Re: Easter Eggs

[Jim Gillogly <jim@acm.org>]

> In article <199509251159.EAA08528@mycroft.rand.org>, jim@acm.org (Jim
> Gillogly) wrote:

> >I'm nervous enough about all the Easter Eggs that have been reported in
> >Netscape, like the secret keystroke shortcut to get to Fishcam, or the
> >different behavior it exhibits when it finds a certain obscurely-named
> >directory at the top level. 

> Rick Busdiecker <rfb@lehman.com> writes:
> Personally, I like the Easter Eggs in Netscape and other software
> products.  I don't know if there's an consensus definition of `Easter
> Egg', but my working definition is something like ``An unpublicized,
> unharmful, preferably amusing, feature for which interested users may
> hunt.''  I think that such things add some fun for curious users and

I enjoy Easter Eggs in general, and I agree that a program with fun stuff
like this in it gives one a warm fuzzy feeling about the relaxed management
style at the company that produces it.  On the other hand, of all kinds of
mass market software, network-aware software needs to have the most trust
from the users, because it alone has the capability of passing information
out of your machine.  My preference is always to have source code
available for security-critical functions so that I can verify that it's
not only doing what I want, but also doing nothing that I don't want.

For a program like Netscape it doesn't make sense to supply source code,
of course, and the Easter Eggs already provide some evidence that it's
doing something that I didn't "buy" (assuming I've bought it, of course).
From there it's a short step to the questions "What else is it doing that
I didn't pay for?  Reading my PGP key generation environment?
Interesting.  What else?"

> I didn't know about the FishCam Easter Egg, but I know that Netscape

Ctrl-alt-f if you're a PC type, or Ctrl-meta-f if you're on a Sun; I'm
calling the diamond to the left of the space bar a "meta".

	Jim Gillogly
	Hevensday, 5 Winterfilth S.R. 1995, 16:14