tomscott.com - @tomscott - No, seriously. Here's how to read text when all you can see is a bunch of 0s and 1s. It's easier than it seems. I... I think I might have gone off the deep end a bit here.
The thing is, it'd be even cooler if you implemented a randomizer in your alphabet. What I mean is, instead of your alphabet being a=1 b=2 c=3 (etc) you go h=1 q=2 f=3 (etc; continue for all 26 letters.)
@@JonesNate That would be way harder to remember though, and would require either way too much dedication or a decoder; A decoder would take too long to write with, and would probably get discovered by a teacher more easily. Such measures would only need to be implemented if your teacher teaches computer science.
***** EDIT: oops, i literally just posted a blank comment by accident! i can't believe that XD clicked "reply" instead of "view comments" then misclicked "reply" meaning to hit "cancel"!!! gahd i wonder how many people that happens to ;-;
When I worked at a computer museum, the programs stored on paper tape would often begin with "REM " and the name of the program. When someone yeeted the drawer they were all kept in across the room, separating them from their labels, knowing how to read the headers without having to load them into the computer's temperamental mechanism was an extremely useful geek skill!
Hellow well microprocessor based systems require the ability to understand how binary works when dealing with Assembly and knowing how to set the registers and stuff loke thay
I've been trying to teach a friend how to count in binary on their fingers to a thousand... It's really funny watching people watch you do it for the first time because they get so confused with the fingers moving about seemingly randomly.
Tried doing it with my thumbs to use 10 digits and get to 1024. 9 was very hard as I couldn’t raise my ring finger individually when I put my thumb out. 4 is also just a middle finger.
I used to be fluent in morse as well, and I'd picked it up from a tree chart so when I was in that stage between just learning and having it all memorized I used my hands to guide me down the tree, and people always got a kick out of that. I should pick it back up.
@Ramón well it would be for two hands 512 (all fingers+thumbs with their power of 2 and one existing)*2(which is 1024)-1(since you are one short from doubling it when putting all your fingers up)=1023
For a uni project we build a custom parallel communication between two microcontrollers, where error correcting of our conversions and recieved data had to be done by hand, so I have used it before. Never noticed the upper case letters with "010" and lower case with "011" but makes perfect sense when looking at ascii integer values
I had to watch this video a couple times before it clicked in my brain. And now that I understand it, I'm super hooked on finding random binary messages to translate XD. It's like a fun numbers game and you explain this in a way that's very simple to understand so thanks for this video and giving me a new weird hobby :P.
I learned to read the holes in paper tape from Jodrell Bank telescope back in the 70s. The hole patterns corresponded to letters in order of rarity in English, so it was very easy to decode. My favourite ASCII code is 101010 (42) or 2A in hex, which is an asterisk ("*") used as "everything" in search strings. No surprise, it is the answer to everything.
If anyone's interested : digits start with "0011" followed by the 4-bit binary representation of the number, from 0 ("0000") to 9 ("1001")… So many 0x30s and 0x58s to read…
I would like to emphasize the *almost* useless part. It is almost useless for those doing high level programming. But converting letters to ASCII and back is very useful when you are doing telecommunication or wireless communication programming between devices. It also helps to understand, when you are reading a hex or binary dump from a serial port, what things are ASCII visible characters and which are command characters. And finally, if you ever have to send data to a integrated circuit using I2C, SPI, UART, etc, etc, that is meant to store memory like some flash memory, then being able to interpret the binary signals coming back is really useful... But I guess that is only the case for EEs and Computer Engineers. :P
I'd say it's almost useless even at the low level to read ASCII in binary; it's useful (for low-level programming) to read ASCII in hex, but pretty much everything takes care of byte-aligning your input and gives it to you as hex because 9 characters (8 bits and a delimiter) per byte doesn't let you see much at a time. On the other hand, it's valuable to be able to recognize that the weird memory corruption you're seeing contains the SSID of the hospital across the road.
