The New York Times International - 13.08.2019

Every car can accelerate, brake and turn. But only the Tesla Model X can put on a three-minute dance performance. The windows open, the speakers blast a holiday carol, the exterior lights flash in sequence, the front doors open and close, and the gull-wing doors rise, arch and flap to the music. That roboshow is a so-called Easter egg: an undocumented feature in a tech product, set in motion by a sequence of commands that nobody would hit acci- dentally. Over the years, Easter eggs in tech products have largely disappeared (ex- cept in video games). Like any other software, Easter eggs, so named for the hunt to find them, cost time and money to design, build and debug. Why would a tech company develop features it can’t advertise or even reveal? In the beginning, the answer was re- venge. In 1976, Warner Communica- tions bought Atari, the video game maker. The game designer Warren Rob- inett, then 25, chafed under his new em- ployer. “There was a culture clash between the New York people and the California people,” Mr. Robinett said. “We wore T- shirts, and had long hair and beards, and came to work whenever we pleased.” Worst of all, the new bosses had no in- tention of giving credit to the authors of their games. And so, as an act of civil dis- obedience, Mr. Robinett built what is generally credited as the first Easter egg into his game “Adventure” — a flashing, colored credits screen that read “Created by Warren Robinett.” To avoid detection by Atari’s testers, he hid it in a secret “room” of the video game, accessed by a convoluted sequence of steps involving a maze, a bridge and a one-pixel “key” that he called The Dot. His bid for recognition eventually paid off spectacularly — in Steven Spielberg’s 2018 movie “Ready Player One.” To save his world at the movie’s climax, Parzival, the hero, must play Atari “Adventure” and unlock its Easter egg. “You see, Warren Robinett was proud of Adventure,” Parzival ex- plains as he plays. “That’s why he created the first digital Easter egg!” These days, Easter eggs are anything but acts of defiance. They are meant to entertain, to lure potential hires, to pay tribute to executives — or to amuse the programmers themselves.

GOOGLE’S MARIO MAPS At Google, there is a long tradition of Easter eggs, which have the full support of the company. “It helps establish software as an art form, following in the footsteps of paint- ers and musicians and craftspeople sneaking little jokes and references into their work for literally centuries,” said Dan Sandler, who works on the Android smartphone software. Mr. Sandler has built an eggy surprise into every version of Android since 2011.

For the current version — Android P — he created a secret painting app. “One of the themes in the P release was ‘digital well being,’ the idea that you should be able to choose a balance of screen time and non-screen time,” he said. “In my paint app, over time, the strokes you draw fade away to nothing, like a Zen drawing board.” (He notes that you can tap the hourglass to pause

the timer, “if you must.”) There’s no Save command, either. “This is another Zen thing: Don’t cling to your creations,” he said. In the Google Maps division, the best- known Easter egg appeared on March 10, 2018. It was International Mario Day (Mar10, get it?), celebrating the goofy Italian plumber from Nintendo’s video games.

On that day, the usual blue dot on the map, representing your location as you drive, appeared as Mario in his little go- kart. The project was a collaboration with Nintendo, which supplied the 3-D Mario artwork and audio recordings of Mario’s cheery voice (“Woo hoo! Let’s a- go!”). “To be honest, I wasn’t super excited about the idea,” said Munish Dabas, the

Google Maps interface lead. “The last thing we wanted is something we’d get a lot of negative feedback or press about.” But Mario Maps was a social-media hit. “The only negative feedback I saw was people asking, ‘Why can’t we have this as a permanent feature?’ ” he said. Easter eggs have become so en- trenched in Google’s culture that two Google Search engineers, Josh Ain and Colin Tincknell, have informally formal- ized the practice. They give talks for colleagues about creating Easter eggs; maintain an internal email group about Easter eggs (called “Poultry”); and have created software tools that make it “ridiculously easy” for their colleagues to add Easter eggs to Google search re- sults. (If you’ve seen “Avengers: Endgame,” don’t miss their finest work. Search for “Thanos” and then click the bejeweled gauntlet icon.) “We focus on how much people are sharing this, how much people are de- lighted by it,” said Mr. Ain. “And we think it’s good for Google.”

JEFF BEZOS’ THANK-YOU At Amazon, the only known Easter eggs were planted by Amazon’s chief execu- tive and founder, Jeff Bezos.

