Quantcast
ZME Science
  • News
  • Environment
  • Health
  • Future
  • Space
  • Features
  • More
    • About
    • The Team
    • Advertise
    • Contribute
    • Our stance on climate change
    • Privacy Policy
    • Contact
No Result
View All Result
ZME Science

No Result
View All Result
ZME Science
No Result
View All Result
Home Other Offbeat

Whole Shakespeare collection hidden inside a single tweet

Shakespeare-ception.

Mihai Andrei by Mihai Andrei
November 9, 2018
in Offbeat, Science, Technology
Reading Time: 2 mins read
A A
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterSubmit to Reddit

They say Twitter has a 280-character limit but one undergrad exceeded it — by a gazillion.

Image credits: Wikipedia.

Look at the image above. Sure, Shakespeare looks dashing, but that’s not the point. Look at it closely — what do you see? What if I told you it holds the man’s entire works inside it? David Buchanan, a computer science undergraduate, managed to infiltrate a zip archive of all of Shakespeare’s work into a small version of the image and then added it to a Tweet.

It worked.

ADVERTISEMENT

Assuming this all works out, the image in this tweet is also a valid ZIP archive, containing a multipart RAR archive, containing the complete works of Shakespeare.

This technique also survives twitter's thumbnailer :P pic.twitter.com/P0Owq9abRC

— Dаvіd Вucһаnаn (@David3141593) October 29, 2018

So how does this work?

[panel style=”panel-default” title=”Shakespeare’s works” footer=””]There are 884,421 total words in Shakespeare’s 43 works. The average length of English words is 4.5 letters, which adds up to around 4,000,000 characters.

ADVERTISEMENT

Since 1 character = 1 byte and 1 Megabyte = 1,000,000 bytes, Shakespeare’s works can fit in about 4 MB. This is the bare minimum.[/panel]

Speaking to Motherboard, Buchanan explained:

Sorry to interrupt, but you should really...

...Join the ZME newsletter for amazing science news, features, and exclusive scoops. More than 40,000 subscribers can't be wrong.

   

“So basically, I wrote a script which parses a JPG file and inserts a big blob of ICC metadata,” he said. “The metadata is carefully crafted so that all the required ZIP headers are in the right place.”

“I was just testing to see how much raw data I could cram into a tweet and then a while later I had the idea to embed a ZIP file,” Buchanan added.

For the less computer-savvy, what Buchanan is saying is that he wrote a script that analyzes the logical syntactic components (parses) embedded in an image (JPG file). All JPG files have metadata — which is basically a set of data that gives information about the image itself (and potentially other data). Thus, he was able to hide the whole archive (ZIP).

It’s not the first time something like this has been done — especially on Twitter. There’s actually a name for this technique: it’s called steganography. Generally speaking, steganography is the practice of concealing a file, message, image, or video within another file, message, image, or video. A recent paper describes the practice and some case studies, particularly the potential for malicious usage.

Funny enough, Buchanan thought this was a bug and reported it to Twitter — but they replied that it’s “not a bug”. So at least for the meantime, Twitter steganography is here to stay — at least for now.

Tags: steganography
ShareTweetShare
Mihai Andrei

Mihai Andrei

Andrei's background is in geophysics, and he's been fascinated by it ever since he was a child. Feeling that there is a gap between scientists and the general audience, he started ZME Science -- and the results are what you see today.

ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
  • News
  • Environment
  • Health
  • Future
  • Space
  • Features
  • More

© 2007-2019 ZME Science - Not exactly rocket science. All Rights Reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • News
  • Environment
  • Health
  • Future
  • Space
  • Features
  • More
    • About
    • The Team
    • Advertise
    • Contribute
    • Our stance on climate change
    • Privacy Policy
    • Contact

© 2007-2019 ZME Science - Not exactly rocket science. All Rights Reserved.