404 Day celebrates the internet's most infamous no-show Forget chocolate eggs, the only event that really mattered this week was 404 Day. April 4 (4/04 – geddit?) marks when internet users around the world celebrate that most humble and yet essential part of web infrastructure – the 404 error, thrown when a page or resource that should be there is absent. The number refers to the …
Look them up? You don't have local copies? RFC 9110 and 9112, for HTTP/1.1. (HTTP/2 and later can go die, as far as Poul Henning-Kamp and I are concerned.)
The concept of the first digit of an ASCII 3-digit result code indicating the result category is older than HTTP, of course. FTP did that, and it may well not have been first. It's a Good Idea.
So there are only four errors that "come before" 404; there are no HTTP response codes < 100, the 100 series is for pre-responses (notably 100 Continue), the 200 series is for success, the 300 series is for redirection. It's sensible that 400 (Bad Request) and 401 (Unauthorized) come first, even if 401 should be called Unauthenticated (because authz and authn are different things, damn it). 402 (Payment Required) is an aberration and should never have existed, but you'll have to take that up with TBL. 403 (Forbidden) is the one that actually typically means "unauthorized", and again it makes sense to have it come before 404.
There's also the "even more 404" result code, 410 (Gone). You don't see that one very often. And the tragic case of 418 of blessed memory. And 419 and 420, and 423-425, which are just ... not found.
My DAB radio once told me " Now Playing : Error 404 - File Not Found". By the time I grabbed the camera it was gone, to be replaced by a real song title.
If a band named Error 404 actually recorded a song called File Not Found, it would have been less amusing. Maybe they did, though it would have been rather 1990's.
I suspect the great unwashed have no idea of a 404 these days.
I'm reminded of the beginnig of 'Three Men in a Boat':
We got to Waterloo at eleven, and asked where the eleven-five started from. Of course nobody knew; nobody at Waterloo ever does know where a train is going to start from, or where a train when it does start is going to, or anything about it. The porter who took our things thought it would go from number two platform, while another porter, with whom he discussed the question, had heard a rumour that it would go from number one. The station-master, on the other hand, was convinced it would start from the local.To put an end to the matter, we went upstairs, and asked the traffic superintendent, and he told us that he had just met a man, who said he had seen it at number three platform. We went to number three platform, but the authorities there said that they rather thought that train was the Southampton express, or else the Windsor loop. But they were sure it wasn't the Kingston train, though why they were sure it wasn't they couldn't say.
Then our porter said he thought that must be it on the high-level platform; said he thought he knew the train. So we went to the high- level platform, and saw the engine-driver, and asked him if he was going to Kingston. He said he couldn't say for certain of course, but that he rather thought he was. Anyhow, if he wasn't the 11.5 for Kingston, he said he was pretty confident he was the 9.32 for Virginia Water, or the 10 a.m. express for the Isle of Wight, or somewhere in that direction, and we should all know when we got there. We slipped half-a-crown into his hand, and begged him to be the 11.5 for Kingston.
"Nobody will ever know, on this line," we said, "what you are, or where you're going. You know the way, you slip off quietly and go to Kingston."
"Well, I don't know, gents," replied the noble fellow, "but I suppose some train's got to go to Kingston; and I'll do it. Gimme the half- crown."
Thus we got to Kingston by the London and South-Western Railway.
We learnt, afterwards, that the train we had come by was really the Exeter mail, and that they had spent hours at Waterloo, looking for it, and nobody knew what had become of it.
I'm pretty sure someone at Microsoft thought that was an architectural specification when they were building Sharepoint.
Slightly related: I recently discovered a book of essays by Jerome K. Jerome in Project Gutenberg, and it's a good read as well. He also wrote a sequel to Three Men in a Boat called Three Men on the Bummel about a bike ride through Germany which is even more Top Gear-ish, and ends with a fascinating pre-war chapter on the German character; I wonder if JKJ reflected on it when he was an ambulance driver in France during WWI.
Colleagues of mine were pretty amused, when the display at the train station showed that the train they were waiting for, was train number 404
At some point, my wife (a web editor and now Sharepoint admin) and I were shopping and, as is our wont, were looking at the reduced-proce chickens.
One of them (a large chicken) had the new price of £4.04.
We looked at each other and simulataneously said "Chicken not found!".
We thought it was funny anyway.
A recent research article by Martin Paul Eve shows that of a sample of 7438037 DOI-links 2056492 works could not be found.
