Tag Archives: funny

cURL and libcurl

emails I received, the collection

I have since at least 2009 posted occasional emails I received on this blog. Often they are emails from people who found my email address somewhere, thinking I am involved in the product or service where they found me. In cars, games, traces after breaches, apps and more.

They range from plain weird to fun to scary and threatening.

Somehow they help me remember that the world we live in is super complicated.

The ones I have shown here on the blog are only a small subset of those that I have received. And of all the ones I have received, I have not kept all, or at least not stored them in ways that makes it easy for me to find them now.

Also: for products such as Cisco Anyconnect and Mobdro I have received dozens of emails so I just selected a few examples to include

Out of the ones that I could find, I have dug up seventy-four different messages, converted them to markdown and added them to a brand new Daniel email collection.

I plan to add future email correspondence that meet the criteria as well.

Enjoy!

The top image for this blog post is a joke back from when I received the subject: urgent warning email which talked about the “hacking ring”.

cURL and libcurl

“I could rewrite curl”

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Collected quotes and snippets from people publicly sneezing off or belittling what curl is, explaining how easy it would be to make a replacement in no time with no effort or generally not being very helpful.

These are statements made seriously. For all I know, they were not ironic. If you find others to add here, please let me know!

Listen. I’ve been young too once and I’ve probably thought similar things myself in the past. But there’s a huge difference between thinking and saying. Quotes included here are mentioned for our collective amusement.

I can do it in less than a 100 lines

[source]

I can do it in a three day weekend

(The yellow marking in the picture was added by me.)

[source]

No reason to be written in C

Maybe not exactly in the same category as the two ones above, but still a significant “I know this” vibe:

[source]

We sold a curl exploit

Some people deliberately decides to play for the other team.

[source]

This isn’t a big deal

It’s easy to say things on Twitter…

This tweet was removed by its author after I and others replied to it so I cannot link it. The name has been blurred on purpose because of this.

100 lines of Python

“I think you could replace 99% of the uses of Curl … with like 100 lines of Python or Rust or Go”

[source]

I should just fix curl

I reported a vulnerable old curl installation being hosted by nuget, only to get this user tell me… to fix the vulnerabilities we already fixed long ago.

Discussions

Hacker news, Reddit

cURL and libcurl

curl pictures

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“Memes” or other fun images involving curl. Please send or direct me to other ones you think belong in this collection! Kept here solely to boost my ego.

All modern digital infrastructure

This is the famous xkcd strip number 2347, modified to say Sweden and 1997 by @tsjost. I’ve seen this picture taking some “extra rounds” in various places, somehow also being claimed to be xkcd 2347 when people haven’t paid attention to the “patch” in the text.

Entire web infrastructure

Image by @matthiasendler

Car contract

This photo of a rental car contract with an error message on the printed paper was given to me by a good person I’ve unfortunately lost track of.

The developer dice

Thanks to Cassidy. (For purchase here.)

Don’t use -X

Remember that using curl -X is very often just the wrong thing to do. Jonas Forsberg helps us remember:

The curl

In an email from NASA that I received and shared, the person asked about details for “the curl”.

Image by eichkat3r at mastodon.

You’re sure this is safe?

Piping curl output straight into a shell is a much debated practice…

Picture by Tim Chase.

curl, reinvented by…

Remember the powershell curl alias?

Picture by Shashimal Senarath.

Billboard

This is an old classic:

curl please

Thanks to @ratacibernetica

Related

Screenshotted curl credits.

curl is just the hobby

Uncategorized

Every base is base 10

This image originally comes from cowbirdsinlove.com but sadly it seems the page that once showed it is no longer there. I saved it from that site already back in 2015, but I cannot recall the exact URL it used. The image is still available at https://cowbirdsinlove.com/comics/base10[1].png.

Since I consider this picture such an iconic classic and masterpiece, I decided I better host it here in a small attempt to preserve it for everyone to enjoy.

Because, you know, every base is base 10.

Update: the original page on archive.org.

cURL and libcurl

Manual cURL cURL

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The HP Color LaserJet CP3525 Printer looks like any other ordinary printer done by HP. But there’s a difference!

A friend of mine fell over this gem, and told me.

TCP/IP Settings

If you go to the machine’s TCP/IP settings using the built-in web server, the printer offers the ordinary network configure options but also one that sticks out a little exta. The “Manual cURL cURL” option! It looks like this:

I could easily confirm that this is genuine. I did this screenshot above by just googling for the string and printer model, since there appears to exist printers like this exposing their settings web server to the Internet. Hilarious!

What?

How on earth did that string end up there? Certainly there’s no relation to curl at all except for the actual name used there? Is it a sign that there’s basically no humans left at HP that understand what the individual settings on that screen are actually meant for?

Given the contents in the text field, a URL containing the letters WPAD twice, I can only presume this field is actually meant for Web Proxy Auto-Discovery. I spent some time trying to find the user manual for this printer configuration screen but failed. It would’ve been fun to find “manual cURL cURL” described in a manual! They do offer a busload of various manuals, maybe I just missed the right one.

Does it use curl?

Yes, it seems HP generally use curl at least as I found the “Open-Source Software License Agreements for HP LaserJet and ScanJet Printers” and it contains the curl license:

The curl license as found in the HP printer open source report.

HP using curl for Print-Uri?

Independently, someone else recently told me about another possible HP + curl connection. This user said his HP printer makes HTTP requests using the user-agent libcurl-agent/1.0:

I haven’t managed to get this confirmed by anyone else (although the license snippet above certainly implies they use curl) and that particular user-agent string has been used everywhere for a long time, as I believe it is copied widely from the popular libcurl example getinmemory.c where I made up the user-agent and put it there already in 2004.

Credits

Frank Gevaerts tricked me into going down this rabbit hole as he told me about this string.

cURL and libcurl

Why is your email in my car?

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I got this email in German…

Subject: Warumfrage

Schönen guten Tag

Ich habe auf meinem Navi aus meinem Auto einen Riesentext wo unter anderem Ihre Mailadresse zu sehen ist?

Können Sie mich schlau machen was es damit auf sich hat ?

… which translated into English says:

I have a huge text on my sat nav in my car where, among other things, your email address can be seen?

Can you tell me what this is all about?

I replied (in English) to the question, explained how I’m the main author of curl and how his navigation system is probably using this. I then asked what product or car he saw my email in and if he could send me a picture of my email being there.

He responded quickly and his very brief answer only says it is a Toyota Verso from 2015. So I put an image of such a car on the top of this post.