One is a permanent tribute to David Risher, the man Mr. Bezos charged with transforming the Amazon of 1997 — an online bookstore — into an everything store. That took Mr. Risher five and a half years. At that point, having built Amazon’s stores into a $4 billion enter- prise, Mr. Risher decided to move on. Just before Mr. Risher’s departure, at his final all-company meeting, Mr. Be- zos called him up to the stage. The Ama- zon website appeared on the big screen. Beneath the copyright date on Ama- zon’s store-directory page, Mr. Bezos had hidden an invisible link. It opens a secret note: “Thank You, David Risher,” it begins. “Your contributions will live forever in the form of an ever-evolving Amazon.com.” “And he does his laugh,” Mr. Risher said. “And I’m like, ‘Oh my god!’ And then we gave each other this huge hug.”

A TASTY TREAT VIA WORDPRESS Sometimes, an Easter egg’s target is neither the public nor a cherished em- ployee. It’s prospective hires. That’s why Matt Mullenweg, co-cre- ator of the WordPress web-creation software, has built so many Easter eggs into his company’s website, Automattic.com. If, for example, you return to a certain job on the company’s hiring site more than five times, a message appears: “We couldn’t help but notice that you’ve visited this page a few times. Give a shot and apply already!” Another Easter egg on that site is so hidden, fewer than a dozen people have ever found it, Mr. Mullenweg said. He has hired almost all of them. He prefers not to describe the Easter egg, so it can continue its work as a test for potential applicants. He is also responsible for the Easter egg that’s hiding 5,274 words into the WordPress Terms of Service page, in a paragraph called “Disclaimer of War- ranties.” It says: “If you’re actually reading this, here’s a treat.” The link then opens a photograph of beef brisket and a tribute to Memphis Minnie’s, a San Francisco barbecue restaurant. Mr. Mullenweg noted that because he makes this Terms of Service document available to anyone, “this Easter egg has actually been copied into many other companies’ terms of service, without them reading or noticing it.”

TESLA’S DANCES AND ROMANCES As for Tesla’s dancing-car trick: It joins a long list of animated surprises that Tesla drivers can summon. Those include Romance Mode (the screen in the car displays a crackling fireplace as a mood-setting pop song begins to play); Santa Mode (your car’s icon on the screen becomes a sleigh, snowflakes fall, and the turn signal produces the sound of jingle bells); and what Tesla engineers call Emissions Testing Mode (you, the driver, can trig- ger the sound of flatulence emerging from any of the car’s seats). Eventually, Tesla’s engineers made them easier to find: Today, a single screen offers icons to tap for most of them. But not all. Tesla has confirmed that its cars still contain Easter eggs that nobody has yet discovered. The hunt continues.

The secret history of ‘Easter eggs’

Clockwise from top: A three-minute dance performance by the Tesla Model X is an “Easter egg,” or hidden feature; Tesla cars also have a “romance mode,” another surprise where the center screen shows a video of a crackling fireplace and a pop song begins to play; and an Easter egg produced by Google Maps in collaboration with Nintendo.

ERIN BRETHAUER AND TIM HUSSIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Quirky surprises hidden in software by Google, Tesla, Amazon and others

BY DAVID POGUE

GOOGLE ERIN BRETHAUER AND TIM HUSSIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

.. 12 | T UESDAY, AUGUST 13, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

tech

How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? John Herrman, a reporter for the Styles desk who covers the internet, discussed the tech he’s using.

What are your most important tech tools for doing your work? I’ve never really taken an inventory like this. It’s kind of depressing! I’m looking back at a decade of doomed attempts to figure out a new work flow, to assemble just the right set of tools or to conjure some sort of productivity spirit out of the App Store, somehow — and not much stuck. I’m right back where I was in 2009: typing on a few- years-old MacBook, stressed out listen- ing to my iPhone buzz away on my desk, typing into Gmail and a work chat window, making any remotely important calls on land- lines and recording people with a little voice recorder. I guess I use my smartphone more? I suppose this makes some sense. We expect to be able to borrow the tech industry’s latest tools to monitor and investigate the tech industry. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they’re not especially useful for this particular purpose! There’s one tool I added that I ha- ven’t given up on, although using it can feel a bit like giving up: Simplenote. It’s a notes app that is as close to a searchable pile of paper as you can get. You make a new note, type into it, and then you make another new note, and you type into that. You just do that

forever until you have thousands of notes that you can sort in a few ways, but that aren’t really organized in any meaningful sense of the word. I’m sure there are people who tag their Simplenotes, or otherwise think of them in some sort of structured way, but I just add them to the heap and then search for names or words and see what comes up. It has turned out to be a really nice way to annotate the frequently, and I think intentionally, disorienting experience of being online. So I like Simplenote. I appreciate Google Calendar for related reasons. It’s one of the many clocks missing from the casino wall.

