“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Josh” sent me an email. Pardon the language here but I decided to show the mail body unaltered:
From: Josh Yanez <a gmail address>
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2016 22:27:13 -0800
To: daniel
Subject: Hey fucker
I got all your fucking info either you turn yourself in or ill show it to the police. You think I'm playing try me I got all your stupid little coding too.
Sent from my iPhone
This generates so many questions
I’ve had threats mailed to be before (even done over phone) so this is far from the first time. The few times I’ve bothered to actually try to understand what these people are hallucinating about, it usually turns out that they’ve discovered that someone has hacked them or targeted them in some sort of attack and curl was used and I am the main author so I’m the bad guy.
He has all my “info” and my “stupid little coding too” ? What “coding” could that be? What is all my info?
Is this just a spam somehow that wants me to reply? It is directed to me only and I’ve not heard of anyone else who got a mail similar to this.
The lovely “Sent from my iPhone” signature is sort of hilarious too after such an offensive message.
Very aware this could just as well suck me into a deep and dark hole of sadness, I was just too curious to resist so I responded. Unfortunately I didn’t get anything further back so the story thus ends here, a bit abrupt. 🙁
Time to submit some more strange emails I’ve received recently. Here’s one I suspect may be someone who spots that curl is being abused against some host. I really wouldn’t even know how to begin to answer this…
Someone is using your code to continually hack small businesses I work
with. How on earth do I stop them?!
![https://cowbirdsinlove.com/comics/base10[1].png](https://cowbirdsinlove.com/comics/base10[1].png){kind=link}