Sunday, April 16, 2006

nethash nastiness

Reading through one of the usual crypto news sources, I came across something that seems to be a joke: a web service that provides a cryptographic hash of the entire internet. There's also a funny web-site validator that tells you whether or not a site is on the web. I'm guessing it's a joke since it was registered on 28-March -- just in time for April Fool's day.

The Internet Hash Project

Curious how it worked, I looked at the source code of the page. Cleverly, the page uses AJAX to obtain the hash (and site-existence queries) from the server. An even closer look at the code revealed a particularly interesting source-code comment (warning: may disturb. Link.) (For more information on goatse silliness, see this page.)

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