A group known as Layers Eight and Nine Now International (LENNI) will formally petition the International Standards Organization (ISO) to update their famous Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model, claiming it is incomplete without acknowledging money and politics. Long an open secret among IT professionals, the activists at LENNI feel it’s time industry standards reflect the reality of layers 8 and 9.
This is certainly not the first attempt to implement these layers into a formal standard, although it is probably the most organized. Some still remember the Albanian Decoy of 1983, very early in the life of the OSI model. At that years ISO working group meeting in Brussels, Belgium, Besnik Delvina snuck into the conference workroom. Delvina, an Albanian national, started a fire in a trash can. While attention was directed at the blaze, he attempted to replace official documents with near identical copies. The copies of course, referenced nine layers instead of seven. He was discovered and forced to leave to great embarrassment.
Two decades later in what’s called the English Escalation, wealthy and politically connected computer scientists tried to disrupt an official ISO meeting in London to air their grievances. The effort was short lived as the protestors arrived right at teatime and found an empty room.
Another 20-years on, and the movement is still active. This time however, proponents of updating the standard are more organized and more determined. Formally incorporated as a non-profit Cayman Islands shell corporation, Layers Eight and Nine Now International has a secretive membership. Communicating via encrypted email, a spokesperson known only by the pseudonym ‘Esther Nettles’ said “Our members are some of the most intelligent and well-known people in the industry. In the past, some have even spoken against updating the OSI model. That will soon change.”
A different source, known only as Deep Web, sent updates from a recent meeting of LENNI’s leadership council. The group debated tirelessly over the order of the new layers, feeling the need to get it right from the beginning. Deep Web asked “Can you imagine the shame if we got the ISO to accept our proposal, only to have to reverse the order of money and politics? We certainly couldn’t show our faces at the annual meeting in the Maldives for a few years.”
Discussions came to a head when a large voting bloc of LENNI members from the Middle East favored money as layer 8, while a contingent from Latin America strongly supported money for layer 9. Ultimately the Middle Eastern group agreed to donate $52.5 million to various Latin American charities in exchange for their support. That locked in the votes needed to formalize money as LENNI’s proposal for Layer 8. The turn of events also served as a microcosm of the proposed changes themselves.
A former employee of the ISO, who wished to remain anonymous due to the delicate geopolitical nature of the situation, said “These nutjobs have been trying to hammer this nail since the very beginning of the OSI model. I’m a little surprised they don’t ask for more cowbell.”
The OSI is expected to resist any change to their venerable standard, primarily on grounds that it would render many certification exams and their corresponding study mnemonics obsolete. LENNI is ready to answer those objections.
Spokesperson Nettles said in the past, individuals who prefer to remember from the top-down have relied on the mnemonic:
All People Seem To Need Data Processing
She suggested a similar (if somewhat ambivalent) replacement –
Pretty Much Any Person Seems To Need Data Processing
For those who prefer to learn the layers bottom up, a favorite has been:
Please Do Not Throw Sausage Pizza Away
The LENNI approved replacement is –
Please Do Not Tell Sam Printers Are My Problem
Nettles predicts the group will present their request to the ISO soon, “We just need to find a guy on Fiverr who can make it pretty.”
