I figured this was one of the best ways to do it. That way I'm letting people that were significant to me live on forever, one random HTTP response header at a time.
$ curl https://xeiaso.net --head | grep clacks
x-clacks-overhead: GNU Satoru IwataThis is most noticeable in his caricatures that became characters that became badasses over multiple novels; the Watch has a few of these, but there are others.
It really seemed like Pratchett knew something of this niche cultures, way more than I expected.
He was definitely an early adopter of the internet, (and e.g. very active on alt.fan.pratchett), so that's no big surprise.
And to what end? To make less money than their moms do in internal medicine?
Surely named "Clacks" because of the clacking sound the system makes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Niclas_Edelcrantz
Also UK used a system close to that. And a lot of countries along Europe developed their networks with different signaling devices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappe_telegraph
The stations were more elaborate and there is even a recorded instance of a secret signal being passed on illicitly:
https://blog.franceinfo.fr/deja-vu/2017/10/10/le-piratage-du...
The early history of data networks https://archive.org/details/earlyhistoryofda0000holz
https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/the-modernisati...
There are also browser extensions, which show when a website broadcasts the "X-Clacks-Overhead" - header.
One day I noticed that it disappeared, but then it returned, so someone on the inside cared and brought it back, that made me smile :)
Amusingly, that's not true. The only cookie they send is Google Analytics, which has zero value to the user. The site works fine with it blocked.
GA was the only way to get a simple page count view without setting up a database or a backend system before we switched to serverless cloud step function lambda craziness.
Seems like a passion project, and they just wanted to know if their work was used. I give people the benefit of the doubt on all of this when it's a small site.
Do you want to know how many human years my last company had to devote to regulation? We could have built a hundred startups with all that effort.
I'm not saying GDPR right to be forgotten and data dump/portability isn't important, but it comes with a steep cost that everyone pays everywhere. So much time and money was spent on it. Easily billions of dollars.
And the cookie stuff? How useful has that been?
ePrivacy and GDPR compliance are cheap. Trying to rules-lawyer them to keep illegal business models going, while dodging regulatory scrutiny, is expensive.
Try running a business that has to maintain GDPR compliance and KYC / AML / FINRA compliance. That is not cheap.
Building compliance is not building for your customers direct asks and requirements. Especially software that does not originate in the EU. How many startups are building data export to comply with data export regulations?
I spent nearly a year plumbing through complex microservices to satisfy GDPR at my last company. We collected an enormous amount of PII and KYC data from payments processing, and there were so many downstream services impacted. And I was just one engineer from amongst dozens of impacted teams that had to deal with it.
Regulatory compliance is not free.
Regulatory compliance is frictionful.
I'm not saying regulation is bad, but that it is a cost of doing business and a tax on engineering. Especially for startups looking to go toe to toe with bigger incumbents that have already paid for compliance and that can afford to pay fees to ignore compliance to go fast.
GDPR-compliance in a greenfield project is cheaper than dirt, up until someone makes a GDPR request, at which point it's slightly more expensive than dirt because you had to take 15 minutes out of your day to satisfy the request. By your third or fourth GDPR request, it's perhaps worth taking time to implement an automated flow, but having that many customers is a lovely problem to have!
But my point is orthogonal to liking the regulation.
I need more time and motivation to make a full network though.
(I used to administer a laser link. go on, ask me why they aren’t very popular)
I spent a lot of time working out how to create low powered laser transducer, capable of working on something battery powered.
I think you're right; I suspect Terry would have been tickled by the header, but if there were any physical world implementations I think he would have been overjoyed. One of my favourite Terry stories is of him making his sword, which feels similar.
i back-of-napkin'd a whole packet-over-laser relay system based conceptually on the clacks that'd give every room/station its own serial-interfacible (up|down) link. you could link buildings out of windows and stuff. horribly impractical and prohibitively expensive, but the kind of thing that could only happen in a university on-campus environment.
https://www.shodan.io/search/report?query=x-clacks-overhead+...
For some reason, a lot of honeypots are also using that header so I filtered those out. The number of services has slowly increased over time:
https://trends.shodan.io/search?query=x-clacks-overhead+-tag...
> [...] header that can be transmitted from server to server [...]
How so? In HTTP, there's always one client and one server. Am I missing some way to make this sticky or self-propagating, e.g. browsers or other clients that will cache received headers and then send them to other servers?
< HTTP/2 301
< server: nginx
< date: Sat, 05 Jul 2025 13:36:11 GMT
< content-type: text/html
< content-length: 162
< location: https://www.mozilla.org/
< strict-transport-security: max-age=60; includeSubDomains
< x-backend-server: TS
< cache-control: max-age=3600
< via: 1.1 google
< alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=2592000,h3-29=":443"; ma=2592000
< x-clacks-overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett
It took two very specific bits from the Discworld lore (the Clacks overhead and GNU) and made it in a general ritual of mourning. But not every techie is a Discworld fan, and the obscurity of the name would draw more attention to the Discworld lore than to the people being mourned.
The idea of sending a header to remember a tech person is a great one, but I think the name should be something neutral, or something that has some relation to the person and not a random fantasy reference.
(Reminds me a bit how the Berlin Pirate Party used to have a "Pony Time" paragraph in its charter, that members could use to request joint My Little Pony watching sessions on congresses. [1]
Seemed like a good idea at that time as Bronies were a new thing and there was a lot of overlap with Pirate Party members. But seems pretty cringeful looking back from today, and also a tad disrespectful towards those who tried to do real political work within that party. Disclaimer: Only got to know about that from the outside, so if their own stance on that is different, I take it back)
You made me laugh - this has 'old man shakes fist at cloud' vibes, which is concerning as it seems we are about the same age!
If you wanted to add a header `X-In-Memorium` to any site that you control, go ahead. If anyone adds `X-Clacks-Overhead` to their site, its not going to affect you.
The My Little Pony thing seems, from an outsiders quick look, like it does meaningfully affect other people.
I think you underestimate just how much Pratchett is part of the pantheon of all time greats for many science fiction and fantasy fans. I suspect there is a considerable percentage of Pratchett fans among the people running the fractal infrastructure of the internet
Part of me feels a little sad that they set it aside if I understand your story correctly. Real world politics is rife with this kind of tradition for tradition's sake. It's one of the things that ends up binding people together in the long run. Compare and contrast The Black Rod in the British Parliament and their role in summoning the Commons.
Perhaps something like IPv6's Hop-by-Hop Options can be used to pass names with every packet?
Or, even better, we can use LoRa repeaters for something close to the actual clacks network.