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Programming IT Technology

Easter Eggs in Web Sites? 567

Posted by Cliff from the ctrl-shift-alt-click-"Pi" dept.
cwikla asks: "Back in the .COM days, I worked at eGroups, now owned by a larger Company. During my time I added a couple of easter eggs to the site, which I was reminded of while watching Being John Malkovich this weekend. I checked, and ones sort of still there. If you append malkovich=1 to a message URL it would turn the message into 'malkovich' mode. It sort of still works, but over time I guess the code has been a changin' so it's kind of spotty. Oh, there are others that still are in there, but where's the fun of telling all the secrets? Any other folks done anything equivalent, especially on mainstream sites?"
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Easter Eggs in Web Sites? More

Easter Eggs in Web Sites?

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  • Malkovich (Score:2, Funny)

    by felipeal ( 177452 )
    Malkovich,

    Thas was a cool egg.

    Malkovich

  • And? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by NetJunkie ( 56134 ) <jason.nashNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:15PM (#3866463)
    Most Easter Eggs are things people might stumble upon...but appending words and parameters on to URLs isn't something I would find. How do you expect anyone except yourself to see these?

    • Re:And? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Laser_47 ( 234412 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:17PM (#3866481)
      How do you "stumble" across the flight simator in Excel? I've never had the need to do those things on a spreadsheet. The programmers had to tell someone in order to find it.

    • Get the word out! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by OutsideBoston ( 442754 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:24PM (#3866567)
      Go here [eeggs.com] and post your eggs. Hopefully others will follow. ~N

      • Re:Get the word out! (Score:4, Informative)

        by hyyx ( 447405 ) <cky@nOSPam.snpp.com> on Thursday July 11, 2002 @07:58PM (#3867932) Homepage
        Actually, DON'T go there [eeggs.com] and post your eggs. Hopefully others will NOT follow. Let me explain...

        I think this site is the most inaccurate, stupid, and mismanaged conglomerations of crap out there. Sure, there are a lot of cool and verifiable eggs on site that you will not find anywhere else, but if you actually take a minute to sit down and look closely at the content, you will see that it is often inaccurate and incomplete.

        The site maintainers need to set up a system that is more rigid and structured for defining what an egg is and in what manner it gets posted. If you look at most eggs, they are lacking in many important details, such as:

        What the egg is.

        Exactly how to reproduce the egg.

        What hardware/software versions does it work on?

        Many of the eggs on the site are simply not eggs. Read the comments in the following egg to see how many people show the egg to be false, but yet the non-egg continue to stay posted:

        http://www.eeggs.com/items/16200.html [eeggs.com]

        The webmaster even admits it for this one:

        http://www.eeggs.com/items/22634.html [eeggs.com]

        Here is the same exact egg, listed twice (also try reading the comments for some highly intellectual discussion):

        http://www.eeggs.com/tree/1243.html [eeggs.com]

        I think the site sucks, because it doing a less than half-ass job. It's not worth doing if you're not going to at least _try_ to do it right.

  • Yoda (Score:5, Funny)

    by Gabey ( 18874 ) <gps@extrema.net> on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:16PM (#3866467) Homepage
    At the College of Business site I develop for, we used to use a picture of Yoda to scare the folks who wouldn't let us take their pictures. Seems as though most of them prefer a picture of themselves (no matter how horrible they may think it is) to one of Yoda attached to their bios.
    In any case, changing the bio's email tag to "yoda" gives the visitor Yoda's (short) bio. There are a few others, but seeing as how nobody has found any of them yet, we gave up on adding them for our own amusement.

    -Gabe

    • Re:Yoda (Score:2, Funny)

      by AssFace ( 118098 )
      I did that in my company's facebook here (which nobody ever uses since we aren't growing but instead shrinking these days).
      I used the picture of the ape merged with a man's face and pigtails... a thing of beauty.

  • Until you get arrested (Score:3, Insightful)

    by papasui ( 567265 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:16PM (#3866468) Homepage
    For attempts to compromise the security of the server while you are trying to find Easter eggs.

