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.
There is extension for XMPP protocol "XEP-0076: Malicious Stanzas", inspired by evil bit.
This RFC has also been quoted in the otherwise completely serious RFC 3675, ".sex Considered Dangerous", which may have caused the proponents of .xxx to wonder whether the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was commenting on their application for a top-level domain (TLD) – the document was not related to their application.
For April Fool's 2010, Google added an &evil=true parameter to requests through the Ajax APIs.
Read more about this topic: Evil Bit
Famous quotes containing the word influence:
“... even I am growing accustomed to slavery; so much so that I cease to think of its accursed influence and calmly eat from the hands of the bondman without being mindful that he is such. O, Slavery, hateful thing that thou art thus to blunt the keen edge of conscience!”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1907)
“This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world ... and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“A husband who submits to his wife’s yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman’s influence ought to be entirely concealed.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)