The journal Nature (14 March 2024) cites Eve: "After you have been dead for 100 years, are people going to be able to get access to the things you've worked on?"
a spammy webpage camping where the old, useful content once was. Recently had an xml tutorial/documentation site turn into a cooking recipe site, with what I suspected was either AI-generated or outright stolen content. The "about us" page was amusing, talking about how much they cared about people finding good recipes, etc. On a URL whose first 3 letters were "xml", yeah, sure.
My old work phone was xxx-404-xxxx. I always found it amusing, particularly that it did, in fact, find me!
Yes. 404 exists for a reason. Don't show me some crap instead.
Personally, I've always found the "comical" 404 pages a bit annoying, too. I don't need anything more than a text/plain "not found". If you have something useful to add, such as an email address for the site admin, then I'll allow HTML (only). But to each his own.
Back when I ran a webserver, the 404s in the logs were useful for 2 things:
1. Finding bad links in my pages. Inevitably a spider would hit it pretty quick.
2. Seeing which incoming connections were legit users (200) or somebody trying to break in (404 with the address being a PHP configuration page; I didn't have PHP).
Fail2ban for the win - 5x 404s in a day and goodbye!
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Funnily enough, and being a somewhat literal reply to your post (I swear I didn't just create this page)
> "...escape characters at Adlestrop"
Yeah, I recall Adlestrop, cos one afternoon when it was hot the train stopped there unexpectedly. It was nearly July.
(with sincere apologies to Edward Thomas...)
Thanks for the pointer. I had a bit of fun playing with it. Although I was a bit confused when I asked it "What is the first line of Hamlet in morse code", as you do, and it replied indicating that it didn't have access to books in morse code. Asking it to "Translate the first line of Hamlet to morse code" was successful, however. And when I then repeated the first request it apologised for it's earlier confusion and gave me the right answer.
These three digit codes were invented because it was necessary to convert TCP -- a stream protocol -- back into a datagram protocol. It was a kludge that was first developed for FTP and subsequently adopted by HTTP. All four hundreds are error codes. BTW.
The sheer inefficiency this kludge represents is difficult to convey -- its a product of people not understanding how networks and their underlying protocols work. Once you transfer traffic from Ethernet to something like 802.11 the inefficiency gets compounded. All this crap needs to get rationalized out ASAP -- Google's been working on it but I suspect its an uphill climb since I notice that people think that applications like curl are viable tools for regularly transferring files.
So I don't celebrate 404 or anything like that......since I'm not in Scotland I'm free to hate....hate...hate.....hate......
It's efficient for programming time, so implementations can be made quickly. The same reason why we use text-based formats like XML or JSON frequently rather than making a custom binary format. Sure, an HTTP response code could look like "\x02\x04" (one byte for version number, one byte for status code), but that wouldn't do all that much for efficiency and makes the protocol harder to extend. It also has little to do with datagrams. If you use UDP for the protocol, you still have to encode the protocol data somehow. UDP can't send a single page as a packet in most cases, and it shouldn't be expected to. Somehow, HTTP has been a viable transmission mechanism for a long time. As we increase network speeds, the overhead from the protocol becomes less and less important, yet a small device with little memory and a slow connection can implement and use HTTP well enough as well. Leave even more efficient protocols to places where you need them.
《These three digit codes were invented because it was necessary to convert TCP -- a stream protocol -- back into a datagram protocol. It was a kludge that was first developed for FTP and subsequently adopted by HTTP. All four hundreds are error codes. BTW.》
FTP was defined back in 1971 pre-TCP (NCP) that is more than 50 years of hating (sure you're not Scots? :)
The 3 digit codes were intended to be understood as a tuple of 3 digits not integers 100 to 599. The first digit the outcome, second digit the error condition and third digit for specifics.
The beauty of text protocols is that the poor put upon sysadmin could telnet to the server and port (21,25,80,110,143) and talk a little of the protocol to check the basics. Until Windows dropped the telnet client from the default install you could do these basics from the user's desktop*. Even today these protocols in their TLS versions can be chatted up with openssl. :)
*Until the early noughties we had IE users relying on telnet://big.unix.server/ to login to read their email with Pine. ;)
I am not sure what the angst with the ftp/http... error codes is that they are "in band" rather than using a (multiplexed?) dedicated error channel (fiddling with /etc/rmt might sensitize anyone to this point) or rather that the error codes aren't binary for efficiency (the responses codes could fit into one byte ahhh octet - the pdp10 had 9 bit bytes supported by historic ftp implementations :) ?
I guess one could define (and implement) an extension to any of these text protocols that negotiates a transition from the standard text version to a binary version.
