Anticryptography

Characters get complex

Nov 7, 2020 media characters unicode

I originally posted this in 2016 and thought it still resonated today. Characters Characters have been the life blood of communications between people since the creation of written language. Limited sets of characters have been key to simple printing and communication with humans via machines. For example, English only …

PBM, the crayons of image formats

Nov 1, 2020 file-format images

Image standards, so many to choose from… Even before people had powerful graphics abilities in their PCs (remember until VGA was widely adopted in 90’s most PCs only supported 1, 4 or 16 colors) there were a literal sea of image formats. Most of them you will have never seen, heard of or used. Many were …

Archive format

Oct 31, 2020 Archiving File-format

This isn’t a new problem. If you are going to archive something successfully you need a format that will be accessible for years to come. This is a fundamental concept of anticryptography. It goes way back also. The library of Alexandria was an immense effort that was made possible by a simple format, ink on …

Encoding images

Oct 26, 2020 anticryptography images aliens

Note: The cover image is from Wikipedia and produced by Arne Nordmann An image is worth a thousand words and can take a million to send We all love images. They convey a lot of information very quickly and are often easier to digest than the written word. Our brains will accept them as fact, even when they …

Basic numbers

Oct 26, 2020 anticryptography aliens

In the previous version of this blog I focused specifically on the concepts of anticryptography. I had written a post about the universality around numbers. While I was thinking of reposting the original it became obvious that the subject was important to me and needed to be rewritten. How to talk to aliens While …

Metablogging

Oct 25, 2020 blogging Machine Learning Artificial intelligence meta

OpenAI has been doing some very interesting work around Machine Learning (ML) and automated text composition. The release of GPT-2 showed what could be done by building a large model and training it with a large corpus of examples. That corpus was from something called WebText which was around 8 million Reddit posts …

Carving in stone

Oct 18, 2020 archiving media

I originally posted a version of this in the summer of 2016. I’m reposting it with some minor edits. A classic way to make something permanent is to carve it in stone. So much so we hold it in our language with phrases like “It isn’t written in stone yet.” Using a chisel and hammer the shapes …

Blockchain

Oct 17, 2020 blockchain inappropriate use

Over the last 5 years I have talked to a lot of companies that have been working with blockchain technology. While blockchain is an amazing concept, as are most implementations, many of those uses made no sense. In fact a few of the companies later admitted the only reason they were using blockchain was to increase …

Code is data

Oct 16, 2020 Programming Archiving

It used to run… I have seen a number of reports in the media about the aging of source code recently and it has had me thinking. If you can’t run code, whatever relies on it’s execution dies with the code. Sure there is always the option of rewriting the code in a more modern language, but that …

Aww, snap

Oct 6, 2020 applications packages

In the olden days… When you need a program or application it has to get installed some how. We used to just copy the file over from floppies or tape (before that software for me was delivered on cassette tape or cartridge). That was because we only needed the executable. There weren’t supporting files for …