April Fools' Day

Well, reading my cartoon strips on my yahoo, as I have been doing for a long time now, I was reminded that today was April Fools' day. I was curious about the origins of this, so a trip to wikipedia it had to be.

While there is no clear origins of this or any particular significance, it seems to have started off in Europe and caught up the rest of the world. Surprise surprise!

Some of the cool pranks that wikipedia documents:
Alabama Changes the Value of Pi: The April 1998 newsletter of New Mexicans for Science and Reason contained an article written by physicist Mark Boslough claiming that the Alabama Legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi to the "Biblical value" of 3.0. This claim originally appeared as a news story in the 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein.

Left Handed Whoppers: In 1998, Burger King ran an ad in USA Today, saying that people could get a Whopper for left-handed people whose condiments were designed to drip out of the right side. Not only did customers order the new burgers, but some specifically requested the "old", right-handed burger.

Write Only Memory: Signetics advertised Write Only Memory IC databooks in 1972 through the late 1970s.

Assassination of Bill Gates: In 2003, many Chinese and South Korean websites claimed that CNN reported Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, was assassinated, resulting in a 1.5% drop in the Korean stock market.

And now the geeks:

April Fools' Day RFC

Internet Engineering Task Force Statements Of Boredom (SOBs).
RFC 2324 — Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0). L. Masinter.

This was the best:
RFC 2322 — Management of IP numbers by peg-dhcp. K. van den Hout et al. 1 April 1998.
Wikipedia sums it up:

Peg DHCP is a method defined in RFC 2322 to assign IP addresses in a context where regular DHCP wouldn't work. The "server" hands out wooden clothes-pegs numbered with the IPs to allocate and an additional leaflet with network information. The "client", typically the user, then configures his device accordingly.

Even though this RFC, "Management of IP numbers by peg-dhcp" was published on the first of April 1998, it describes, unlike most other April Fools' Day RFCs, a regularly used protocol with a serious purpose. During the preparation of Hacking in Progress 1997, the organizers were looking for a robust way to assign IP addresses to the participants. The obvious first choice, DHCP, almost completely defenseless against rogue servers, was not retained considering the traditionally creative use of the network.

Instead, for every IP to allocate, the variable (host) part is written on a wooden peg with waterproof marker. The user would then attach it to the cable connecting that device to the network. The peg is accompanied by a leaflet with further information such as the static (net) part of the IP address, the netmask, the default gateway, DNS-servers, and often also their MAC addresses to prevent ARP spoofing. Different subnets, such as LAN and WLAN are distinguished
by different colors used to write on the pegs.

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_RFC