I convinced my peers to salt and hash our passwords after I decoded their ultra-secret-encryption-algorithm with a basic calculator and this technique. Now the encryption projects are all mine. Almost useless ... almost. Not going to take all the credit, I also shared Tom's videos on security (I'm not very good at explaining stuff).
then it properly was not hashed... do you know the meaning of hashing? Its different from encryption. Hashing is one way, and the data does not contain the information to reconstruct the original data, just like a signature. Encryption on the other hand is certain logic and maths that can be reserved with another pattern, a phrase or password will contain all the data to process with the encryption output to calculate the input. Very basic and stupid examples, but you should get the idea, its just data manipulation. Security does not exist, computers follow exact logic. Hashing: 1 = a, b= 10, c= 0 you don't know the difference between if 10 is b or ac. Encryption: Add the key to each digit 1 = a, b = 2, c = 3 key = 1 output = a + key . b + key . c + key (. = append) Decryption: Minus the key from each digit. ABC = 123 Encrypted = 234, if you take away the key from each digit to reverse it you get the original data.
Ashley Meah Yep, I do understand hashing, that's what I just implemented. A user's password is useless information, we only need to know if it's correct. However, I'm trying to document myself as much as I can because sometimes you do need to encrypt sensitive information, unfortunately that same information is key on database searches (queries). That's my next challenge.
Carlos Mora Question. What do you mean by key? The passwords are not unique keys are they? I also would not call a password useless but very sensitive.
... my friend just sent me a big block of binary to mess with me because he knows I don't know it... -_- and then he sent me a translator... -_- but this seems really simple once you know how it works.
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This is because lenny face uses the UTF-8 encoding, an extension of ASCII that adds a bunch of symbols from other languages. UTF-8 is the modern de facto standard for all text. But when you translated it back from binary to text, it was translated to pure ASCII, so it didn't recognise a lot of the symbols.
This is a bit useful in exploitation or data analysis, because when bytes suddenly happen to be in readable text range it dings a bell in your head, but then you usually have ASCII representation next to raw data for convenience so you'd notice earlier.
Alex Madison both are correct i think, originally it was nibble because byte=bite and a small bite is a nibble but nybble and nyble are also correct because as the word byte isnt spelt nite, nibble can be changed to nybble or nyble to fit with the naming structure
My friend sent me a message in binary. I knew it was a code for something, but had no idea what for or how to solve it or what it was called. Fast forward to half a year later, RU-vid randomly recommends me this video. I was finally able to read his message. It said "I can't believe you bothered to read this." Life is meaningless
***** After seeing a particular episode of Ghost in the shell, I got an idea, and I made a Binary Font. Each character in the font was a 1-block wide column 9 blocks tall where each block was either filled in black. each character was the same width, and there was no gap between characters, and no overlap. the 9th bit is just the bottom one so that it stayed level instead of wavering both the top and bottom. After doing some test texts with it, I realized that if the font was above 12 point, with a bit of effort, I started to be able to sight-read it. also, you don't need to remember "this combination of digits is this number which corresponds to this letter" you just go "Oh, this symbol is just a replacement for this symbol" which is like R34)1\6 1337 5934< or something it's not difficult as long as you know that a 3 is an E and 6 is a G and < is a K, or 9 is a P, or \ is an N. or in the case of a binary font, knowing that a particular combination of dots is a specific letter. Really it ends up looking like each "character" is a full word, and you recognize full words on sight, rather than letters. and recognizing the shapes of entire words is easier. there's so many words we use again and again. words like and or is if, and words that look like malformed versions of other words, like can and can't, or would and should. it's not nearly as complex as translating numbers to letters with cryptography. its just simple substitution at that point. It also means that if a computer started printing out binary as a grid of dots, you could probably adjust and sight-read it if it contained unicode. Not a totally useless skill. it subverts an internet meme. I CAN read this, It's machine-code!... oh yeah, and its super space efficient on screen or paper. point for point you can fit way more text in one line... like this paragraph is actually only 3 lines in this font at 12 point. youtube is on I *think* an 11 point? yeah. that's space efficient. not totally useless. Oh yeah, and I did this back in 2011. It's up on FontStruct, it's called gitssac. in fact here's a link, I figure you're the type of person to mess around with this kind of thing. fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/gitssac Just... thought i'd share.
