Yesterday was the deadline for those of us in the United States to file our tax returns for last year. As I looked at that date, April 15, on my blog, I had an idea. An idea of April Fools magnitude. Rather than filing a tax return every year, we could just put our tax data into a digest (a.k.a. newsfeed) and let the IRS subscribe to it a little at a time through the whole year. Of course, people would put off publishing till 11:00 pm April 15th, and then rather than congested post offices, the whole United States portion of the internet would be congested that night.

I was also reminded of a little joke I came up with some years ago. In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Caesar is warned, "Beware the ides of March". That was the day, the 15th of March, when Caesar was murdered. Had he lived in the modern United States, his reply might have been, "'Beware the ideas of March'? Yeah, right! Beware the ideas of April!" Of course, the joke doesn't quite work, because the ides of April fall on the 13th, not the 15th.

I suppose I should add something serious to this post, if only to raise a question. The idea of publishing tax data via RSS brings up the issue of secure in RSS feeds. Do sensitive feeds need any more protection than SSL and basic authorization, or whatever other security measures might become part of the web? Perhaps I'll revisit that issue someday.