RFC

RFC may refer to:

Sports

Science and technology

Politics

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.

File Transfer Protocol

The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard network protocol used to transfer computer files between a client and server on a computer network.

FTP is built on a client-server model architecture and uses separate control and data connections between the client and the server. FTP users may authenticate themselves with a clear-text sign-in protocol, normally in the form of a username and password, but can connect anonymously if the server is configured to allow it. For secure transmission that protects the username and password, and encrypts the content, FTP is often secured with SSL/TLS (FTPS). SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) is sometimes also used instead, but is technologically different.

The first FTP client applications were command-line programs developed before operating systems had graphical user interfaces, and are still shipped with most Windows, Unix, and Linux operating systems. Many FTP clients and automation utilities have since been developed for desktops, servers, mobile devices, and hardware, and FTP has been incorporated into productivity applications, such as Web page editors.