Ghost in the machine

Going about my business last night, copying the latest full backup of the blog from the server to my hard drive (as all responsible bloggers do daily, right?). The log from my FTP program:

150: Accepted data connection
The computer is your friend. Trust the computer
129024.5 kbytes to download
226: File successfully transferred
848.621 seconds (measured here), 152.04 Kbytes per second

And the first thing you think, of course, is “malware.” The next thing, fortunately, is “Google.” That is, I searched for the unexpected phrase and found that now and again, other people had made the same surprising discovery in their logs. A Unix-based Easter egg of some kind, apparently, sitting in a server’s FTP program, waiting to alarm and delight people who actually read their logs.

It’s always interesting when technology surprises you.

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What’s the deal with this?