Balmain RFC

The Balmain Rugby Football Club is an Australian rugby union football club, based in Balmain, Sydney, New South Wales. Established in 1873 it is one of the oldest rugby clubs in Australia. Balmain was one of the founding members in 1874 of the Southern Rugby Union, later renamed the New South Wales Rugby Union, which was the first governing body for the sport in the Southern Hemisphere.Billy Murdoch, who would later go on to captain the Australian cricket team, was Balmain's first captain, and he represented the club at the Southern Rugby Union's formation.

Over the years, Balmain has provided several players who have represented Australia in international rugby, including Bob Craig,Robert Graves, and Herbert Moran, who was captain of the 1908 Australian side and served as Balmain's president in 1911-12. Bill McKell who would later become Australia's Governor General also played for Balmain in 1909-10.

More recently, international players including Wallabies Drew Mitchell, Matt Giteau, Matt Dunning and Ryan Cross, and French representative Sebastien Chabal have all played for the club run by Warren Livingstone. Balmain currently competes in the NSWRU competition and won the first grade premiership Kentwell Cup in 2013, shared with St Patrick's Rugby Club after a 33-all extra-time draw.

Time-based One-time Password Algorithm

Time-based One-time Password Algorithm (TOTP) is an algorithm that computes a one-time password from a shared secret key and the current time. It has been adopted as Internet Engineering Task Force standard RFC 6238, is the cornerstone of Initiative For Open Authentication (OATH), and is used in a number of two-factor authentication systems.

TOTP is an example of a hash-based message authentication code (HMAC). It combines a secret key with the current timestamp using a cryptographic hash function to generate a one-time password. The timestamp typically increases in 30-second intervals, so passwords generated close together in time from the same secret key will be equal.

In a typical two-factor authentication application, user authentication proceeds as follows: a user enters username and password into a website or other server, generates a one-time password for the server using TOTP running locally on a smartphone or other device, and types that password into the server as well. The server then also runs TOTP to verify the entered one-time password. For this to work, the clocks of the user's device and the server need to be roughly synchronized (the server will typically accept one-time passwords generated from timestamps that differ by ±1 time interval from the client's timestamp). A single secret key, to be used for all subsequent authentication sessions, must have been shared between the server and the user's device over a secure channel ahead of time. If some more steps are carried out, the user can also authenticate the server using TOTP.

Evil bit

The evil bit is a fictional IPv4 packet header field proposed in RFC 3514, a humorous April Fools' Day RFC from 2003 authored by Steve Bellovin. The RFC recommended that the last remaining unused bit in the IPv4 packet header be used to indicate whether a packet had been sent with malicious intent, thus making computer security engineering an easy problem — simply ignore any messages with the evil bit set.

Influence

The evil bit has become a synonym for all attempts to seek simple technical solutions for difficult human social problems which require the willing participation of malicious actors, 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. A Linux patch implementing the iptables module "ipt_evil" was posted the next year. Furthermore, a patch for FreeBSD 7 is available and is kept up-to-date.

Request for Comments

A Request for Comments (RFC) is a type of publication from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Society, the principal technical development and standards-setting bodies for the Internet.

An RFC is authored by engineers and computer scientists in the form of a memorandum describing methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems. It is submitted either for peer review or simply to convey new concepts, information, or (occasionally) engineering humor. The IETF adopts some of the proposals published as RFCs as Internet Standards.

Request for Comments documents were invented by Steve Crocker in 1969 to help record unofficial notes on the development of ARPANET. RFCs have since become official documents of Internet specifications, communications protocols, procedures, and events.

History

The inception of the RFC format occurred in 1969 as part of the seminal ARPANET project. Today, it is the official publication channel for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), and — to some extent — the global community of computer network researchers in general.