With hindsight almost everything could have been done much better but like biological evolution reality is an endless procession of hacks and fixes of which the least unviable survive to torment the future. ;))
You're wasting your time. A certain type of person has been railing against the plain-text IETF protocols since they appeared, and always will. In this particular case we have some special nonsense ("stream to datagram" is both technically incorrect and rubbish anyway), but it fits the general case.
In any event, those who want a binary HTTP have had one for nearly nine years now, courtesy of RFC 7540 (since obsoleted) and HTTP/2. And those who want binary HTTP over a datagram protocol have HTTP/3, which runs over QUIC; that was standardized in 2022. A year ago, HTTP/3 accounted for around 30% of the traffic seen by Cloudflare, and another 60% or so was HTTP/2.
The "More Context" section of this article offered me "Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep"
I'm struggling to spot the connection between 404 errors and megasheep, though I'm sure one of you smarter people here can enlighten me :)
Hmm. For those who have read Graydon Saunders’ Commonweal books… was the sheep named Eustace? And how much of a death wish do you need to have before you try to arrest Halt?
For those who haven't read Saunders’ works, Eustace weighs five tonnes (Saunders is Very Canadian) and eats all kinds of things, including demons. Halt created him. Halt is a sorcerer. She is on the Short List, the list of wizards that the Commonweal Line would send a battalion to deal with if they got out of hand. In Halt’s case, make that a brigade. Or two. Maybe three to make sure. Given that in The March North, an understrength battalion of terrertorials aborts an invasion of the Commonweal by a corps-size force and about half of the territorials get home afterward while there’s about a company of the invaders left, it might be said that annoying Halt is a Very Bad Idea. (True, the territorials did have Halt and Rust and Blossom and Eustace, but the opposition had dozens of fire-priests and over 100 demons. The fire-priests made the error of angering Blossum, who deployed FOOF. Look it up. There was a line about the water vapour in the air catching fire. Say bye-bye, fire-priests.)
All cars are shaped according to something. Today it's aerodynamics, back then it was fashion, (& whilst fashionistas believe that they are all interesting individuals, the rest of us can see that they are all just parts of a massive, homogenous herd. Thus, at any point in history, cars end up looking the same. See also modern architecture, for all values of modern.)
Hah! Thanks for that.
Was it Austin that led the way, and the rest of BL followed? Because besides the Morris, there were also Wolseley and Riley models that looked very much the same (albeit with less memorable names).
That'd be the Wolsely Hornet & Riley Elf iirc.
Both Minis when you peel the skin off.
All examples of a large manufacturer trying to fill out the model ranges of all it's brands without the cost of letting them design unique cars for themselves. See also Volkswagen Audi Group (VAG) for example. Seat Ibiza / Skoda Fabia / VW Polo / Audi A1. All essentially the same car, & the pattern repeats as you go up in size. Given the crucifying r&d cost of developing a new car to the standards of noise & ride that we've become accustomed to, to do otherwise would be madness.
Less obviously note how Nissan's reliability scores fell off a cliff once Renault started inflicting their components on them, & left Nissan designing skin & interior only for most of their range. Then there's Kia / Hyundai. Fiat / Lancia / Alfa Romeo / Chrysler, etc.
Basically they're all at it now.
Didn't actually answer your question, & tbh I don't know in that instance. For the more modern manufacturers each model has a given life cycle with a mid-life refresh, & the perceived as higher end models tend to get the new stuff first, so in the VAG instance, the A1 might have the latest structure whilst the contemporary Fabia might still be based on the previous model for another year or two.
Very likely something similar would apply in the case of the Oxford / Cambridge / Wolsely 6/110 (?)
It's being celebrated on the wrong day.
260 can't easily be rendered as a day/month or month/day so it will have to be the 260th day.
Somewhere round about September 16th or 17th unless you start counting from zero like proper engineers.
No, I am not fun at parties, why do you ask?
With 404 Day, you can plan for a party on the 4th of April
Microsoft could use the day of the year sequence to have a big bash on the 31st of December (or, 30th, if it's a leap year) to celebrate Office 365 - but given the outages, in a typical year, the party would a;most certainly end up having to be bought forward
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the FT misrepresents socialism... ironically, their misrepresentation — "you can't have it because somebody else didn't get it" — is more closely aligned with the kind of small-minded conservative thought that screams about forgiving student loans because they didn't go to college.
(Incidentally, my site 404 page is CGI-generated using one of seven randomly chosen templates, from The Prisoner to Star Wars to the Goon Show to ninja monkeys.)
Worth mentioning
https://b3ta.com/404
You won't like them all, & all deliberately old skool (like geocities never went away) but it will bring back some meme memories & hopefully give the odd smile.
It cycles through a lot, so if you hate one, just wait for the next, and the next, etc.
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