This is an old story, but I came across it today, and it's just too funny not to pass along. File it under Scandavians With Too Much Time on Their Hands.

Pigeon-powered Internet Takes Flight

By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

One of the Internet's most obscure technologies came to life last weekend: transmitting network information by carrier pigeon.

In 1990, David Waitzman wrote RFC 1149, a tongue-in-cheek standard for using pigeons to transfer information using the Internet Protocol (IP). On Saturday, a group of Linux enthusiasts in Bergen, Norway, succeeded in exchanging some data using the Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol (CPIP).

The group transmitted a "ping" command, among the most basic operations of the Internet, in which one computer sends a signal to another, which in turn signals that it is attached to the network. In the experiment, packets of network data were printed on paper then attached to pigeons' legs. Upon their arrival at the destination, the data was transferred to the computer using optical character recognition software.

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