The mysterious site c0d3.attorney has almost nothing linking to it, no connection to other Web content, and no indication of who created it. What audience seems to be primarily people who stumble across it by accidentally triggering web searches of randomly mashed keys (like this one posted to reddit's WeirdWebsites). The site's content is not only generative, but incomprehensible, except perhaps to another algorithmic system; it's a mix of simple geometric images and long tracts of patternless text. The oddest aspect of this is perhaps that the site claims the textual content are working Malbolge programs. This image (a "disclaimer") appears on every page:
c0d3.Attorney's disclaimer, legal.gif
For those unfamiliar with Malbolge, it is considered the most difficult language to program in. It is ternary (base 3), and self-encrypting: after each command runs, it changes its state into something else. I interviewed Ben Olmstead about his work in 2014. Malbolge programs have only been written algorithmically, it is far too complex to write "by hand." As such, it's associated with encryption. It is a reminder of the intertwined histories of computers and encryption, and how encryption is something that computers do quite well natively.
However, the strings of text on the site are not working Malbolge programs, not using the original interpreter (140 or so lines of C that Olmstead wrote in a single afternoon) or more recent ones (like this nice one with a nice visualization of the virtual machine). The lack of information, the uselessness of the text, and the surreal aesthetic of c0d3.attorney gives the site a numbers-station-like mystery. Or perhaps it's because Malbolge is firmly established as the choice of super-villains, at least in the world of tv show Elementary:
from Season 1, Episode 10 of Elementary, "Leviation" (2012)
Here is a taste of the site's "Malbolge":
MGW xKCh(MsTH/LWkD PgjQ/ DPk)nYip RXbn"nXrG~GbX$lmQ)Chx+ hLf^eARQ YDsc|Jytc`mpbT^ hMXv fIpq oJf(GgxR<GDS nLcw\NUQ( MjR*bOYZ=UWC~pSFt Krl deO|Vjg. Clu>FuKN@kOE{vLjA-Gdfa\ aFLa!iMH?SNWN ZSEB*ZgC(opz@hbJW BZi]Yxo MHEv:WDV.MJg} Faf UpyL*CFt?yTpL@HRZa Qsr XsCm)tBgW lMz MxIa; iOs<KxO'PksB'kOqM wjeK`uVqI_fIu= QNaA nHZc_rVUx|XisB\gowh[
duJ]IVl HhDQ,GzVb'bbi+qke_uMXc/ IyD?xBR"KAJ vhoB\zmvH(VvB= Nph~HSj,Rpy)HpZY|Zrt>KKRo CDE+ eTP kPAO TCn~aas&cXC hKY XUf uRhn%FatP|ymb[fNWm:ESVA Dhq<LGx,twc wVQ/JZRE?HLU: AKPF\dOa wmYU RpQ@TPPE~ ixj;WaND_kQLC qgww.zQG[YoKV oLnD~dizQ.esLe#plo;YBMq^ UFH BpP^HEk_PcLp;MXNx fRMn CMEc_ The site has popped up on several cryptography-related discussions, in one case a bitcoin treasure hunt, although it appears that the action that brought those seeking Bitcoin to it was an accident, one encrypted string matching part of another:
I translated the Morse code and have got RKRWSWGSGGKWOOGUSWGOORGSGT
Which has lead me to http://c0d3.attorney/0.1?m=140
Think there's a link here. This is to do with the red ribbons and the butterfly lock. There's a key in one of these programs.
The site has an internal logic. There are the "0.1" pages, which take an int in the querystring like so for parameter m: http://c0d3.attorney/0.1?m=899 Each has two images, which are php scripts that generate images based on it, _0 and _1, both of which can be passed negative numbers and will still return something: http://c0d3.attorney/_0.php?m=-3 The 0.1 pages go from 1 to 1250. Then there is the a.html page and a2.html, a2 takes an i parameter of any number, and have several images, including a2.php, which takes an i parameter of seemingly any number: http://c0d3.attorney/a2.php?i=1.0E+17. The a2 pages have text like CaseS.II.[the number of the i parameter], and a pages like CaseS. A2 have text (as image) saying "The second level archive: programs in Malbolge by the project c0d3.Attorney," a catalog of sorts of Malbolge programs that don't work. Are cases tied to attorneys? What does it all mean?
Zombie formalism making a comeback (one of the great many, very similar, generative images)
One guess is that it means absolutely nothing.
The images are most likely generated on the fly (they are returned by php scripts), but it's most likely true that the "Malbolge" is similarly generated. After all, there are unlikely 1250 functioning Malbolge programs ever written, so the likelihood that someone had discovered a "weakness" in Malbolge that allowed them to create so many working programs -- and then decided to keep that secret and post it on an obscure website, as a secret message to some secret Malbolge community, seems quite unlikely.
But then what is the point? If it's someone's weird art project, there would likely be, if not more clear attempts to get the site visibility, or at least the word Malbolge in text (rather than as an image), to appear in web searches. It's possible it has some other use; the YouTube channel Webdriver Torso (currently with 130k followers), posts only videos of red and blue rectangles and different pitches for reasons that were similarly mysterious until it was revealed as an automated account created by Google engineers to test the upload mechanism in YouTube. This did little to hurt its popularity, and it was included in net art collection The Printed Web* by Paul Soulellis [full disclosure: I also have content in this series]. Many videos, like this one, have hundreds of comments.
It might just be about the ads (the only coherent content on the site is about cookies and ads), collecting the piddling revenue on the occasional random person stumbling by (in which case I am enabling this by posting to it). It is fitting that the content has been swallowed up into other spam sites, which repackage c0d3.attorney's nonsense with pictures of Uggs. Although who knows, maybe there really is some bitcoin wallet hidden away in some corner of the site. Whatever it's story, I'm thankful for sites like this keeping the Web weird.
h/t to @noob_studios