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Pigeon Protocol Finds a Practical Purpose
Selanit writes "Since David Waitzman wrote his tongue-in-cheek Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers, there have been occasional attempts to actually transmit information via pigeon. One group back in 2001 successfully sent a PING command. But now there's a practical use for pigeon-based communications: photographers working for the white-water rafting company Rocky Mountain Adventures send memory sticks full of digital photos via homing pigeon so the photos will be ready when the rafters finish up. The company has details on how the pigeons are trained and equipped. It may not be a full implementation of the Pigeon Protocol, but it works in narrow canyons far off the beaten path — and just as David Waitzman presciently predicted, they occasionally suffer packet loss due to hawks and ospreys."
This is less "TCP/IP over Pidgeon" and more "Sneakernet Over Pidgeon." Although if all the memory cards were the same size you could get away with calling it ATM over Pidgeon, I guess.
a.k.a. "POOP".
Ospreys have been known to devour Marines.
The article took 2 years to reach Slashdot because pigeon 1 carried the text in XML, pigeon 2 carried the XSL to render the XML to HTML, and pidgeon 3 carried the embedded adverts. Pidgeon 3 however was apparently mis-routed and wound up at EWeek.com, where the lack of content went unnoticed.