Today’s stupid geek trick takes us to the unseen technical world beneath the surface of your favorite websites, and shows us how real geeks hide secret messages in the HTTP protocol headers. We’re talking Serious geek cred here.

What Are You Talking About?

The thing you probably don’t realize is that behind the scenes, your web browser sends a request to the web server using the HTTP protocol, which is nothing more than a pre-defined set of commands in text format so the browser and web server can communicate.

…but that’s really boring. Which is why the geeks that run various web sites decided to hide messages in those headers just to see if anybody would notice. And some of them are rather fun.

How to See the Hidden Headers

There’s a number of ways to access these headers, the easiest for real geeks is to pop open the command prompt and use the curl utility, available on Linux, Mac OS X, or even Windows—if you don’t mind downloading an additional utility.

The other way to view them is with the Live HTTP Headers add-on for Firefox.