A unique archive, dubbed the "hardest tarball," has been created using a single GNU tar invocation, which can be extracted in 8 distinct ways depending on the tool used, including GNU tar, BusyBox, and various programming language libraries. The archive is constructed from three files, exploiting the behavior of hard links and pax headers to create ambiguity in the file structure. Specifically, a hard link is renamed to a file with a non-ASCII name, triggering the creation of a pax header with a size record that overrides the default size, leading to differing interpretations by various tar extraction tools, resulting in 8 different extraction outcomes.