If one is hacking on the Internet, they want to make sure they are RFC 3514 compliant,

[jtuck004]

so their traffic gets through. Many novice hackers, or people simply learning about this to protect themselves, are not aware of this protocol, and may in fact find their packets dropped if not properly formatted, and thus a waste of their time.

Here's a link...http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt

and a blurb...

1. Introduction

Firewalls [CBR03], packet filters, intrusion detection systems, and
the like often have difficulty distinguishing between packets that
have malicious intent and those that are merely unusual. The problem
is that making such determinations is hard. To solve this problem,
we define a security flag, known as the "evil" bit, in the IPv4
[RFC791] header. Benign packets have this bit set to 0; those that
are used for an attack will have the bit set to 1
...

More at link.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

1. who would have guessed

that all the way back on April 1, 2003 they would have this awesome technology to protect us?

sP

[PrestonLocke]

2. LOL, thanks for this!

Almost every time my connection drops, it's because I forgot to set the evil bit in my router. Damn thing keeps resetting.

[ChromeFoundry]

3. DD-WRT and Tomato have a patch that offers RFC3514 config

You can even configure your VLANs and WLANs on separate virtual interfaces, allowing you to set each to EVL-Bit = (on/off). However, there is a bug report on VPN tunneling through TOR that is expected to be fixed very soon. The workaround is to set your default EVL-Bit to 0x1.