X-Clacks-Overhead

by modinfo • 4 years ago

60 42 4 years ago

superkuh• 4 years ago

Not that it matters, especially in a just for fun context, but X- prefixes in http headers are currently depreciated (but will probably last forever). https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6648

layer8• 4 years ago

You mean deprecated. It also only applies to the creation of new parameters, not to existing ones.

blep_2• 4 years ago

Ehh. IMO there's still a place for them in extensions that it would make no sense to standardize - this is one example (I hope nobody attaches any behavior to this); a more common one is application-specific headers that aren't generic enough to ever have meaning outside of interop with that one application.

zzo38computer2• 4 years ago

I agree; this is what I thought too, when I learned that "X-" is deprecated, I still thought, that "X-" should still be used (in HTTP, email, Usenet, some file formats, etc) if it has no reason to be standardized. (I have seen other made-up headers in HTTP and Usenet and email, in many cases where there is no reason to be standardized, but a few cases where standardization may be useful, maybe)

hprotagonist• 4 years ago

Man's not dead while his name's still spoken.

mikl2• 4 years ago

Forgotten, no. Dead, yes.

dijit• 4 years ago

“A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.” (from the article)

hnbad2• 4 years ago

Subjectively to him, yeah, he's very much dead.

Culturally, he's still very much alive.

But that gets into philosphically discussions about what "he" even is.

mikl2• 4 years ago

I guess we should all be glad that the Internet was not designed by Pratchett.

If it was possible to send infinitely repeating messages like he describes, the whole Internet would soon be completely bogged down with useless overhead packages filled with spam and ads.

At least the fanboys who implement this nonsense header on their servers are only wasting the bandwidth of themselves and their visitors.

iamevn• 4 years ago

Damn, do you really have to be like that about a clever little tribute to a beloved author?

trenec• 4 years ago

He would have had the beginnings of dementia at the time of writing the book, please cut him some slack.

Villodre2• 4 years ago

What a mean and unnecessary thing to say :-(

alternatetwo• 4 years ago

All those ... 50 bytes or whatever it is, yes.

If you want to pick a fight about bandwidth waste, start with spam, not this.

c22• 4 years ago

https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs

oarsinsync• 4 years ago

the whole Internet would soon be completely bogged down with useless overhead packages filled with spam and ads

I’d love to be on your internet where this isn’t already a reality

gommm• 4 years ago

When I read that I thought OP was being sarcastic, but sadly from the rest of the message he isn't

dspillett2• 4 years ago

Yeah, and imagine if libraries really twisted the universe enough to create routes between different places and times. So unrealistic. The man just had no idea about shelf architecture and gravitational physics.

Ahem.

You are aware he was writing fantasy with a referring-to-real-life comedy bent, not specifications & instruction manuals, aren't you?

hnbad2• 4 years ago

The point of the "GNU" flags is that they're an unforeseen exploit of the system. The technology in Discworld is intentionally convoluted and whimsical because it is a fantasy setting with humerous overtones (while also using that setting to deliver biting commentary on real-world issues at times, I suppose "a little bit of sugar helps the medicine go down"). The fact the flags spell out GNU is also an obvious tribute to the free software movement (as is arguably the hacker subculture of clacks operators that builds around the clacks in the novel).

Yes, if the Internet worked on the clacks protocol, it wouldn't work in real life. But neither would cameras if they relied on small creatures living in them and painting the photographs very quickly. It's not even that Discworld is horribly naive, it's more that it served as a whitewashed canvas to allow him to create narratives by introducing elements of the real world individually and give the reader the opportunity to draw parallels from that.

The clacks "GNU" hack is a perfect example of the kind of things you'd see in the early Internet days before commercial websites were really a thing. Remember that for a long time there was a dream of the "semantic web" which turned out to be similarly exploitable and fell apart when commercial interests became relevant (giving birth to what we now call SEO).

The X-Clacks-Overhead header is clearly not intended to behave like the clacks in the story. Nobody is naive enough to believe that this protocol would work (just as the semantic web didn't). It's entirely a tribute, a form for fans to (at least temporarily) "immortalize" someone who had a great influence on them. And unlike the twenty different analytics and ad scripts you now find on many websites it not only wastes hardly any space but also doesn't meaningfully inconveniece users (not any more than forgetting to turn of the server and x-powered-by headers at least).

