Carter Yagemann

Carter Yagemann

Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State University with interests in automated vulnerability discovery, root cause analysis, exploit prevention, and cyber-physical security.

You never know where your code will end up.

I was searching through an archive site for 4Chan when I noticed that my name was in a random post on the Technology board, /g/:

Anonymous Sat Jun 17 11:13:54 2017 No.60943336

>>60943289
I'm running it locally, but you can get it here:
https://github.com/carter-yagemann/4ChanBBS
It uses the official API to retrieve posts, and it even converts images to ASCII

The link is for a public repository I created on Github. It contains a proxy server written in Python that allows computers to browse 4Chan via a telnet connection using a command line interface (CLI) reminiscent of old-school BBS sites. I wrote it in a few hours purely as a joke and then never touched it again. Everything about it was intended as nothing more than a quick laugh, down to how it crudely converts images into ASCII strings so they can be displayed in the terminal. I didn't put much effort into the project and I assumed no one would ever care.

But apparently someone did care and that someone owns a retro computer:

Retro IBM computer running 4Chan BBS

Seeing my code's banner page on a monitor old enough to be from the days of BBS made my day. I don't know the person that posted this image, but I'm happy to know someone found value in my forgotten code. It just goes to show that you never know where your code will end up.