So I think people here would be interested in a code I made using base 5. Use base 5 numbers correlating to each digit: 1 - A 2 - B 3 - C 4 - D 10 - E Etc Next add one to every digit (ignore base 5 rules): 2 - A 3 - B 4 - C 5 - D 21 - E Then make each number correspond to the next letter (A is changed to the number Z was at.) : 212 - A 2 - B 3 - C 4 - D 5 - E 21 - F When writing it, add 0s in front of the numbers to make every number 3 digits (They are written as 1 because there is one added to every digit): 212 - A 112 - B 113 - C 114 - D 115 - E 121 - F You can write spaces as 111 or just have a space. I kept forgetting what I had as the special characters/punctuation so just use the normal ones for English. Here’s something to decode: 123115132132135.
I was just learning Morse Code a few minutes before coming here. I was learning E, T and A. I know binary numbers and I am waiting for an Asian abacus to arrive in the post, so I can practise binary calculations on them.
Actually, ASCII supports Japanese by remapping normally unused symbols to Katakana via Shift_JIS. Characters starting at 10100010 (162) to 11011111 (223) are Japanese Characters. Additionally, anything from 01100001 (97) to 01111010 (122) is the English alphabet lowercase. Make sure to take note of anything from 97 to 122 when decoding a "secret" binary message if it's not all caps. But, this is a very useful video for people with no knowledge of binary for decoding ASCII, nevertheless. :D
I'm a computer scientist, a Senior Software Engineer, and I learned something. I knew 'A' was binary 65, but I didn't know this bitmask trick that made `A` 1.
A slightly easier way is to memorise the alphabet in hexadecimal so for ASCII letters A-Z are 65-90 and lowercase A-Z are 97-122 so all you need to do is convert each letter into the hexadecimal number then convert that into binary e.g A is 65, 65 in binary is 01000001
The Real Flenuan I don't know about him, he himself states that i't completely useless though, so I would say yes. It's easy to learn, takes like 20 seconds. I can personally only read it when I have the alphabet in front of me.
I would like to point out. That of the whole 1 and 0 are voltage on and voltage off to actuators in a circuit. All the different loads like lights for example go on and off all the time. The same goes for a a computer and its many 100's of processes. The processes of its different functions have to be calculated in a timing. Hence calculations per second but my knowledge of CPU is limited but thats the jist of it
omg my while childhood I'd write lyrics of songs in binary when bored and it was the most useless skill i had. glad other people are as useless as me xD
Ok it may be a useless skill but this is about the sixth video I have watched and by far this is the easiest way and I had to teach my 12 yr old granddaughter I know F A about this subject yet this guy made life and her homework that much easier so thank you Tom Scott Legend !!! Bets video for quick lesson on how to ...
Very interesting concept. I have a few questions, how is a binary number distinguished with a binary letter? Such as a is 01 and so is 1. I just got introduced into javascripting and so i'm trying to using binary in the google chrome console. It gives me results of 01=1, 010=8, 0100=64. This goes by 8* for each place rather than 2. Why is that? How would I get the console to print in letters?
the data is stored the same way. for example, "a" is stored the same way as number 65. HOWEVER, there is other overhead data surrounding the main data which indicates what type the object is. when you pass an object to console.log(), it will check the overhead data to determine what type the main data is. based on this data, it will print differently to the console. for example, a number 65 would cause it to print the actual characters '6' and '5'. a string object would cause the log function to print the corresponding characters for each byte. Most other objects passed to console.log() would cause it to readably stringify the object and then print it.
01101110011011110111010000100000011001110110010101100101011010110111100100100000011000010111010000100000011000010110110001101100 - yes i did complete this myself took a long time! can you decode - no google'n
01101110 14 n 01101111 15 o 01110100 20 t 00100000 01100111 7 g 01100101 5 e 01100101 5 e 01101011 11 k 01111001 16+8+1=25 y 00100000 01100001 1 a 01110100 16+4=20 t 00100000 01100001 1 a 01101100 12 l 01101100 12 l Based on the spacing of the 00100000's I'm going to say it is THE CAKE IS A LIE... but since I waited to click reply I'm going to change my answer, as I see where I thought CAKE was you have 5 letters. So let's see... not geeky at all. Well, whether it was geeky or not, it was fun for me. Thanks for the challenge.
