Hey sweet chilly sauce,
While downloading a few albums I just purchased on Bandcamp, I noticed the URL where I was downloading from is https://p4.bcbits.com.
Out of sheer curiosity (and definitely not boredom), i wanted to find what the hell this is, so I visited first http://bcbits.com and https://p4.bcbits.com second, but nothing interesting appeared there.
“Bandcamp bits”? that is a good pun in my book :).
Then I googled bcbits.com and among the links there was an interesting one. As I’m writing this, I guess you know which one.
I poked around for a while in there and, not because I was bored or something, I took your little challenge. There can’t be something bad at the end of the race, can it?
Solving it was pretty easy - it took me maybe 30 minutes and unfortunately, more than 5 of those were spend fighting wget to push the file outside the vm. In the end I gave up and manually copied the output from more url.txt. Thanks for not putting a humongous url in there :D.
Trying to understand what memfrob does, lead me to some interesting hits, such as this thread of comments - A lot of C developers I know see value in keeping the C standard library small. ... | Hacker News. Should we have smaller stdlibs? Eh, I’m a Kotlin dev, so what do I know…
I’m curious why 42 was chosen. It can’t be a random choice, can it? The universe tells me it’s not.
Don’t ask me how, but Niger, the country. · Issue #237 · minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings · GitHub was opened in one of my tabs during that search.
Besides thanking you for the little entertainment, I want to give a bit of feedback to peculiarities surrounding it.
I’ll start by asking why isn’t the site secure? Trying to access the https version of the url doesn’t respond back.
Soon browsers will try “secure connection” by default, so everybody will most likely think the website is badly cached by google and lose this little gem.
Secondly, and also related to google: it saddens me that other search engines don’t know about the treasure. If the google entry disappears for any reason, then all of this will be forgotten.
Is that something you want and you’re okay with?
I love these random bits of “history” and losing your treasure would sadden me.