Mind your photo previews

Posted on Friday July 10, 2015
Categories: News

Next:
Previous:

Short description

This famous French news outlet tweeted a very serious article with an image containing... less serious code.

⏱ Estimated reading time: 1 minute

Update from the 1st of August 2021

The code in the picture is PHP related to WordPress in an application created by JetBrains called PHPStorm. One of the lines of code clearly states echo "banana"; exit;, which is short for printing “banana” on the screen and ending the processing there. You would likely be presented with a white web page with a black text saying, you guessed it, “banana”.

For the general public, this is just a representation of code. A dark art that only a lucky few masters. Hacking is at times associated with programming and it is true that the two notions live close by. A mention of “banana” is legitimately harmless in that context as is PHP or WordPress. However, to people understanding that code, all these hints would not lead to an article about hacking and seem rather humorous.

Lesson learned, the authors of the article from Le Monde Pixels changed the preview in the article to that of a backlit QWERTY keyboard. With no banana this time.

Developed with ❤

Vincenzo Scalzi