Silicon Valley Encryption, Half I

I’m a fan of the HBO Sequence, Silicon Valley. From creator Mike Decide, it excellently showcases the antics of the nerds who populate California’s Silicon Valley and the businesses they work for. It’s a superb collection that I extremely suggest to my techy buddies. Plus, it’s chock stuffed with digitally pleasant easter eggs.

The present facilities round a gaggle of programmers working in an incubator. One among them, Richard, stumbles upon a compression algorithm that’s magnitudes higher than the rest. This “Pied Piper” algorithm is the catalyst that runs the present and motivates the various adventures and missteps that happen, lampooning a variety of Silicon Valley tradition.

At one level, Richard quits the corporate he based, leaving the opposite programmers to strive to determine his algorithm. An easter egg is present in a screenshot the code, proven in Determine 1. Fellow programmers try to decipher what Richard has executed. One among them, Dinesh, factors to an undocumented quantity within the code and says, “What is that this quantity?”

Determine 1. Dinesh (Kamail Nanjiani) is pissed off by Richard’s poorly-documented and obfuscated Pied Piper code. (Silicon Valley, HBO)

The quantity proven within the code is an easter egg. The code is C, all seen within the picture. When compiled, it outputs the string DREAM_ON_ASSHOLES, which is suitable for one programmer to say to others who attempt to decode what was executed. Right here is the code:

2025_04_12-Lesson.c

#embrace <stdio.h>
#embrace <stdlib.h>

typedef unsigned lengthy u64;


typedef void enc_cfg_t;
typedef int enc_cfg2_t;
typedef __int128_t dcf_t;

enc_cfg_t _ctx_iface(dcf_t s, enc_cfg2_t i){
    int c = (((s & ((dcf_t)0x1FULL << i * 5)) >> i * 5 ) + 65);
    printf("%c",c); }
    enc_cfg2_t major() {
    for (int i=0; i<17; i++){
        _ctx_iface(0x79481E6BBCC01223 + ((dcf_t)0x1222DC << 64), i);
    }
}

The rest of the code from the screenshot isn’t pertinent to this system. It could be one other easter egg, however I targeting the code proven above.

General, the code is intentionally cryptic. It makes use of typedef statements to obscure the usual information varieties void and int. The indentation and formatting isn’t constant, which makes it much more opaque.

Buried in there may be the major() perform. It loops, calling the _ctx_iface() perform 17 occasions, as soon as for every digit within the worth 0x79481E6BBCC01223. That is the quantity Dinesh references in Determine 1.

What the code does is to decrypt the worth 0x79481E6BBCC01223, which ends up in single characters output, forming the string DREAM_ON_ASSHOLES, which is humorous should you watch the present.

It’s odd to me that the major() perform fails to return a price, which doesn’t set off any warnings, a minimum of when constructed through the use of the clang compiler.

In subsequent week’s Lesson, I un-obfuscate the code and remark upon it additional.