    • Re:Until you get arrested (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Cutriss ( 262920 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:59PM (#3866853) Homepage
      For reference...2002-03-19 20:37:21 Easter Eggs at the Expense of Resources? (askslashdot,programming) (rejected)

      That just got rejected in the last three days.

      My comments went something like this - I have a friend who works for a company that does Palm software, and he inserted a tic-tac-toe game in their application. The software he develops is fairly large and robust, and the thought came to mind: Where do you draw the line with Easter Eggs?

      The Palm platform, and any other portable/embedded system, deals with small storage and memory footprints. Adding in a hidden extra like this isn't taking up an "infinitesmal" amount of space or resources. Proportionally, it's of significant size. On a PC, this might be different, but for a Palm with 2 MB of memory, I'd personally be a bit disappointed to find out that the software I'm installing is artificially fluffed/bloated because some yahoo decided to have a little fun.

      So, where do you draw the line with Easter Eggs? Fun in programming is cool. And I'm not saying that he was wrong for doing it...but what if he decided to put in JezzBall or something larger instead? Or something that wound up being a security/system hazard?

  • Intranet apps (Score:4, Funny)

    by tshak ( 173364 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:17PM (#3866471) Homepage
    The last company I was at used all web-based customer management tools. If you searched for something like "I like banannas" it forwarded you to a java based tetris game.

  • I've done this before for copyright reasons (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:18PM (#3866491)
    I would append a url string like ....cgi?author=who

    and the page would parse out my contact info. I would use this for portfolio pieces when demoing new clients. It just proved that you worked on it.
  • I had hacked up a custom redirect from the old bookmarks to the new locations when a graphics software company changed their whole layout. Since I already had the ability to program any redirect I wanted, I added ones to my homepage and the other webmaster's homepage as our own little credits for the site. Lasted a while too before the next redesign killed it all, but it was a cool way to prove I had worked on it.

  • Why, yes I did . . . and it's still there (Score:3, Informative)

    by eschasi ( 252157 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:19PM (#3866501)
    Using a classic bit of social engineering and a photograph donated by a mutual, er, friend, we modified a directors web page at UUNET. If you click on just the right letter, it takes you to a photograph other than the one you would expect. I checked a few minutes ago, and it's still there....

  • Slashdot Egg (Score:4, Funny)

    by aardwolf64 ( 160070 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:19PM (#3866507) Homepage
    I consider http://apple.slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] to be an egg... a lot of people don't know about it.
  • A friend of mine was making a website for a jazz bassist. He took it upon himself to riddle the code with punny comments, such as "this site was written in bassic HTML."

    Fortunately, the rest of the world can't see what a goof he is! :)

  • Slashdot Easter Egg (Score:5, Funny)

    by big.ears ( 136789 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:21PM (#3866521) Homepage
    Here's one you can find on slashdot: If your comment consists entirely of "First Post", you get modded down to -1.

  • Is Jeeves Gay? (Score:4, Funny)

    by PunchMonkey ( 261983 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:21PM (#3866526) Homepage
    Go on to http://www.ask.com [ask.com] and ask Jeeves if he's gay :-)

    This used to result in a funny error message something like:

    "Server Error 505 - None of your business".

  • urk... (Score:2, Funny)

    by lingqi ( 577227 )
    from the ctrl-shift-alt-click-"Pi" dept.

    goodness... Cliff man: you remember enough from that (bad) movie that vividly to talk about it?

    there are newer movies much more worthy of rememberance, ya know...

    • Re:urk... (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Do they put Sandra in a Bikini too? Ok then. Shut up.

  • EEGGS.COM (Score:5, Informative)

    by webword ( 82711 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:21PM (#3866531) Homepage
    1. Eeggs.com [eeggs.com] is good site for Easter Eggs in general.

    2. You'll find a few web sites with Easter Eggs here [eggheaven2000.com].

  • GoatSe.CX (Score:5, Funny)

    by clinko ( 232501 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:22PM (#3866535) Journal
    For "Security" on a friends site he has it redirect to goatse.cx if you try to change strings.

    I learned my lesson. I don't try to fuck with his site anymore.

  • Well, there's Klingon Google: (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:22PM (#3866537) Homepage Journal
    Klingon Google [google.com].

