A researcher decoded the obfuscated bash script printed on the back of a t-shirt sold in stores Uniqlodiscovering that behind the jumble of characters there is no malware hidden, but a real terminal Easter egg. The boss is part of the line Peace For Alldesigned by Akamaiand at first glance the alphanumeric block on the back seems anything but harmless.
The front of the shirt features a simple heart enclosed in curly braces. The back, however, shows a block of text that opens with one shebang (#!/bin/bash) followed by a string encoded in base64 passed to command eval through base64 --decode. A structure that, out of context, is exactly how malicious code is distributed.
Transcribing the block of text from the photo was not easy: base64 does not provide error correction, so one wrong character was enough to make the string unusable. The researcher crossed three optical recognition methods, the one integrated into the “Circle and Search” function of Android, Tesseract and a language model, comparing the results to eliminate transcription errors before attempting decoding.
What does the script really do hidden in the fabric of the shirt
Once decoded, the string returns a commented and far from hostile bash script. The code prints a congratulatory message in English and Japanese, then starts an infinite loop that scrolls the writing “?PEACE?FOR?ALL?” along the terminal following a sinusoidal trajectory, with a color gradient that goes from cyan to orange.
The collaboration between Akamai and Uniqlo is not the first in the series Peace For Allthe charity project launched by the Japanese retailer in June 2022. According to the company, the beige color of the t-shirt recalls the plastic bodies of the first computers used to run the internet, while the heart on the front symbolizes the positive use of the internet. The code on the back, Akamai explains, is a tribute to Linux, defined as “the open source language of the internet”.
Kim Salem-Jackson, Akamai’s head of marketing, linked the operation to the company’s mission to “protect and fuel life online”, in line with the goal of building a more secure and connected network. Profits from the Peace For All line fund humanitarian organizations such as UNHCRPlan International and Save the Children: in January 2025 the collection had exceeded 6.6 million t-shirts sold and the $12.8 million donated.
On the typographical front, the researcher had initially attributed the font printed on the t-shirt to Consolas, only to later correct himself after a report received online: the font used is actually Roboto Monorecognizable by the shape of the “g”.
This is not an isolated discovery: other enthusiasts had already deciphered the same script in the past. Furthermore, the collection also includes another variant of t-shirt whose printed code is partially truncated and, in fact, not fillable: a detail that the researcher attributes to a probable error during the printing phase.
