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.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/FireyFly/pixd" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/FireyFly/pixd</a>
[2]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation#/media/File:Tux_ecb.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>He touched the unit's power stud; the Judge, ten meters away, hummed and
trembled.
Seems to be open source: <a href="https://github.com/codilime/veles" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/codilime/veles</a><p>A nice summary of other simialr tools: <a href="https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6003/visualizing-elf-binaries" rel="nofollow">https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6003/...</a>
Is this using the same techniques as the old mostly-vaporware "cantor dust" project? It looks very similar.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/2apw6l/what_happened_to_cantor_dust/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/2apw6l/...</a>
Relatedly, a similar technique is used to assess the quality of random number generators: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_test" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_test</a>
\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.
[Tim Borgmann - Mind Over Eye][<a href="https://vimeo.com/145264053" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/145264053</a>]<p>This is beautiful and fascinating! It Reminds me a lot of this.<p>Also, can this be used in any functionally meaningful way for code-analysis and/or conceptualizing? Animating a sequence of code execution?
Reminds me of a talk I saw at a conference a while back about doing it with fractals.
<a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6694490/" rel="nofollow">http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6694490/</a>
Reminds me of svforth[0].<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/ephsec/svforth/blob/master/README.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ephsec/svforth/blob/master/README.md</a>