Square Zero: hide silly messages in decorative borders | Hacker News Reader

Square Zero: hide silly messages in decorative borders

danwilkerson.com

41 pointsdanwilkerson13 comments

I prefer the codes of Chris Seivey/ Frank Sidebottom.

Only, it too GCHQ to finally solve them.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-47907370

I'm confused by the card "hope you soar in 2024". This card was mailed this year? I don't understand the footnote about 2/19. Was it sent in February 2024 and just posted about now?

Correct.

I used to do this when I designed rave flyers in the 1990s.

tell us more?

I encoded secret messages in rave flyers I designed in the mid-late 1990's, in Los Angeles. I couldn't tell you what the messages said now, I just remember that I did it. The messages were encoded in a border design, much like the subject of this article. I may still have an example somewhere, but finding it in my digital hoard is going to be a problem.

cool! you might like https://www.phatmedia.co.uk/

some cutting edge stuff for the time, as well as some awful design!

I once worked at an architecture firm where one of the principles was problematic and my coworker who worked with him directly was constantly cleaning up his messes, etc. (Don't worry, the guy was just a tool, this wasn't an HR matter.)

I have always been a "hacker" at heart. Although I couldn't express my thoughts on the guy publicly, I DID add a new linetype to the file which sets them in Autocad which had a rude message about him. The scale was so small It looked like a solid line, but if you were in the file and zoomed in you could see it repeated over and over.

Thinking back, I don't know if any files with that linetype went out to consultants, but if they did the consultants either didn't catch it or kept my secret.

Looks great, thanks for sharing this!

extremely cool

I’ve seen this embedded within geographic paths that form polygons. There are many points along each side of a polygon, arranged so that each segment length is longer (1) or shorter (0) than the one before. Decrypts to two floats, offsets from the first point.

Oh, interesting. What was the meaning of the offsets?

So, you take the Lat and Lon of point[0] and add the offset vector. This locates with precision, like X marks the spot.

We could store an arbitrary path in a database in the clear, and only with a decryption key find a dropped point.

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