Handytinge• 4 years ago

This sentiment is what is removing - day by day - the soul of the world wide web.

Not everything is about efficiancy gains - it's ok to just have fun. The internet never has been serious business, nor will I (or many others) ever treat it as such.

scubbo• 4 years ago

Always present in any project I build. See http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com/ for drop-in implementations.

GNU Terry Pratchett.

akhilrex• 4 years ago

Same. No project of mine has ever missed this.

Villodre2• 4 years ago

I always insert it (with permission from the owner, of course) in the sites that I manage, just as a little gesture. It's bit like that ASCII duck saying "meow!" on Amazon.

aarestad• 4 years ago

I understand that the “GNU” is a series of commands and not an acronym, but is there any sort of connection with FSF GNU? Or is it just an interesting coincidence?

cmeacham98• 4 years ago

It's possibkle Pratchett meant it as an intentional reference to the other GNU, but if it was he never told anyone.

Symbiote• 4 years ago

He obviously meant it, all his books are full of references like this.

The Annotated Pratchett File is a longrunning effort to document these references, though I'm not sure if it is really being maintained any more -- the Going Postal page is empty.

https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/

blep_2• 4 years ago

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Terry Pratchett, is in fact, GNU Terry Pratchett, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Terry Pratchett.

gpderetta• 4 years ago

surely it must be GNU/Terry_Pratchett.

Majestic121• 4 years ago

I think it's too specific an acronym to be a coincidence, and if you read "Going Postal", it's a pretty clear love letter to the hacker culture, so in my mind officially recognized or not, the connection with FSF is there

zzo38computer2• 4 years ago

I have seen "X-Clacks-Overhead" also in message headers on Usenet.

dspillett2• 4 years ago

IIRC it appeared there first, though not by long as is spread PDQ.

Pseudomanifold• 4 years ago

I use this on several of my sites as well. None of them get any significant amount of traffic, so I figured it would be okay to add more names to the list, as a small token of keeping their memory alive.

Browsing the web with the Clacks Overhead extension for Chrome (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clacks-overhead-gn...), I'm always surprised by which sites enable this extension. My latest find is arXiv.org! If you go to any abstract page, such as https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0310077v2 (picked that one at random for its humour), the header will be sent.

mikro2nd• 4 years ago

I was a little baffled by the (legally void, and thus pointless) cookie notice on the site -- a site that clearly does not need cookies in order to "operate correctly". It clearly states that they use Google and other 3rd parties who set cookies, and that these are "necessary for the site to operate correctly" which appears to me to be a nonsense, since it's just a static text page. Tracking cookies are certainly not "necessary".

tux2bsd2• 4 years ago

All of those are thanks to the EU.

Totally pointless garbage that further train "Click OK" behaviour (after decades of Microsoft's existing conditioning) and enable malicious parties to take advantage of that behaviour.

tmp2343EU• 4 years ago

Thanks to EU we are aware that plain text website is tracking us.

...What for?

throwaway_xyeet• 4 years ago

This one actually goes against GDPR since it has no "reject all" button on it.

pwdisswordfish9• 4 years ago

Yes, blame the EU. It's never the greedy websites that are at fault.

CRConrad• 4 years ago

Bullshit.

There is absolutely nothing in the GDPR that prevents web sites from not using tracking (or other) cookies.

ftyers• 4 years ago

Yeah, that's one of the worst cookie notices I've seen in a while, no reject button for what is essentially a page of Markdown.

In addition snarky wording which I can't work out if I hate more than the faux caring "oh you don't mind if we use cookies do you?" language.

FWIW You can use uBlock origin to remove ##.alert-dismissible.alert-info.alert from the page to avoid having to deal with it.

MrGilbert• 4 years ago

I really loved it the first time I read about it. So I added it to my private page for every (close) relative that is already and dearly missed. <3

Mizza• 4 years ago

I sometimes wonder what would have happened to the Roman empire if they had invented clacks towers. Did any ancient civilizations invent them, or is it just an ancient technology invented by Terry Pratchett?

theandrewbailey• 4 years ago

Not ancient, but optical telegraph systems were a thing.

The most widely used system was invented in 1792 in France by Claude Chappe, and was popular in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph

X-Clacks-Overhead

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