Externalities
Externalities
[This was a dynamic image where the text changed during April 1st. The main title text also changed after the dynamic part was finished, and there are even different title text for different part of the comic. This transcript is of the final version of the comic, (no longer dynamic or changing), as displayed at present on xkcd, there are still four different title texts for specific panels. These four title text are for that reason included here in the transcript.]
[The basic title text for the entire comic is: "This comic went up on April 1st, and the panels changed throughout the day in response to readers doing things like breaking hashes, edited a rapidly-shuffling set of target Wikipedia articles, and donating to Wikimedia Foundation. (The vandalism is over now and CMU won the hashing contest.)" The other three title text are only active over certain panels.]
[The first panel with the caption and Megan below has it's own title text. A part of that panel is a link, and in the section where this link is active there is no title text at all. The title text for the rest of the first panel is: "Happy April 1st, everyone!"]
[A panel with only text is above the first drawing. There is a link on the top part of the text to http://almamater.xkcd.com/ (the link is now broken).] Ahoy, carnegie melonites! Come find your future at Baidu.
[Below, not in a frame, is Megan.] Megan: But nothing about Tiananmen Square.
[Caption floating above the frame of the next panel:] It takes great minds to stifle other great minds. [Ponytail sits at a desk, hand to her chin, with two Cueball-like guys with their hands on the table.] Ponytail: Let's block Canada Cueball-like guys: Sounds good.
[Ponytail crouches on a moving Roomba (labeled) with a steaming mug of coffee in one hand and a smartphone in the other. Above her is a caption. The Roomba makes a noice] We're a convenient four hour drive from New York City (15,000 hours by Roomba.) Whirrrrrrr Roomba
[Ponytail and Hairy corners Cueball as he walks out of a door, and a black haired ponytailed girl is moving towards him wielding a giant butterfly net. There is a caption above them:] Our recruiters are on the hunt for unaware CMU graduates
[The fifth panel has it's own title text only active within (or very close to) the frame. It is: "uic has the third best hash. See the full standings at http://almamater.xkcd.com/best.csv" (The link is now broken)]
[There is a caption above a website application. There is three fields to be filled, with each their caption and text:] or uic graduates, provied any of them manage to fill out the application correctly. Name which one Email forget it Education Riding the L all night long
[Caption floating above the frame of the next panel:] At Baidu, Inc., you'll have the opportunity to work on cutting-edge projects. [Cueball sits at a computer.] Cueball: What does "make dog" do? Off-screen voice: Experimental dog generator. Don't click on it; the default size isn't set, so- *click*
[The last three panels has their own title text, only active within a frame that could contain all three panel. Outside that "frame" (all the way around) is the other title text. Within the title text is: "The dog gains a pound for every $10 donated to the Wikimedia Foundation via this link. Currently at $51135.33."]
[Small insert panel, going in above the next larger panel: Cueball stares at the screen.] Kzzzt *bip* Off-screen voice: Uh oh.
[A giant dog looks down at the desk where the computer once was, now only the wires are left. Cueball, leaning way back in his office chair, holding his hand to his mouth, stares up at it.]
[Again a smaller insert panel above the large one with the dog. A graphic showing two sliders and a dog (similar to the one in the previous panel). Next to the dog with arrows pointing to it are a thermometer graphic and an equation. Below is an e-mail type text and finally a caption. There are arrows over and under "God" and "dogs" between the g and d's.] d(x)=R [email protected] , Inc. Play God with dogs. TM

This was the fourth April fools' comic released by Randall . The previous fools comic was 1037: Umwelt from Sunday April 1st 2012. The next was 1350: Lorenz released on Tuesday April 1st 2014.
This comic isn't a static image - even the title text changes depending on which part of the image you're hovering over. It presented a competition for students to see who could come closest to breaking a Skein hash but also an aid appeal for the Wikimedia Foundation.
There are quite a few references in the comic to Baidu . Baidu is a large Chinese Internet services company that employs thousands, whose shares are publicly traded on world stock exchanges. It's the predominant Internet search provider of China, and is sometimes called the "Google of China". It offers parallels for the Chinese market of many of the services that Google provides and offers its own encyclopedic wiki with a restricted edit policy to serve as a replacement for Wikipedia. Wikipedia reports that Baidu's search engine handled 56% of Chinese internet search queries in Q4 2010. and that in October 2012, Baidu ranked 5th overall in the Alexa Internet rankings. Given that explanation for the Baidu references in #1193 is still solicited for explainxkcd, Baidu apparently is not well known yet among savvy XKCD readers.
Baidu Search results reputedly follow the censorship dictates of the Chinese authorities, causing it to return censored responses to searches for politically sensitive terms like "Tianamen Square massacre" or "Falun Gong" when executed by web browsers that are connected via Chinese ISPs. When you execute such searches via Baidu in the US, the top links returned for these topics do seem to reflect Chinese government sensibilities although the uncensored English language Wikipedia articles for these topics are listed high in the query results. Baidu's reputation for censorship provides background for Megan's reply "but nothing about Tianamen Square" in response to the "Come and find your future at Baidu" employment enticement of panel one and also provides the background to understand the "It takes great minds to stifle other great minds" slogan of the second panel.