    Pig Latin Google [google.com].

    What we need is an xx-askslashdot google. :)

    - A.P.

  • Here's some (Score:2, Redundant)

    by MadFarmAnimalz ( 460972 )
    A few here and there [eeggs.com]

  • easter egg clients (Score:5, Funny)

    by brer_rabbit ( 195413 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:23PM (#3866548) Journal
    I swear my server doesn't have easter eggs, but that doesn't stop some people from trying:

    "GET /scripts/..%255c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c +dir HTTP/1.0"
    "GET /_vti_bin/..%255c../..%255c../..%255c../winnt/sys tem32/cmd.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0"
    "GET /_mem_bin/..%255c../..%255c../..%255c../winnt/sys tem32/cmd.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0"
    "GET /msadc/..%255c../..%255c../..%255c/..%c1%1c../..% c1%1c../..%c1%1c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0"
    "GET /scripts/..%c1%1c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0"

  • Expunging the Past (Score:2, Interesting)

    by yumyum ( 168683 )
    I wrote a Java applet that you should be able to access here:

    http://amdemo.audiomining.com/ [audiomining.com]

    Just click on one of the media links. I think a right-mouse click on the logo in the applet will pop up a list of credits. Unfortunately, my name is no longer there, even though I was the creator. My name and others have been neatly edited out as people have left while the group has moved from Dragon to L&H and now to ScanSoft.

    I spent many hours on that silly Java applet trying to keep it working under Mac, Linux, Solaris, and Windows. It appears that those working on it now have not been so dedicated. It does not run on my Solaris box.
    • Theres a post about people putting easter eggs in thier code, so they can have proof they did the work. If a company lies about you not doing the work, thats slander. Offering a "Credits List" makes them 100% responsible for keeping it accurate, even if people leave the company.

      Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it. - Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 1965

  • Background Images and Webcams (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Marasmus ( 63844 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:23PM (#3866553) Homepage Journal
    Heh, my favorite was on black-background pages, having a random background image with an embossed super-dark-grey color... so only people in 16bit+ color COULD see it, if the brightness and contrast was high enough.. and once they did see it, it'd still be hard to discern. :)

    I remember putting a little easter egg into an undisclosed "mature webcam site" that would bring up the webcam of the NOC... I'm sure that nearly 3 years later it's gone, though... especially considering that the webcam of the NOC has changed IPs. :(

  • I always liked google's "more evil than satan himself" egg, although it seems as though it does not work anymore...
    • That was actually an artifact of the way google ranks pages based on your search term.

      If you enter that string now.. the top link is actually a page discussing the effects of typing that string into google. ;) So in effect the popularity of that "egg" destroyed it.

      Probably a good example of how well google evolves along with what people find topical, as well. Talking about tricking a search engine into calling microsoft worse than satan got more popular than websites that actually rant against M$.
  • Stay in view! Agents will be there to 'assist' you shortly!

    </haha>

  • Resume` in Code (Score:5, Funny)

    by RembrandtX ( 240864 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:24PM (#3866565) Homepage Journal
    When I Decided to leave Comcast@Home I put my resume in the template source code as comments.
    [Just in case I needed to prove to potential employers that I was what I said I was.]

    It was there for about 3 months before someone caught it.

    Oddly enough .. no crank calls .. even for having my phone number out there 'obtainable' as it were.

  • about:mozilla (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bsDaemon ( 87307 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:25PM (#3866571)
    in the URL field. It's sorta like funny. I guess.

  • seti@home easter egg (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Theres a cool easter egg at the seti@home project, you normally get a crappy certificate when you pass a workunit milestone, but if you fuck with the request, you get a funky kang and kronos (from simpsons) one....

    example Normal cert: http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?ema il=seti@sun.com&cmd=print_cert&certnum=10000&size= 0 [berkeley.edu]
    example easter egg cert: http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?ema il=seti@sun.com&cmd=print_cert [berkeley.edu]

    well...i found it funny :op

    • Re:seti@home easter egg (Score:5, Funny)

      by totallygeek ( 263191 ) <sellis@totallygeek.com> on Thursday July 11, 2002 @05:27PM (#3867078) Homepage
      Not really a Seti@home easter egg, but funny story none-the-less:

