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RFC 863 – Discard Protocol (1983)

by gurjeet on 10/24/25, 4:46 AM with 7 comments

• by xg15 on 10/24/25, 10:29 AM

  I get the TCP-based one, as the service would still complete the connection handshake, send ACKs, etc - but the UDP one seems indistinguishable from simply dropping the packets.

  Maybe back then the designers still expected that hosts would always reply to unwanted packets with an ICMP error, so silently dropped packets were expected to be rare and always indicators of a connection fault?

  Though I guess we can proudly say today that UDP:9 is the most widely deployed service on the internet...

• by ZeroConcerns on 10/24/25, 7:58 AM

  Yes, simpler times and such. And I get the feeling someone is about to discover RFC 864, which is even more fun (as in: a DDOS amplification vector of note, but this stuff actually was useful for a while...)

• by HeadlessChild on 10/24/25, 7:44 AM

  /dev/null as a service.

• by bawolff on 10/24/25, 7:15 AM

  The networked webscale database we've all been waiting for.