The blank regions in the above image are dynamically generated from various sources.
For the two days until comic 1194 appeared, a competition was underway to see who could come closest to breaking a Skein hash .  The first text line of the first panel contains a link to http://almamater.xkcd.com . This page contained the text:
Currently looking for Skein 1024 1024 input matching
On this page, users were invited to enter "Your school's domain name" — presumably intended to be their college alma mater. (At least in the beginning, only a few top-level domains were accepted.) If the user entered an acceptable domain (by xkcd's rules, which apparently changed during the 48 hours of the competition), they could then enter data values one at a time. For each data value entered, xkcd returned a hash value and the number of bits by which it differed from the target value. The object was to achieve the lowest possible number of differing bits, ideally zero.
A ranking page showed the lowest value achieved for each domain name entered, but not the data that achieved it. The first name on the list was substituted in various panels, and the third-place school showed in panel five. No data values were reported by xkcd, but various results were posted by users of the xkcd forums and on other websites, leading to copycat submissions, so that occasionally large numbers of institutions would show the same moderately low value.
After the end of the contest, the data submission page vanished, replaced by the final list of rankings, which shows that Carnegie Mellon University achieved the best score with 384 bits incorrect out of 1024.  The rankings only show a few hundred out of the several thousand domains submitted—presumably Randall chose to chop the copycat submissions off the end of the list, retaining only honestly obtained results.
In some cases, Megan's reply seems to correspond to the company.
The text in the second panel is based on the company in the first panel:
The text in the form varies independently of the text at the top, sometimes related to the organization in 3rd place:
The title text documents the different sources of data in the comic. The different title texts are:
[This was a dynamic image where the text changed during April 1st. The main title text also changed after the dynamic part was finished, and there are even different title text for different part of the comic. This transcript is of the final version of the comic, (no longer dynamic or changing), as displayed at present on xkcd, there are still four different title texts for specific panels. These four title text are for that reason included here in the transcript.]
[The basic title text for the entire comic is: "This comic went up on April 1st, and the panels changed throughout the day in response to readers doing things like breaking hashes, edited a rapidly-shuffling set of target Wikipedia articles, and donating to Wikimedia Foundation. (The vandalism is over now and CMU won the hashing contest.)" The other three title text are only active over certain panels.]
[The first panel with the caption and Megan below has it's own title text. A part of that panel is a link, and in the section where this link is active there is no title text at all. The title text for the rest of the first panel is: "Happy April 1st, everyone!"]
[A panel with only text is above the first drawing. There is a link on the top part of the text to http://almamater.xkcd.com/ (the link is now broken).] Ahoy, carnegie melonites! Come find your future at Baidu.
[Below, not in a frame, is Megan.] Megan: But nothing about Tiananmen Square.
[Caption floating above the frame of the next panel:] It takes great minds to stifle other great minds. [Ponytail sits at a desk, hand to her chin, with two Cueball-like guys with their hands on the table.] Ponytail: Let's block Canada Cueball-like guys: Sounds good.
[Ponytail crouches on a moving Roomba (labeled) with a steaming mug of coffee in one hand and a smartphone in the other. Above her is a caption. The Roomba makes a noice] We're a convenient four hour drive from New York City (15,000 hours by Roomba.) Whirrrrrrr Roomba
[Ponytail and Hairy corners Cueball as he walks out of a door, and a black haired ponytailed girl is moving towards him wielding a giant butterfly net. There is a caption above them:] Our recruiters are on the hunt for unaware CMU graduates
[The fifth panel has it's own title text only active within (or very close to) the frame. It is: "uic has the third best hash. See the full standings at http://almamater.xkcd.com/best.csv" (The link is now broken)]
[There is a caption above a website application. There is three fields to be filled, with each their caption and text:] or uic graduates, provied any of them manage to fill out the application correctly. Name which one Email forget it Education Riding the L all night long
[Caption floating above the frame of the next panel:] At Baidu, Inc., you'll have the opportunity to work on cutting-edge projects. [Cueball sits at a computer.] Cueball: What does "make dog" do? Off-screen voice: Experimental dog generator. Don't click on it; the default size isn't set, so- *click*
[The last three panels has their own title text, only active within a frame that could contain all three panel. Outside that "frame" (all the way around) is the other title text. Within the title text is: "The dog gains a pound for every $10 donated to the Wikimedia Foundation via this link. Currently at $51135.33."]
[Small insert panel, going in above the next larger panel: Cueball stares at the screen.] Kzzzt *bip* Off-screen voice: Uh oh.
[A giant dog looks down at the desk where the computer once was, now only the wires are left. Cueball, leaning way back in his office chair, holding his hand to his mouth, stares up at it.]
[Again a smaller insert panel above the large one with the dog. A graphic showing two sliders and a dog (similar to the one in the previous panel). Next to the dog with arrows pointing to it are a thermometer graphic and an equation. Below is an e-mail type text and finally a caption. There are arrows over and under "God" and "dogs" between the g and d's.] d(x)=R [email protected] , Inc. Play God with dogs. TM