      A good friend of mine was sshing to another computer to run seti and it finally got noticed (why is this computer running sluggish?). So, this other guy went to my friend to ask a question and saw that he was watching the seti processes going on about 20 computers. So, he went back to his machine and wrote a program outputting stuff just like seti@home and at the end came up with a message saying something was found and he should call this 800 number immediately. Once it was ready, he rebooted (killing my friend's ssh session) and now the replacement seti was ready to go. So, my friend logs in and runs seti. All is well, and then everyone hears, "Oh my God". He is calling everyone around his computer so that he can speakerphone the historic phone call giving fame and fortune for finding E.T. Click, dial tone, beep, beep....beep, ring, ring -- It was so funny to see his face when it was a sex line number, and not SETI.

      Moral: don't jack with others' resources.

      • Re:seti@home easter egg (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonvmous Coward ( 589068 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @06:45PM (#3867535)
        Heh I love pranks like that.

        My company asked me to put a demo of our technology up on our website. So I created a blank web page with a windows error message in the center that read: "The radiation shielding on your monitor has failed, please do not sit directly in front of your computer."

        Then, I did something really sneaky: Using FrontPage (there really is a use for it :P) I downloaded a CNN Health page and wrote up a fictional health warning about the 'Microwave Virus'. Heh It was a silly idea: A virus floats around people's machines and increases the power of UV guns in your monitor by 400%. Eventually it burns out some of the shielding and exposes people to radiation. Common symptoms included drowsiness, irritability, and other stuff you typically feel at work.

        I renamed my computer on the network to 'www.cnn-news.com' and set up MS's Personal Web server on my computer to host that fake web page I created. Except for the domain, the URL looked exactly like one of CNN's pages. I even corrected all the links to go to other areas of CNN's site. (It seems like a lot of trouble, but like I said, FrontPage made it real easy.) Of course, I sent out a 'virus advisory'.... Anybody on our network was able to visit 'www.cnn-news.com' (with the address stuff at the end) to hit that page.

        So what happened was first a few people opened my message about the new demo, and they got the 'Radiation Shielding has Failed' message. They ignored that (they work too hard), then they read my advisory of the 'Microwave Virus' and put the two together.

        When I got to work, several of the women in the office were standing around asking each other if they should go to their doctor. The System Administrator about died laughing when I let him on it. (He had to put up with strange questions about radiation shielding all morning. Heh.)

        Not sure if that quite qualifies as an easter egg, but a fun story nonetheless. :)
      • Awesome prank. Remember that "Bill Gates will send you $1000 if you forward this..." email that was sent around extensively a few years ago? My friend sent it to me and everyone he knew one day, because he claimed "It was worth his time just in case it was true."

        I modified my header information and sent him a nice form letter thanking him for participating in Microsoft's email tracking software beta and told him to send a self addressed stamped envelope to Microsoft so he could get his $1000 check. I gave him an address and a confirmation number, too. I didn't tell him about it for 2 years and finally one day he brought the subject up. The sucker had sent the self addressed stamped envelope and Microsoft just sent it back to him. He said he figured "it was worth the 66 cents in case it was true". haha.
  • I've had a unlinked page on my Wizardry site [tk421.net] for awhile now. If you read around in it you'll get instructions for the URL. Of the few thousand hits it gets a week, about a dozen people stumble on the secret page.

  • Slashdot Easter Egg! (Score:4, Funny)

    by indole ( 177514 ) <fluxist@gmail.cSLACKWAREom minus distro> on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:29PM (#3866613) Homepage
    I've found one:
    by appending /~%43%4d%44%52%54%41%43%4f/ after slashdot.org, one can peruse over a collection of megamaniacal ramblings. Scary as this easter egg is, the pure absurdity of the posts is funny enough to keep me laughing (and crying).