As someone who lives and breathes this stuff, which tech trends do you love and which do you hate? I’m trying and failing to “live and breathe this stuff” a bit less lately, and I don’t appreciate what seems to happen when I try. Each time I step even an inch away from a service — let’s say not logging in to Facebook or Twitter for a while — I get this little reminder of what I actually mean to them. There’s a flood of messages, of fresh notifications, of humanoid emails with subject lines like “We miss you” or sort of unearned claims that my friends miss me, or whatever. They almost instantly abuse whatever privileges you had given them to contact you, because why wouldn’t they? This is new territory for companies that are used to always growing. It doesn’t bode so well for what might happen if or when any of them end up in real decline.

So what about a tech trend that you think is good? The best tech trend right now, broadly speaking, is public hearings about Big Tech. On the surface, these are often vex- ing spectacles. I’ll grant that it’s frus- trating to watch questioners seem to fumble with the details, or even basics,

of tech issues, but it’s also a good way to learn what lawmakers believe the underlying issues actually are. There are genuinely different approaches on display, and they hinge less on granu- lar detail than on ideology. For example, some liberals tend to believe that platforms can ultimately be adjusted and fixed. Leftists may suggest they’re inherently problematic, and should be reined in. Some on the right seem to think that a better Big Tech is simply a cowed Big Tech that has been made very aware of its particular grievances. Subject expertise can, and will, be adapted to these very different ends. While it may be funny and galling that Congressman Morsecode acciden- tally called it “The Twitters,” can you

really say you understand the first thing about what Twitter’s working definition of harassment is? What gets you barred there? Sometimes the dumbest-sounding questions actually arethe best ones, particularly when you’re dealing with companies that need us to accept information asym- metry as a business model.

You often write about issues that technology has wrought. What do you think are some of the biggest tech problems, and how do you deal with them personally? There isn’t a single such issue that doesn’t implicate advertising in some way, and advertising is so deeply inter- twined with the web and the rest of the

consumer internet that it’s quite diffi- cult, often by design, to conceive of a world in which it’s less important. For example, I won’t tell everyone to block ads. It’s complicated, especially from these pages! But that’s what I do, in as many ways as possible. I exclude sites from my ad blockers as I deem necessary. This “whitelist” is pretty substantial, and mostly includes other news organizations. It’s an imperfect solution. I just don’t think exposure to advertising is a healthy default for any environment where we spend a lot of time.

Which tech platforms do you think wield the most power, and what should people do to ensure their data

and overall lives are not beholden to Big Tech? Amazon could really hold the world hostage on a moment’s notice, but I suppose Google could, too. I don’t think there’s a data-hygienic way to use any of the ad-supported platforms. That’s part of the deal, and I think most suggestions otherwise are either mistaken or deliberate diver- sions and a waste of time. Facebook isn’t free; loss of privacy is just one of the costs. Uber is conven- ient for riders because of what it asks of drivers, of cities and of public roads. It’s not so hard to understand the benefits and costs of older technologies this way — cars poison the air, newspa- pers pulp trees — and it only benefits any moment’s “big tech” to exempt it from such interpretations.

Outside of work, what tech product are you currently obsessed with? Mubi! It’s a streaming app that hosts 30 films at a time — a new one shows up every day, and the oldest one leaves. It’s like having a really good independent or repertory movie theater in your house, or on your phone. (You can also download movies for flights, or for when you’re keeping your phone offline.) You’ll probably treat it as if it were a real-life small movie theater, and not use it as much as you wish you would, but you’ll rarely regret it when you do. And it’s $11 a month.

If you could tell people to do one thing today with their personal tech to improve their lives, what would it be? Get a $20 shower radio, AM/FM. Ours looks like a fish and I use it almost every day, usually for news, sometimes for music. If you’re a morning shower person, don’t check your phone before you check your fish. If evening, no phones after. A fully loaded smartphone is a per- fectly greedy device; it has no respect for your time. This radio worked for me to get away from that.

Untangling the internet the old-fashioned way

Tech We’re Using

FEATURING JOHN HERRMAN

When it comes to tech, John Herrman, a Times reporter, says he’s trying and failing to “live and breathe this stuff” a bit less lately.

BRITTAINY NEWMAN/THE NEW YORK TIMES

The best tech trend right now, broadly speaking, is public hearings about Big Tech.

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The New York Times International - 13.08.2019

The secret history of ‘Easter eggs’

tech

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