Thursday, May 03, 2007

fun with numbers

so the powers that be want to suppress distribution of a particular 32-digit hexadecimal number. but there are lots of ways to distribute such numbers online, especially when people are committed to keeping the number in circulation.

for example, one could take a photograph, and then using a hex editor, one could surreptitiously hide the number in the image data. or one could go completely balls-out and just replace all of the pixel data in the image with the number, in order to see what sorts of patterns emerge. one could even do this multiple times with multiple images.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It was making the rounds of twitter posts yesterday, and I've also noticed the number as an alt tag behind several recent lolcats posts in the last couple days, too.

arratik said...

i'm sure that by the time i actually get an hd-dvd player or drive, that code will be obsolete.

it's kinda fun, though, watching all of the creative ways to use those hex numbers. my favorite was a work of "steganopoetry", using the first word or letter of each line to indicate each digit.

if i could figure out how the frak to get ardour working on my computer, i'd convert the number to midi data... surely someone's already done that.

Wilson46201 said...

I thought the cleverest hiding was the "hiding in plain sight" by registering the complete number as a domain name. The domain owner said he couldn't say what the significance of the name was though!
http://09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63.com/