- Evil bit
The evil bit is a fictional
IPv4 packet header field proposed in RFC 3514, a humorousApril Fools' Day RFC from 2003 authored by Steve Bellovin. The RFC recommended that the last remaining unused bit in theIPv4 packet header be used to indicate whether a packet had been sent with malicious intent, thus makingcomputer security engineering an easy problem.Influence
The evil bit has become a synonym for all attempts to seek simple technical solutions for difficult human social problems, in particular efforts to implement
Internet censorship using simple technical solutions.The evil bit also became a noteworthy in-joke in
Slashdot . News about the publication of this RFC was posted in Slashdot dozens of times, reworded each time, among other April Fools stories, poking humour at the common criticism of Slashdot often posting duplicate stories.As a joke,
FreeBSD implemented this on the same day but removed the changes on the following day. [ [http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-all/2003-April/001098.html Implementation] , [http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-all/2003-April/001295.html removal] ]This RFC has also been quoted in the otherwise completely serious RFC 3675, ".sex Considered Dangerous", which may have caused the proponents of
.xxx to wonder whether theInternet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was commenting on their application for atop-level domain (TLD) - the document was not related to their application.ee also
*
Technical fix References
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