  • Ask Jeeves (Score:2, Redundant)

    by MBCook ( 132727 )
    Have you ever wondered if Jeeves is gay? You should ask him! Now it takes you to a little page but it used to take you to an error page (like 404) except the error was "None of your business". He he he.
  • i worked for a firm that developed a site geared towards selling baby supplies to parents.

    anyway, they were trying to build it out into a "community" type site as well, so they wanted a message board.

    well, some of the mothers can get outta hand... maybe it's the hormones or something, but anyway, they asked our developer to write a script that would just go through a post and remove explatives. well, when he went to do it, I convinced him to add a little "easter egg" in which if someone typed in the word "wanker" it would replace it with all of the bad words that were being removed as one big long string.

  • Secret images (Score:3, Informative)

    by Frank of Earth ( 126705 ) <frank@fper3.14kins.com minus pi> on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:33PM (#3866650) Homepage Journal
    I love n00b cam sites. The "egg" is that they don't always turn off directory browsing so you get to see images that they really didn't want you to see.

    Not really hacking, but fun to spy around. Something like: http://pinksugar.net/cam/

    Which might not having anything that she doesn't already have on the site.

  • Years ago, I had to make a documentation website for work. Since I was learning javascript at the time, I decided to play around with it: between noon and 1pm, the last letter of one of the links didn't take you to the linked page, but instead changed the site logo to a picture of Fritz the Cat. I think the only person who ever noticed was one guy who was looking at the source and couldn't figure out what that javascript did...

  • My high school's web page had a dead clown page (Score:3, Funny)

    by PastaQueen ( 305883 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:35PM (#3866665)
    A friend of mine who knew our high school's webmaster showed me an easter egg they put in. You go to this page http://www.jefferson.k12.ky.us/Schools/High/Manual /va/VAstinfo.htm [k12.ky.us] and click on the lips of Leonardo Rivera's picture and you get a funny page about dead clowns. I graduated about 4 years ago, so it's been up at least as long as that.
  • I had a friend who was doing website upkeep (among other things) for a (rather major) company. www.XXXX.com took you to their (normal) site, but wwww.XXXX.com took you to his (personal) site.

  • yeah... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Lord Omlette ( 124579 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:38PM (#3866690) Homepage
    See, that's what the Anonymous Coward thing is for? To prevent people like you from being sued. Tell us about the lawsuit in a slashback, k?

    *ahem*

    Loooooooooooong time ago, in one of the sites I was working on, if you didn't have Javascript enabled it would just print "Hairy Moose Balls" instead of showing the rest of the site. It was a stupid testing thing, nothing serious. Of course, my boss ended up demoing the site to the client and the client didn't have JS enabled... Surprise!

  • Every site I built from 95-99 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CDWert ( 450988 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:40PM (#3866715) Homepage
    Every site, or more specifically interesting component I built was egged.

    I did this for 2 reasons, 1 company I worked at, my MGR had a VERY bad habbit of claiming work was his, he would do a search and replace on Our names with his own....schmuck, SO, I would easter egg a cgi into it for "Author and Verion control"
    Lol....It basically said it was built by me when and what cool stuff it did.

    The second reason was Job Hunting, nothing like bringing up a killer site and being able to PROVE you were the constructor. Worked like a charm every time. Or if I was a company or two down the road from something of note I built, I could prove it was mine.

    I started doing this in the early 90's when a lot of applications we were writing were for exclusive distribution and branding by third parties, who were never going to , or expected to give credit, of course they still graced my resumes....ONCE I had a company get contacted, they claimed it was all written in house, and I was lying about having ever worked on the app, NOW I can actually understand this , it was a finacial app and the thought of eggs or backdoors must have been scarry, I got called on it in my secnd interview. I explained why the company lied about my involvment and promplty offered PROOF of my involvment on particuar modules....I got the job.....:)

    I still do it to some extent although not as clandestine or ego-centric. I proved myself to those in the area a loooonnng time ago. But its cool that over half the site I put up are still up in their original form and doing well, most are ecommerce site, and their eggs are still there :) Not backdoors mind you, just "Author Control's" :)

    If code goes under the proper review channels, as it should before release this should never happen, funny thing is you have guys in charge of this stuff like me who then add it :)

    But then again , on a smaller site that then gets gobbled by a 800lb gorilla you may see this, I guess If Ive done it, the author has done it and as many slashdotters Ive seen have done it .....how many egged sites are out there ?

