How to Sneak a Dirty Joke Into the New York Times
Four NYU students were lucky enough to get some New York Times coverage for their would-be Facebook killer. But they seem to have helped slip a nerdy sex joke past Times editors, as well.
The joke, written on a blackboard behind the students in their Times picture, is a sequence of Unix commands that could double as a crude hook-up manual: "touch grep unzip mount fsck fsck umount." Click the screenshot above for a closer look.
The joke certainly fits with the geeky, open-source nature of the student's social networking project. But it's also an old saw among hackers, and could have been written by any computer science student with access to the same blackboard, as the website Geekosystem, which first wrote about the joke, pointed out.
Of course the Times must be weary of getting punked again by NYU students. After all, the paper cropped the dirty computer commands out of its photo in recent hours. But, despite the fallout in old media, a group of enterprising programmers looking to drum up attention and interest among fellow geeks could hardly pick a better backdrop than this filthy, cheeky blackboard.