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RFC 35140: HTTP Do-Not-Stab (2023) (www.5snb.club)
144 points by zkldi 1 hour ago | hide | past | web | 15 comments | favorite





The authors are [redacted] Google. Are they actually Google? They seem to unironically complain about what Microsoft is doing, but Google is guilty of the same.

Dude come on

It’s great satire, but it really does mirror a larger societal shift where the burden of safeguarding personal autonomy has shifted from institutions/regulators to individual users. Do-Not-Stab, Do-Not-Track, whatever it might be, any sort of “voluntary compliance” is a non-starter in the face of financial pressures

IMO we need to start normalizing being militant about this stuff again, to aggressively and adversarially defend the freedom to use your computer the way you choose to use it


To be extremely pedantic, it's great satire precisely because it mirrors that shift. Owes a lot to the OG, A Modest Proposal.

This is such transparent EU Bureaucracy shilling. No wonder Europe doesn't have any large SaaS companies with their stabbing unfriendly business climate.

For the low price of $20/1000 clicks, I will provide you with a stabbing consent banner, fully compliant with upcoming EU and CA regulations on web-based stabbing.

I'm sold, the distinctions between "necessary", "targeting", "performance" and "functional" stabbings are such a minefield. Not to mention how I'm supposed to properly disclose the 846 different stabbing brokers I work with. How's a man supposed to make a living stabbing people with all of this red tape in the way?

Wouldn’t this header just be another bit of entropy used by companies that are going to stab you anyway?

I’ve always wondered, since an RFC is a request for comment, how does one leave a comment? And who?

A bit of lore that I learned in my networking class in college was that the RFC name was chosen as tongue in cheek in that by the time a proposal gets to the RFC stage, comments are very much not appreciated. You're supposed to comment well before that point.

No idea if that bit of lore is true but it is certainly the case that RFCs are usually the final word on the relevant standard.


Finally I understand why RFCs are served with the Do-Not-Comment header!

Then they should be renamed CFCs (closed for comments).

RFC's operate under the IETF. RFC's are developed under some specific group, and you can join that group, the business is generally conducted on email. There are (well, were back when I participated) in-person meetings, but attendance there was not mandatory.

For those who only skim things, it might be worth scrolling down to read the "Editor Comments" section which is the actual article.

I feel like that section ruins the joke.

Maybe it’s just me, but I fundamentally disagree with the mentality that we should prioritize the “feeling of being special” among those who already get the joke (and corresponding point) at the expense of those who have yet to appreciate the message.

You can still laugh at the joke with the section there, you’ll just have fewer confused people to correct, and be in one less elite club.


I couldn’t tell if it was intended to be a note-for-note parody of an RFC about the do-not-track header, but I couldn’t find one that would qualify. The closest would be this[1], but it doesn’t cleanly match up (in part because [1] is more verbose and its points scattered).

Another satire RFC in the same spirit is the one about the evil bit[2] (designate one bit in packets to indicate whether it’s intended for evil), with the same subtext as the linked post: no, you can’t trust malicious entities to change their behavior to make it easier to stop.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/2019/NOTE-tracking-dnt-20190117/

[2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3514


> it’s fucking depressing when even the fucking bare minimum form of regulation is followed to the letter and no more, because every company out there fucking hates you and would sell you out to make a bit more money if they legally could. and even if they couldn’t, who’s going to stop them?

Certainly not any government. If you think the EU's regulation are of any help to the consumer you are gravely mistaken. The EU is quickly becoming a fucking nightmare to live in. "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws". The meme that goes around atm is that while Elon Musk created Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink the EU managed to get everybody to now have plastic bottles who do not close properly anymore: due to some regulation that mandates that bottle caps must hold to the bottle, weird only partially-functional mechanism have been created and it's a PITA to either drink from a plastic bottle or, worse, try to lay it horizontally in a fridge.

That's what the EU is: probably that some politicians or bureaucrats with enough brain cells to recognize a bottle cap on the ground thought "I've got an idea to make the EU better, let's mandate every bottle to have a cap that cannot be separated from the bottle".

As a result you lay horizontally a plastic bottle of sugary drink in your fridge (because you've been used to do that for decades) and now all your fridge is sticky due to the bottle leaking.

It's all that is wrong with the EU bureaucrats in one example.

Also hailing the EU as the savior vs Microsoft when our lives becames miserable with EU consent cookie popups virtually everywhere is a bit thick.


Good grief if you’re biggest complaint about why the EU is a nightmare to live in because sometimes you get nasty soda all over your fridge then I think you might need to touch some grass.



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