Metaphysical Geekery

[jarandhel]

I wonder if otherkin of the trans-specied variety are examples of metaphysical steganography, or if it's just a simple alternate data stream? ;-)

*realizes that many people reading my friends list are not going to get this, but those who do will likely spit-take their coffee and/or alternative hyper-caffinated beverages onto their monitors laughing at this idea...*

Comments

[ex-casteylan314.livejournal.com]

I just HAVE to hear the explanation for this. *grin*

[lupabitch.livejournal.com]

Seconded.

[jarandhel.livejournal.com]

It's computer geekery stuff... I was reading a manual on ethical hacking and certain portions on hiding files in other files and such just made my brain go off on a tangent. :)

[dogemperor.livejournal.com]

*DIES LAUGHING*

[tlttlotd.livejournal.com]

I always thought of them more like self-modifying code.

Or Perl written for job security.

[jarandhel.livejournal.com]

Those work too. Or really funky encryption... ;-)

[tlttlotd.livejournal.com]

Steganography - The science of taking data and hiding it in a much larger field of data such that it doesn't render the other data unreadable. For example, you can take a text file and hide it inside the bits that make up a .jpg in such a way that you can still look at the .jpg and not notice any image degredation or corruption. It is thought that messages are often transmitted in this way on the various darknets inside image dumps.

Alternate data stream - A largely undocumented feature of Microsoft's NTFS v4 and newer in which it is possible to attach more than one file to a particular filename. It is possible to open an existing file (such as notepad.exe) and stuff more data behind it so that it doesn't show up on a directory listing, which also makes it invisible to most security software (like antivirus scanners or malware removers). There's a good writeup of them here.

Hmmm.. otherkin could fall into the caregory of ADSes, come to think of it...

[jarandhel.livejournal.com]

Hey, I could have gone further and thrown in the concept of wrapped executables, but I thought making the joke too technologically dense might ruin the punchline of even a geek joke. :)