Philotic Web

It has been a while since i have read any BeanVerse...
But thinking back i remember Petra doing some whacky programming stuff with the dragon image...

now i think i know a thing or two about computer and images especially. But i do not know what it is that she was doing with the image...

Is Card messing with me? and goin all sci-fi dude? or is that some remenant of applications past?

can someone please help?
cuz truth be told i wanna do that too...

I think what you're referring to is the message in the image that was designed for Bean to find... right? So there was the dragon, the "clever poem" and the encoded message once Bean knew to look for it.

Unfortunately, I don't have the books here to quote or anything, but essentially, the dragon and poem were just to lure Bean into looking at the visual image of the dragon more closely, looking for a message of some sort. The message she "encrypted" was just a binary code (as I recall) playing with the size / color of the markings on the dragon, which she knew he could understand if he only noticed them in the first place.

I don't remember the message. Maybe it was her location? Basically, it was "HELP - HERE I AM" but I don't remember the specifics! It's been too long I guess. I need to go back and reread it!

PS - I thought it appropriate that I answer, since my avatar is that dragon... I only wish I remembered more details about it!

iirc the message was encoded in what looked like compression artifacts

i do remember what her purpose was, I was just curious about the techno side... the process itself...

and what are compression artifacts?

Little nasty squares on jpegs that appear when the image is resized badly... You know, when a pic looks like its a close-up a of a really crappy webcam...?

thats just rasterization...

i mean was petra hiding messages in between the pixels themselves? it didn't make any sense to me, if achilles had the battle kids under complete surveillance, how was she able to manipulate code and play with machine language.

I mean i can't even log on to myspace at school... lol

It is a "phantom" that results from reducing an image (digitally).

A compression artifact (or artefact) is the result of an aggressive data compression scheme applied to an image, audio, or video that discards some data that may be too complex to store in the available data-rate, or may have been incorrectly determined by an algorithm to be of little subjective importance, but is in fact objectionable to the user. Artifacts are often a result of the latent errors inherent in lossy data compression.

So basically, Petra's code was camouflaged to look like something that happens by mistake while reducing an image to upload it onto the net, but it wasn't a mistake at all of course...

thats just rasterization...

i mean was petra hiding messages in between the pixels themselves? it didn't make any sense to me, if achilles had the battle kids under complete surveillance, how was she able to manipulate code and play with machine language.

I mean i can't even log on to myspace at school... lol

Look the term 'compressions artifacts' up on wikipedia...

my question is how bean decrypted it... did card go into it?

my question is how bean decrypted it... did card go into it?

He got Chuck Norris to stare at it until it turned into a Magic-Eye and revealed the code to them.

Ooh! That's beautiful. Quick, let's take a picture before it goes away again! *gets misty eyed* Goodness gracious me. A dead meme.

I like the magic eye theory... i love those things. and they come so easily to me....

I was always able to find the kangaroo and the star in the background!

my question is how bean decrypted it... did card go into it?

As I recall... he noticed the slight distortion around the altered area of the image, looked at the data around it, and somehow deduced the code that Petra used by just looking at it for awhile. OSC went into some details, but I can't even remember what the code was, so I can't remember. Something involving dropping all vowels, among other things, I think.

Try opening that picture with WinRAR, change the extension to .rar if you have to. Not quite what Petra was up to, but similar.

oooh! how would one go about doing that

Which OS are you running? It's simple to do in Linux and Windows I know, and I assume doing it on a Mac is similar to Linux, but I'm not sure.

os x. similar to linux.

Put the archive (.zip, .rar, .7z) and the pic (.jpg, .gif, .png) in the same location, and navigate to that location within a terminal, and once you're issuing commands in that location, use:

cat archive.rar >> picture.jpg

Then, to open it, change the extension and open it with whatever archive manager is appropriate.

Try opening that picture with WinRAR, change the extension to .rar if you have to. Not quite what Petra was up to, but similar.

