A Researcher Discovers a Hidden Bash Script in a Uniqlo T-Shirt Designed by Akamai

A researcher has decoded the obfuscated bash script printed on the back of a t-shirt sold in Uniqlo stores, discovering that behind the jumble of characters lies not malware, but a genuine terminal easter egg. The garment is part of the Peace For All line, designed by Akamai, and at first glance, the alphanumeric block on the back seems anything but harmless.

The front of the t-shirt features a simple heart enclosed in curly braces. The back, however, displays a block of text that starts with a shebang (#!/bin/bash) followed by a base64 encoded string passed to the eval command via base64 --decode. A structure that, out of context, is exactly how malicious code is typically distributed.

Transcribing the block of text from the photo wasn't easy: Base64 does not have error correction, so just one incorrect character could render the string unusable. The researcher cross-referenced three optical recognition methods, including the integrated "Circle and Search" function on Android, Tesseract, and a language model, comparing results to eliminate transcription errors before attempting the decoding.

What Does the Hidden Script in the T-Shirt's Fabric Really Do?

Once decoded, the string returns a commented bash script that is anything but hostile. The code prints a congratulatory message in English and Japanese, then initiates an infinite loop that scrolls the text "?PEACE?FOR?ALL?" across the terminal following a sinusoidal trajectory, with a color gradient transitioning from cyan to orange.

The collaboration between Akamai and Uniqlo is not the first in the Peace For All series, a charity project launched by the Japanese retailer in June 2022. According to the company, the beige color of the t-shirt recalls the plastic casings of early computers used to run the internet, while the heart on the front symbolizes the positive use of the network. The code on the back, Akamai explains, is a tribute to Linux, described as "the open-source language of the internet."

Kim Salem-Jackson, head of marketing at Akamai, linked the initiative to the company's mission to "protect and power life online," in line with the goal of building a safer and more connected network. Profits from the Peace For All line fund humanitarian organizations like UNHCR, Plan International, and Save the Children: as of January 2025, sales had surpassed 6.6 million t-shirts sold and over $12.8 million donated.

On the typographic front, the researcher initially attributed the font printed on the t-shirt to Consolas, only to later correct himself after receiving an online tip: the font used is actually Roboto Mono, identifiable by the shape of the "g."

This is not an isolated discovery: other enthusiasts had already deciphered the same script in the past. Moreover, the collection also includes another t-shirt variant whose printed code is partially truncated and, in fact, not compilable: a detail that the researcher attributes to a likely printing error.