HTTP/2.0 Opens Every New Connection It Makes With the Word 'PRISM' (jgc.org)

An anonymous reader writes: British programmer and writer John Graham-Cumming has spotted what appears to be a 'code-protest' in the next generation of the hypertext protocol. Each new connection forged by the HTTP/2.0 protocol spells out the word 'PRISM' obliquely, though the word itself is obscured to the casual observer by coded returns and line-breaks. Work on the hidden message in HTTP/2.0 seems to date back to nine days after the Snowden revelations broke, with the final commit completed by July of 2013. In July 2013 one of the protocol's architects appealed to the development group to reconsider design principles in the light of the revelations about the NSA's worldwide surveillance program.

Comments

So who did it?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

It should be possible to find out who did the code chage, who approved the change and who merged it.

One of our coders used a limerick, yes it was the man from Nantucket, as a static string. He used it to test some of the string utility functions he was developing. Forgot to remove it. Eventually a nosy customer found it by running strings on our executable and made a stink about it. (Never explained why they were poking around our executable with strings) It is out of our builds now, but if you do a blame on stingutils.cpp you can still see it and see how long it stayed in production.