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It's a Mystery

So it's been a really long time since I posted anything. There has been a lot going on lately, but very little of it has been "blog-worthy". This may not be, either, but I'm okay with that.

One of the many projects I've been working on the last few weeks is a way to encrypt text (or any data, really) inside a computer image. I got the idea from news coverage of those Russian spies, and figured if a bunch of Russian spies could figure out how to do it, I could too. It turns out I was right.

The following two images look the same. The only difference is that one of them contains the entire text of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" encrypted inside it. If you were to load the image into my encryption application it would pull out all 326,000 characters and allow you to read the book.

Amazingly, the text takes up no space in the image, nor does it change the appearance in any appreciable way. If you zoom in on each image and go from one to the next, you'll see tiny changes in a few of the pixels, but you can't tell the difference in the pictures at their normal resolution.

Anyway, I'm excited about it, and I'm looking for ways to use it in a productive manner. There are probably only 2 or 3 people reading this that understand what I've done, and maybe only one of those that cares, but at least it's a new post, right?



2 comments:

Robert said...

Wow. I mean dang. We need to put you to work solving Kryptos. Annie will probably kill me for saying that, cuz you'll spend way too much time on it like I have, but, between the two of us, I think you have a better chance of solving it. beari.

Kristin Sokol said...

If I find out you are really a Russian spy after all these years...well, it will actually explain a lot.

But hey...this is really cool. I am not sure what it means, but I trust that you have done something cool here so congratulations.

You know what I've been thinking about lately...Driving to BHS with you and Randy in your tooth paste colored Tempo listening to They Might be Giants. Just thought I'd mention it.