[-empyre-] my experience with digital objects

[Ange Albertini]

Hi,

1/ digital is not always 0/1 :)
I refer here to the way digital information is stored. On a floppy
disk, a bit is stored by 2 "spaces" of magnetic flux. if the flux
stays the same within a threshold, it's a 0 bit. if it changes, it's a
1 bit. if for any reasons, the flux changes outside of the usual
threshold for these spaces, then its possible that this part of the
disk is read once at a 0, once at an X: so called 'fuzzy bits' or
'weak bits' could be also written as X, as in the 'unknown value' of a
ternary bit. This was commonly used as copy protection: read the same
bit twice, if they're identical, it's a fake copy, because a reader
would read some values and just write them down again as standard 0/1
bits.
one could actually write such fuzzy bits yourself with a standard
drive by writing a floppy track once by slowing down your drive, then
once again after speeding up your drive.
It's not related to my current experiences, but maybe some people
don't know that binary is not always 0 and 1 (when seen as stored on a
support), so I thought it was worth mentioning.

ok, from this point on I'll just speak about 0/1 only ;)

2/ bypassing standard assumptions about files (aka common digital objects)
my job is about computer security and its tools. Most tools, like most
humans, see files just like any object, ie independently:
a painting is a painting, a table is a table, a ball is a ball. but
nothing prevents you to pain a ball on the surface of a table.
and similarly, what comes out of the washing machine is expected as
randomly ordered. exactly like the output of encryption or
compression.
So, by personal and professional curiosity, I carve curious digital
objects, like the table with a painted ball.
and I share them so that people can realize they are possible, and
test their tool and knowledge with them.
there's no real goal, except doing something that is artistically
interesting (such as a JAR JAR BINK polyglot
https://twitter.com/angealbertini/status/500318779318861826  just for
fun) or that defies the standard assumptions (like my JPEG that
becomes a PNG after AES encryption and a PDF after 3DES decryption,
which is a bit like putting a painting in the washing machine and
getting a table once the machine finished its job).

3/ making (some) files beautiful
many geeks usually prefer to use text editors and ugly graphics, but
they still appreciate nifty graphics.
I think it's mostly due to artists (as in, paper and paint) and
reversers are usually opposite cultures. pure virtuality vs technical
reality.
But even reverser have kids and kids understand better when explained
visually. So that's why I try to simply describe technical
formats in a visually attractive way. also, since I can craft the
files manually, I remove the unnecessary details from the file, so
that it still works, but it's more elegant to be visually described.
Recently, I started to even dispute the standard representation of
binary objects (such as hex editors, with their offset/hex/ascii view)
to something more compact (such as HexII
http://corkami.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/HexII/HexII.png). Less
noise, more relevance, better information, for a better teaching and
sharing of digital objects' knowledge.

Ange