  • My favorite easter egg.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by _mythdraug_ ( 27158 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:41PM (#3866721)
    HP Scanjet playing Ode to Joy...
    http://www.eeggs.com/items/557.html

  • Mississippi (Score:3, Funny)

    by KILNA ( 536949 ) <kilna@kilna.com> on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:44PM (#3866739) Homepage Journal
    From an episode of Farscape [farscape.com] (paraphrased):

    Chrichton (human): OK now count, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi...
    Dargo (big alien with tentacles): One Mippippippi, two Mippippippi, three Mippippippi...

    At the ecommerce company I worked for, Zoovy [zoovy.com], I wrote the shopping cart system used by a few hundred merchants. I wanted to make a completely innocuous egg since it would be used on stores selling everyting from dildos to bibles. If the merchant turns on international orders (so the state selection in checkout turns into a box instead of a dropdown), and you type in Mippippippi, it corrects it to Mississippi. I know, I know, boring... :)

  • Eudora had my resume in it (Score:5, Funny)

    by Wee ( 17189 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:46PM (#3866760)
    I don't know if this is an Easter Egg, but I built a version of Eudora (it was like the tenth daily build and really late at night on a weekend when I had plans or something -- in other words, typical Qualcomm) which displayed my resume instead of the readme. Heh. Never told anyone that. Nobody reads the release notes anyway.

    Oh yeah, when Eudora moved to adware mode and went public beta, me and a guy from tech support put in some ads of our own (accessible only to a small range of IPs, though). We had a Russian brides one, some personal lube ads, Gary Coleman, the usual. We used most of them for testing during the private beta, but one we did add was a picture of a former VP who played a large part in causing the ruination of the Eudora group. It wasn't a flattering ad, and predictably it didn't rotate for very long, but it got seen.

    Ahh, the memories...

    -B

  • Easter eggs in my software (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PolyDwarf ( 156355 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:47PM (#3866769)
    In the software I'm writing (Windows app), we've put in an easter egg that brings up a picture of one of the guy's dog (Yorkshire terrier that he absolutely loves) with an algorithm to animate flames superimposed on the picture, to achieve a burning dog effect.
    How did you get there?
    Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A- Return

    (Up, Down, Left, Right being the arrow keys... No start key, so we had to go with return).

  • HTTP header (Score:5, Funny)

    by lampwick ( 105342 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:48PM (#3866777) Homepage

    One of the sites that I wrote about 7 years ago included this HTTP header line in every response it sent out:

    X-Urban-Legend: There's lots of hidden information in HTTP headers.

    • Slashdot, was Re:HTTP header (Score:5, Interesting)

      by babbage ( 61057 ) <cdeversNO@SPAMcis.usouthal.edu> on Thursday July 11, 2002 @07:18PM (#3867741) Homepage Journal
      % lwp-request -m HEAD http://slashdot.org/ | grep '^X-'
      X-Fry: I'm never gonna get used to the thirty-first century. Caffeinated bacon?
      X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000

      % lwp-request -m HEAD http://slashdot.org/ | grep '^X-'
      X-Bender: Bite my shiny, metal ass!
      X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000

      % lwp-request -m HEAD http://slashdot.org/ | grep '^X-'
      X-Bender: Like most of life's problems, this one can be solved with bending.
      X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000

      % lwp-request -m HEAD http://slashdot.org/ | grep '^X-'
      X-Bender: There's nothing wrong with murder, just as long as you let Bender whet his beak.
      X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000

      % lwp-request -m HEAD http://slashdot.org/ | grep '^X-'
      X-Fry: No, no, I was just picking my nose.
      X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000

      Is this a Slashdot specific hack, or does the publically available version of it do the same thing?

  • There are lots of dns txt record easter eggs out there. I remember that some website (was it 2600) had decss in it for a while. You can do:
    > dig txt foobar.com
    Funny that this came up today. Yesterday I put a silly easter egg in a dns txt record of unixboxen.(com|net|org).
  • Since nobody else bothered to post the working links to the Jeeves easter eggs, here they are:

    Is Jeeves Gay? [ask.com]
    Will You F*** Me? [ask.com]

    BTW: The "Is Jeeves Well Hung" no longer seems to be working.

