Great, Someone Managed to Sign Facebook's PGP Key with an ASCII Goatse

On Monday, a little bit out of the blue, Facebook jumped on the "encrypt all the things" bandwagon and announced that it will offer the option of sending all notification emails to users using PGP encryption.

The announcement was generally well-received—though not by everyone.

If you visit Facebook's public key on the MIT server, you'll see a ASCII of a slightly mangled representation of Goatse, an internet shock meme that consists of a man bent over stretching his asshole.

It's unclear who did it, but the prank is not new. Users can sign public PGP encryption keys to verify that they really belong to the purported owner, or leave notes. To draw a Goatse on a PGP key, a prankster simply has to sign the key multiple times with different ASCII strings, so that when they are all one of top of each other, they show the drawing of a Goatse.

Somebody used the same technique to draw a Goatse on one of the PGP keys of Adrian Lamo, the hacker who tipped authorities of Chelsea Manning's leak, and led to her arrest. This made Lamo very unpopular, to say the least, in the hacker community.

The attempt to draw Goatse on Facebook's key "is a fucking disgrace to the art of goatpgp," Andrew Auernheimer, also known a Weev, a notorious hacker who was part of a tongue-in-cheek security group called Goatse Security, told Motherboard.

But the Goatse on Lamo's PGP key, Auernheimer said, is what a "proper attempt looks like."

Looks like the pranksters that tried to troll Facebook have a lot to learn in the art of drawing Goatse in ASCII.