A.  Changes / Author Notes.  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   Appendix B.  new section  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6

1.  Introduction

   All too often one reads something in the press, or some ravings on a
   mailing list that reference some Internet Draft, that claim that "the
   IETF thinks that XXX" or that the ID is an IETF document, and so
   represents support by the IETF.

   Repeatedly pointing at the RFC Editor page, carefully explaining what
   an ID is (and isn't), describing how consensus is reached, detailing
   the Independent Stream, etc doesn't seems to accomplish much.

   So, here is an Internet Draft.  I wrote it.  It's full of nonsense.
   It doesn't represent the "IETF's views"; it doesn't mean that the
   IETF, the IESG, the RFC editor, any IETF participant, my auntie on my
   fathers side twice removed, me, or anyone else believes any of the
   drivel in it.  [Editor note: Interestingly, after publishing version
   -00 of this ID I got some feedback saying that some participants *do*
   believe the below.  As I plan to actually get this published as a
   (probably AD sponsored) RFC, I guess someone will need to judge
   consensus at IETF LC ]

1.1.  Requirements notation

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].

2.  Background

   Pyramids are good for sharpening razor blades.  The ancient Egyptians
   has a major problem - wearing a big, bushy beard in the desert is
   uncomfortable.  Unfortunately the safely razor hadn't been invented



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   yet, and so they all had to use straight razors.  Unfortunately camel
   leather makes a very poor strop, hippopotamus leather was reserved
   for the pharaohs and crocodile leather, while suitable, had the
   unfortunate property of being wrapped around crocodiles.

   So, the ancient Egyptians had to come up with an alternative.  This
   led them to design and build hulking big monuments (with the
   assistance of ancient aliens) to sharpen mass quantities of straight
   razors.  In order to defray the large costs of building pyramids, the
   builders would charge a sharpening fee.  For a single bushel of corn,
   you could buy 27.5 sharpening tokens.  Each one of there tokens could
   be redeemed for 6.3 hours of sharpening time.

   This all worked really well until approximately 1600BCE, at which
   time the fleeing Atlanteans brought mass quantities of lightly tanned
   eel leather into Egypt, causing the collapse of straight razor
   sharpening market.  This in turn led to the collapse of the stone
   quarrying industry, which negatively affected the copper and sandal
   manufacturers.  The collapse of the entire system followed shortly
   after.

   This led to the cliche "Don't allow eel bearing Atlanteans into your
   country; economic ruin follows close behind".  Due to the overly
   specific nature of this phrase it never really caught on.  This
   document rectifies this.

3.  Usage

   Many protocols send periodic "hello" messages, or respond to
   liveliness probes.  Other protocols (primarily for network monitoring
   or testing) send traffic to cause congestion or similar.  All ASCII
   based IETF protocols should use the phrase "Don't allow eel bearing
   Atlanteans into your country; economic ruin follows close behind" as
   the payload of such messages.  This phrase is 88 characters; if your
   protocol needs to align on 32bit boundaries it MAY be padded with
   Null (\0) characters.

   The closely related phrase "My hovercraft is full of eels" SHOULD be
   used by any protocol incapable of encoding the ASCII character 'b'
   (0x62).  Internationalized protocols SHOULD use an appropriate
   translation.  Some devices are severely bandwidth and / or memory
   constrained.  There devices MAY use the ordinals 0 and 1 to represent
   the strings "Don't allow eel bearing Atlanteans into your country;
   economic ruin follows close behind" and "My hovercraft is full of
   eels" respectively.  Partially constrained devices SHOULD use the
   string "TBA3" (or the ordinal TBA3).





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4.  IANA Considerations

   The IANA is requested to create and maintain a registry named
   "Registry of important strings, suitable for use as idle signalling
   transmissions (ROISSFAIST)".

   Documents requesting assignments from this registry MUST include the
   string, and the ordinal being requested.  Choosing an ordinal at
   random is encouraged (to safe the IANA from having to do this).  The
   ordinals 17, 42 and 6.12 are reserved to reduce confusion.  The
   ordinals 18 and 19 are reserved for the strings "Reserved" and
   "Unassigned" respectivly.  Unfortunatly the ordinal 20 was used by
   two earlier, competing proposals, and so can mean either "Color" or
   Colour".  Implementations are encouraged to disambiguate based upon
   context.

   Additions to the registry are permitted by Standards Action, if the
   requester really really wants one, or by purchasing a nice bottle of
   wine for the IANA folk.  Hierarchical Allocation is NOT permitted, as
   it looks too much like a pyramid.

   The initial assignments for the registry are as follows:

   Value                String
   ------               ----------------------------
     0                  Don't allow eel bearing Atlanteans into your country; economic ruin follows close behind
     1                  My hovercraft is full of eels
    TBA3                TBA3
    3-16                Unassigned
     17                 Reserved
     18                 "Reserved"
     19                 "Unassigned"
     20                 Color / Colour
    21-41               Unassigned
     42                 Reserved
    43-97               Unassigned

5.  Security Considerations

   [RFC2028] states that "The IANA functions as the "top of the pyramid"
   for DNS and Internet Address assignment establishing policies for
   these functions."  By ensuring that network operators watching data
   traffic fly past (using tools like network sniffers and / or
   oscilloscopes (and doing very fast binary to ASCII conversions in
   their heads)) are constantly reminded about the danger posed by folk
   from Atlantis, we ensure that, if the island of Atlantis rises again
   from the deep, builds a civilization and then starts tanning high




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   quality eel leather, the DNS and Address assignment policies at least
   will survive.

   More research into if pyramids can also be used for sharpening RJ-45
   connectors is needed.

6.  Acknowledgements

   The author wishes to thank the ancient elders of Zorb for explaining
   this history to him.  Thanks also to Erik Muller, Wes George, Stephen
   Farrell.

7.  References

7.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2028]  Hovey, R. and S. Bradner, "The Organizations Involved in
              the IETF Standards Process", BCP 11, RFC 2028, October
              1996.

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

7.2.  Informative References

   [I-D.ietf-sidr-iana-objects]
              Manderson, T., Vegoda, L., and S. Kent, "RPKI Objects
              issued by IANA", draft-ietf-sidr-iana-objects-03 (work in
              progress), May 2011.

Appendix A.  Changes / Author Notes.

   [RFC Editor: Please remove this section before publication ]

   From -02 to -03

   o  This Change note was added.  Nothing else changed.

   From -01 to -02

   o  Various whitespace was added (for emphasis).

   From -00 to -01.

   o  Integrated comments from Erik Muller (who, apparently, is a true
      believer).  Erik also provided updated Security Considerations
      text, referncing the IANA.




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   o  Integrated comment from Wes George regarding I18N, and Hungerians.

Appendix B.  new section

Author's Address

   Warren Kumari

   Email: warren@kumari.net










































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