  • Ha! (Score:2, Funny)

    by errxn ( 108621 )
    My egg consisted of a weird picture of a squirrel that my dad had sent to me. It would come up in the content section of the (now-defunct) site whenever someone typed a common curse word in the search text box. There was a little caption that said "Sammy the Squirrel says: Saying dirty words is just nuts!"

    Don't ask. I was just bored that day.

  • Marvin the Paranoid Android 404 takeoff (Score:5, Funny)

    by tevita ( 110787 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:52PM (#3866804) Homepage
    Loved the 404 at http://www.sweweb.net/

    Try http://www.sweweb.net/garbage.html for instance.

  • Music easter egg (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Stiletto ( 12066 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:53PM (#3866808)
    Another cool easter egg, although not web-related: Memepool posted this [yerbox.org] a while back. Someone discovered a "face" painted into the spectral view of one of the musical tracks on Aphex Twin's Windowlicker CD.

  • Tons of easter eggs to be found here. Spring only (Score:3, Funny)

    by Typingsux ( 65623 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:54PM (#3866822)
    Easter bunny [easterbunny.com]

  • Another Slashdot Easter Egg! (Score:3, Funny)

    by SteelX ( 32194 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @05:26PM (#3867070)
    When your BSD-related story gets submitted and approved, "BSD is dying" posts suddenly appear.

  • PHP4 Easter Egg (Score:5, Interesting)

    by N8F8 ( 4562 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @05:34PM (#3867128)
    Append "?=PHPE9568F36-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42 [php.net]" to the end of any php page running PHP$ gives a goofy picture of one of the PHP developers.

  • Al Gore's campaign web site (Score:5, Funny)

    by mikosullivan ( 320993 ) <miko@idocCOUGARs.com minus cat> on Thursday July 11, 2002 @06:01PM (#3867269)
    Al Gore's campaign web site for the 2000 election [archive.org] contained some special remarks in comments in the HTML. Basically, Al falls all over himself congratulating you on how smart you are for viewing the source:
    Thanks for checking out our source code! I plan to use this space to post special messages to those who are helping to improve our web site -- by making our site the best it can be. The fact that you are peeking behind the scenes at our site means you can make an important difference to this Internet effort. I'm grateful for your help and support in this campaign. Now let's keep working to build the 21st Century of our dreams!

    Al Gore

  • A Mozilla Easter Bug/Egg... (Score:3)

    by AtariDatacenter ( 31657 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @06:01PM (#3867273)
    If you are running Mozilla 1.0 on a non-UNIX platform, click and drag the bookmarks button onto the browser window below. You'll be taken to my Mozilla Easter Egg Page [bookmarks-button.com]. It gets approximately 200-300 hits per day.

  • Hidden Easter eggs = Bad, Bad. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Smarmy_1 ( 96867 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @06:04PM (#3867289)
    I've helped create a number of easter eggs in the past, but these days, I've had a serious change in thinking about them.

    This may sound extreme, but if a coder added an easter egg to a project that I was running, they would get in serious trouble, maybe even fired. Now, before you think that is just being too serious or flame-bait, here's my reasoning:

    Simply put, easter eggs are for the developers, not for the customers, and they don't belong in commericial software developement. The risk almost always outweighs the benefits, especially in a project like a public site! That is incredibly dangerous.

    One of the biggest problems with easter eggs is they almost always bypass the QA process. Think about that for a minute. The developers are writing code that hasn't been tested, and the QA department doesn't even know it exists! Granted, this isn't always true, but most of the time, it is. Bad, bad. Like potentially company-ruining-bad if the dev uses some bad judgement (gee, that never happens, late at night, at the end of a project, does it?).

    The best course of action is that the devs know ahead of time that easter eggs are not tolerated unless they are totally above-board in the development cycle. Save your humorous inside jokes for internal little apps you give to your mates, and you and your company will be a lot better off. They're usually inside jokes, anyways, so putting them in a public software project is just a totally unecessary risk, IMO. A few yuk-yuks is not worth your company or your project being compromised by bad code or a PR hit from an embarassing easter egg.
    • Hey, I had an old room mate who formally placed easter eggs into some (maybe all) of his projects.

