Easter Eggs in Open Source Software

They say that the nice thing about Open Source software is that all the users are looking at the source checking it for bugs, so it will be higher quality than closed-source software.

Heh. I have proof that people don’t read the code they are installing.

Since the earliest widely-distributed releases of Cricket, there’s been an easter egg in it. It is hidden in code that should arouse the curiosity of anyone doing a security audit, but it is hidden well enough that someone poking around in the code won’t see it. To my knowledge the only person who’s ever found it was Javier Muniz, my officemate when I was writing Cricket. And that was only after I dropped a hint that I’d put an easter egg into Cricket. Javier’s a bright guy, and it didn’t take him long to find it.

Wonder if someone will run across this post and get curious? It’s there for the finding… you’ve got about as much to go on now as Javier did!


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