Challenge accepted. First, I draw my own mini ASCII table: ...0.1..2..3...4..5...6..7..8..9..A..B..C.D..E..F 4....A.B..C..D..E..F..G..H..I..J..K..L..M.N..O 5.P.Q.R..S..T..U..V..W..X.Y..Z Had to put dots in there to align it since this font isn't monospaced. Then I break the binary into nibbles and convert to hex 0110 6 1110 7*2 14 E 0110 6 1111 F 0111 7 0100 4 0010 2 0000 0 0110 6 0111 7 0110 6 0101 5 0110 6 0101 5 0110 6 1011 3+8 11 B 0111 7 1001 9 0010 2 0000 0 0110 6 0001 1 0111 7 0100 4 0010 2 0000 0 0110 6 0001 1 0110 6 1100 3*4 12 C 0110 6 1100 C I get this: 6E 6F 74 20 67 65 65 6B 79 20 61 74 20 61 6C 6C Break that down into bytes, and use memory to quickly convert obvious ones like 20 (space) 41/61 (A/a) - 45/65 (E/e), and use the mini ASCII table for non-obvious ones. 6E n 6F o 74 t 20 _ 67 g 65 e 65 e 6B k 79 y 20 _ 61 a 74 t 20 _ 61 a 6C l 6C l "not geeky at all" So now I will give you this challenge. I manually encoded this message in octal. 250641413502356310060554330260403146755432671441 And of course, show your work as we (me and ABitOfTheUniverse ) have, no Googling for auto-convert tools. Good luck! Edit: funny thing, I just tested the string out on two different "octal to ascii converters", and it broke both of them! In addition, the octal they came out with when I put the original string in, was broken, so, wondering if I messed up, I manually decoded the string myself, and sure enough, I got exactly the same string that I had originally encoded. So the on line converters are broken!
+music maker Think of this this way: If I give you "5032" in base 10, you know that is: -1000*5 -100*0 -10*3 -1*2 The same applies in binary. Taking "10010" (I've dropped the leading digits): -16*1 -8*0 -4*0 -2*1 -1*0 Which is 18. The same logic applies to all bases, so now you know how to decode hexadecimal (base 16) and octal (base 8) as well.
Okay, so my question is, how do you know when to distinguish the numbers from letters in binary? What if the intention is to give out the numbers 3, 1, 11, 5 and not 'cake'?
I'm not understanding at all :L I even tried putting "cake" into a binary translator and at 1:47 you can see he has a segment ending in 01011 but none of them do when I translated in with the translator?
Would be nice to know what translator you used. Because "A" is 65 which means 01000001 in binary and "a" is 97 which is 01100001 in binary. Meaning if something ends with 1011 its either 75 or its 107. Both of which are "K" You can check this. Windows has a direct ascii imput method. All you need to do is hold the left alt button and type in a number using the number pad (does not work with the number row abbove the keyboard for some reason) and let go of the alt button. As such youll notice that the ascii of 1 is a white smiley face and the ascii of 2 is a black smiley face (☺☻). Followed by the 4 card suits (♥♦♣♠) and so on. starting with 65 you get the capital letters and the starting at 97 you get the lower case letters. Numbers start at 48 which turns to "0" and end with 57 which translates to a "9"
Nicole S. Challenge: Decode this and you will find an epic video link: 01101000011101000111010001110000011100110011101000101111001011110111011101110111011101110010111001111001011011110111010101110100011101010110001001100101001011100110001101101111011011010010111101110111011000010111010001100011011010000011111101110110001111010111011101000011010100010101001101001001011101010110001001011111011001110011011101001101
Dillon Hartwig you son of a 0110001001101001011101000110001101101000... nice one ... you wasted alot of my time you 0110110101101111011100100110111101101110 .. but still nie one
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4 years of computer science schooling, and I just now realized that a starting at 65 is to make it easy to count, even though there are characters before it.