      He was a project manager for a large "internet products" company, designing and building large software projects. Early on in the process, he would get the programmers and QA and other creative types together over beers when there were no other managers around. He would then ask them if they wanted to put an easter egg into the project. The answer was always Yes!, so they would come up with a secret code name for the module, and then QA would be able to test it, project leaders could review it, and the module name would exist from the very first sign-off by managers. Since they basically followed an "extreme programming" style, writing out the test cases and specifics of each function before coding, some slight obfuscation would occur around the eggs exact function. He'd then place a rule that the easter egg module couldn't be coded until 90% of the other code was finished, but the programmers would all have modules coded in advance waiting for the 90% day.

      When the easter eggs were all ready, they would all vote for the best (or best two) and put that into the code. Then the QA people could also write test cases around the trigger code, to make sure the easter eggs did exactly what they were supposed to do, and nothing more. Usually they also had a secret credits page, since the company would never allow former employees to tell which projects they worked on (because they now outsource most of their projects to India, VietNam and China and the idiotic^Wpatriotic american customers wouldn't understand).

      Because of this, liability of the programmers and the project management team would be negated. The original design specs would contain the easter egg code, just under a name that looked like all the other modules. Just in case the lawyers came after them later, but I've never heard of it happening.

      the AC

  • Govt Surplus Ark (Score:3, Funny)

    by mgarraha ( 409436 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @06:42PM (#3867514)
    I used to work on a web site for government surplus goods. One guy made it so that if a user searched for "ARK, COVENANT" they would get this quote from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark:
    "We have top men working on it right now."

    "Who?"
    "TOP men."
    Unfortunately, this feature was removed in a code review about a year after the guy left.

  • PayPal (Score:3, Funny)

    by usr122122121 ( 563560 ) <usr122122121@braxtech . c om> on Thursday July 11, 2002 @07:17PM (#3867740) Homepage
    Go onto PayPal, and go to the Sign Up for an account [paypal.com] page.

    Scroll down until you see the characters in the yellow box with the grid. Click "help?" and you will get a popup window outlining some help junk, disregard that.

    Click "Listen To These Characters" and it will load a wav file that tells you the characters...
    Now go back, and copy the address of that link. It 'll look something like:
    https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/wv_web/[blah blah blah]/secret.wav

    Add a letter into the blahblahblah section, and load that file :-)

    I won't spoil your fun.

  • DANGER GIRL MODEL (Score:4, Funny)

    by caferace ( 442 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @08:09PM (#3867994) Homepage
    Only cute chicks need apply [danger.com]

    For a company on its way out, this is still amusing....

  • Resume Eggs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TwP ( 149780 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @08:33PM (#3868089) Homepage
    Not quite the same, but my resume has an easter egg in it. At the top of the resume, separating my name and job title from the main body of the document, is a small line of ones and zeros (4pt font) with border lines above and below. It looks like a simple, decorative border to separate the title from the rest of the page. It is, but it also contains a "secret message" using "binary encryption".

    Most people don't even notice that it is there. [zippy6.net]

  • oh yeah! Almost forgot! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Phroggy ( 441 ) <slashdot3@@@phroggy...com> on Thursday July 11, 2002 @11:19PM (#3868736) Homepage
    My home page [phroggy.com] allows the user to choose among several different themes, many of which look like windows on a desktop in a variety of operating systems. Your default theme when you first visit the site is chosen based on your browser and operating system. If you use a 4.0 or better browser, it chooses one of the more complex themes based on your OS; if you run Netscape 3 (which doesn't support background graphics in table cells) you get the Plain theme, and if it doesn't recognize your browser, you get the Simple theme which renders nicely in Lynx.

    Robots and spiders, such as those who might be trolling for e-mail addresses, aren't recognized and therefore get the Simple theme. At the bottom of the main home page, only shown in the Simple theme, in very fine print, appears a message that is tailored for your particular IP address:

    Home page in simple theme [phroggy.com]

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