Binary data visualization | Hacker News Reader

Binary data visualization

codisec.com

196 pointsdmit26 comments

Really cool, I really like that binary data, with all it's abstractions, still creates visual meaning. Also reminds me of pixid [1], which sadly never got any traction on HN. Plus the common example, in which CBC encryption fails [2], is definitively something to throw in.

[1]: https://github.com/FireyFly/pixd [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation...

It's not CBC but ECB.

Uh, missed that - Thank's for pointing out.

There was no way to argue with Gentry; the juice was his, because he was the one who fiddled it out of the Fission Authority; without Gentry's monthly passes on the console, the ritual moves that kept the Authority convinced Factory was somewhere else, some place that paid its bill, there wouldn't be any electricity.

And Gentry was so strange anyway, he thought, feeling his knees creak as he stood up and took the Judge's control unit from his jacket pocket. Gentry was convinced that cyberspace had a Shape, an overall total form. Not that that was the weirdest idea Slick had ever run across, but Gentry had this obsessive conviction that the Shape mattered totally . The apprehension of the Shape was Gentry's grail.

Slick had once stimmed a Net/Knowledge sequence about what shape the universe was; Slick figured the universe was everything there was, so how could it have a shape? If it had a shape, then there was something around it for it to have a shape in , wasn't there? And if that something was something, then wasn't that part of the universe too? This was exactly the kind of thing you didn't want to get into with Gentry, because Gentry could tie your head in knots. But Slick didn't think cyberspace was anything like the universe anyway; it was just a way of representing data. The Fission Authority had always looked like a big red Aztec pyramid, but it didn't have to; if the FA wanted it to, they could have it look like anything. Big companies had copyrights on how their stuff looked. So how could you figure the whole matrix had a particular shape? And why should it mean anything if it did?

He touched the unit's power stud; the Judge, ten meters away, hummed and trembled.

I saw this and instantly thought of Gibson.. glad I wasn't the only one ;) We need more of this kinda thing..

Totally agree

Seems to be open source: https://github.com/codilime/veles

A nice summary of other simialr tools: https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6003/...

Is this using the same techniques as the old mostly-vaporware "cantor dust" project? It looks very similar.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/2apw6l/...

Yes. If you follow the link at the top of the page to the explanation post[1], it says at the bottom:

> Veles visualizations were inspired by Christopher Domas’ talk from Derbycon 2012.

> Check out the video of his presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bM3Gut1hIk.

[1]: https://codisec.com/binary-visualization-explained/

Relatedly, a similar technique is used to assess the quality of random number generators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_test

\tangent (properly) Compressed data is indistinguishable from noise. This is why the universe's background radiation is actually alien communication from all over the place.

It's not (at least in most cases): https://codisec.com/compression-vs-encryption-visual-recogni...

LZ-based compression won't look like noise.

[Tim Borgmann - Mind Over Eye][https://vimeo.com/145264053]

This is beautiful and fascinating! It Reminds me a lot of this.

Also, can this be used in any functionally meaningful way for code-analysis and/or conceptualizing? Animating a sequence of code execution?

There's probably a potential in visualizing code execution, see e.g. this: https://twitter.com/doegox/status/811934079620878336

Reminds me of a talk I saw at a conference a while back about doing it with fractals. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6694490/

Reminds me of svforth[0].

[0] https://github.com/ephsec/svforth/blob/master/README.md

They keep spelling "Cartesian" as "Carthesian".

Perhaps they're getting it mixed-up with Carthusian.

That's not binary data at all! That is data stored in a binary, but the data itself is hexadecimal.

Binary like "this file may be binary doyou still wish to view it" I guess

Actually they explicitly pull out bytes (each byte is 8 bits, or 2 hexadecimal digits). So really it’s ducentahexaquinquagesimal (if Wikipedia can be trusted about the word for base 256). https://codisec.com/binary-visualization-explained/

But the files themselves mostly consist of data elements (like numbers) which are larger than that, e.g. 8-byte double-precision floating point numbers.

When people say “binary data” what they mean is that it’s a machine-readable data format, not a human-readable text-based file.

"Binary data" means, in actuality, data that are only expressed using two bits. In common parlance, this means 1 and 0, or presence and absence. Using anything larger requires a different label to remain accurate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_data#In_computer_scienc...

Isn't this just arguing semantics? A byte written in hexadecimal notation is just a convenient human-readable(ish) way to represent a sequence of 8 bits of binary data.

Information is about patterns in sequences of things.

If you are displaying patterns in a sequence of 16 things (2 bytes), you are no longer in the realm of binary information. The information has a structure on top of it that makes patterns of 16 things meaningful, so that you can plot them on a 256-256-256 cube and retain or explore some of that structure.

If I'm dealing with "binary data" (in a simple case, whether a light is on or off under certain other _binary_ conditions), I am not interested in patterns of 16 bits together since that constitutes some higher level of structure in the data that may or may not be important to me. At this time the indivisible atomic information bit becomes a pattern of 16 bits, not just 1, and we have left the realm of "binary."

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