Sunday, January 8, 2006

A PHP Easter Egg

The makers of the PHP server-side scripting language included an Easter Egg that seems to work on any* PHP-driven website: just append ?=PHPE9568F36-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42 to the URL.** You’ll see the image of a dog, like on this blog’s forum – which is PHP5-driven. Apparently, this particular Easter Egg has been discovered many years ago already, but I never came across it. And just for fun, here’s the dog on Technorati... Corante... and it’s even showing for our friends at InsideGoogle and Searchblog.

By the way, the following search currently returns 35 results in Google today...
inurl:PHPE9568F36-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42
.. but I bet in a week or two, it will be a lot more than just 35!

Now the dog’s not the only image showing in this Easter Egg. There’s also:

• ?=PHPE9568F34-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42 for a PHP logo.
• ?=PHPE9568F35-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42 for a Zend logo (also available in black).
• ?=PHPB8B5F2A0-3C92-11d3-A3A9-4C7B08C10000 for a PHP credits screen.***
• And then, Diggnation.com shows a different dog (this might have something to do with the specific PHP version in use).

Apparently, the dog is no security issue as it only shows if the “expose_php” setting is turned on in the php.ini file (so you can’t abuse this to find out if a given page is PHP-driven, unless the page expose this information via its HTTP headers anyway****). But I can already imagine some tricksters sending around emails asking, “Hey, what’s that dog doing on your server?”, pointing to the query-stringed URL, and resulting in panicked late-night calls to the respective webmaster. Then again, the dog looks just so innocent... who would get mad at it?

[Via Digg.]

*At the very least version 4 and higher.
**Not sure if the “42” in the end of the query-string is a coincidence.
***The PHP group is cited to consist of Thies C. Arntzen, Stig Bakken, Shane Caraveo, Andi Gutmans, Rasmus Lerdorf, Sam Ruby, Sascha Schumann, Zeev Suraski, Jim Winstead, and Andrei Zmievski.
**** For example my forum sends out an HTTP header reading “X-Powered-By => PHP/5.1.1”.

A PHP Easter Egg by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1)

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