Not really; I'd consider this to be a completely different thing. This only works because the RAR format ignores all garbage it encounters before it hits the RAR header, and most programs for most image formats ignore garbage after the image data. You're simply putting together two different formats. Petra was altering the image data itself, with a visible result.

well... it's a similar form of stenography. it's just that it takes about 10 seconds to figure it out, so it only stops users who use the "usual" tools (web browser of picture viewer) from getting at it.

I'm assuming I'm doing something wrong because Stuffit doesn't want to open your hidden rar. I've seen these things before and I never have been able to get them to work for me.

Wasn't there a pwebber at one point who actually did make the dragon pic complete with encoded message? I seem to recall this.

that's because stuffit sucks.

use http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html

Wasn't there a pwebber at one point who actually did make the dragon pic complete with encoded message? I seem to recall this.

Yes, I believe so. And the Dragon I modified to be my avatar was that dragon, as far as I know (although I didn't make it). But the encoded message was a bit more "blatant" than a mere "compression artifact" I think. But it's been too long for me to remember who or how or when or what...

(As I recall, there is some Morse code along the spine... or was.)

well... it's a similar form of stenography.

I think you mean steganography. And... the only thing I see similar between them is that they're both forms of steganography.

what's two letters between friends?

That's a pretty big assumption you're making.

My friends and I actually send each other messages embedded into pictures. I'm pretty sure that all we're doing is attaching binary code onto the end of the picture's info, but I'm not exactly sure. It's really simple programming.

I thought that she just turned it into standard ascii code, then turned that into 2 bit code, then shifted pixels in one part of the image to represent that - one line was just binary pixels.

Wasn't there a pwebber at one point who actually did make the dragon pic complete with encoded message? I seem to recall this.

Yes, I believe so. And the Dragon I modified to be my avatar was that dragon, as far as I know (although I didn't make it). But the encoded message was a bit more "blatant" than a mere "compression artifact" I think. But it's been too long for me to remember who or how or when or what...

(As I recall, there is some Morse code along the spine... or was.)

I cannot remember whose this is. Someone on Pweb II had posted this .gif and I liked it so much I borrowed it. It has been lying dormant on my olde computer for four years or so. I think this is the image you both were referencing.

Whoa, that's so cool! I'm borrowing it, if nobody minds...

I cannot remember whose this is. Someone on Pweb II had posted this .gif and I liked it so much I borrowed it. It has been lying dormant on my olde computer for four years or so. I think this is the image you both were referencing.

Any way to repost this image or have it messaged to me?? It appears dead now...

It has been a while since i have read any BeanVerse...
But thinking back i remember Petra doing some whacky programming stuff with the dragon image...

now i think i know a thing or two about computer and images especially. But i do not know what it is that she was doing with the image...

Is Card messing with me? and goin all sci-fi dude? or is that some remenant of applications past?

can someone please help?
cuz truth be told i wanna do that too...

Back to the original question... What Petra did was take an image, and erase a line of pixels from it, then fill in that now empty line of pixels with a new line of pixels. This new line's placement and arrangement corresponded to letters, and functions as her message. She knew that Bean could figure it out if anyone could. The attached poem and the dragon picture were hints about the content of the message; the dragon obviously corresponding to dragon army, and the poem mentioning 'lucky end...' corresponding to Ender. In this way, Bean knew that there WAS a message, and the line of pixels that didn't match with the original picture of the Dragon was the only thing that could be a message. It was designed to look like 'noise' in the picture, a problem with the file that happens a lot when you resize a picture and the quality changes. Bean knew that the incorrect line of pixels was a message, and was eventually able to match the pixel placement to letters and numbers that gave him Petra's location and a reference to Peter, among other things.

Check it out, this kind of encryption made the news: http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/201 ... linephotos

Wow, it has been awhile since I have been on here. Unfortunately, I have lost the image. Sorry to those who wished to see it.