Revision as of 18:48, 23 February 2013

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Pointers

Title text: Every computer, at the unreachable memory address 0x-1, stores a secret. I found it, and it is that all humans ar—SEGMENTATION FAULT.

Explanation

This comic is about a play on the dual meaning of the word “pointer”. Cueball is playing a computer game in the comic, but he seems to be stuck. So he askes Black Hat for a few tips (“pointers”) to get unstuck again. Black Hat wants to be annoying, so he spits out a couple of (seemingly random) 32-bit hexadecimal addresses, which are “pointers” in a programming language. These pointers are used to access a certain location in the computer's memory in order to fulfill a task. Cueball is then annoyed at Black Hat for not answering his question.

The "segmentation fault" the image text is referencing also arises from this kind of memory access. If you define a pointer to an invalid address, then try to access the memory location associated with it, you could end up with this exception. The hexadecimal address 0x-1 is one of those invalid access pointers, because memory locations generally start at numeric location 0.

The "pointers" given are interesting in that all the bytes are printable ASCII characters. In this case (and assuming network byte order), ":(!:", "c99,", and "sch.". It is also interesting that the values that are followed by punctuation each end in that punctuation.

Transcript

[Cueball is playing a video game, with Black Hat standing behind him.]

Cueball: Man, I suck at this game. Can you give me a few pointers?

Black Hat: 0x3A28213A 0x6339392C, 0x7363682E.

Cueball: I hate you.

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