15 November 2025

x-clacks-overhead

Murray Champernowne in GNU:

By prepending the dead man's name with the key commands "G", "N", and "U", it causes the machines to constantly ping the message around the network, never arriving at a final destination. It's effectively a hidden message, stored as part of the "overhead", a stream of metadata that the company behind the Clacks uses to relay internal messages to different parts of the network. The result is that the message "GNU John Dearheart" becomes this core part of the network itself, keeping John's memory alive every time an engineer or operator sees it fly by in the metadata.

Murray's post has prompted me to commit to two things for 2026:

1. Finally pick up Terry Pratchett's Discworld books.
2. Start broadcasting an x-clacks-overhead message from this site.¹

That's all. Thanks Murray!

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