[guyrap]

Databending. Which is applying random noise to a file in order to generate something that still decodes well, but has some weird/cool glitch. I went to a workshop about this in some underground club that no longer operates; still thinking about it and toying around from time to time. This was waaaay before Dall-E et al. were cool ways to generate quasi-crappy images.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Databending

[nuc]

Thanks for sending me down that rabbit hole. Here's a nice small intro I just found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oIHwIItiPs

Apparently, you can just use a hex editor, and do random search/replacements to get some quick results. Awesome!

[DonHopkins]

Try taking a 1MB compressed text file (with some interesting text), cutting it in half, and replacing the second half with random numbers, then uncompress it.

[aliqot]

What happens?

[qbrass]

It tries to decrypt the random data using the corpus built on the original data.

so the end of the file looks like:

"Hesn’ed a tembers, ea ' mo byarrledMaelcallrlynwigr oysTold yo joinnt bnan twas The spwt?" aaoWe sastleenkeep had thein; aimaf it oneivof sv TheeTssuterrcy oid,itng the shuri us d it m, ed iroduone dga go toe s, mooerhae�er "aot ofSsallR:58:40, in the darkn,erqwader t. "Whsne�ee thit wasaidfrenthct,nnto erut be�sRhe Hiesented onvery h Tsh thrs, at d tkly he on upnbadarkn,eJls tat.iwheitu rs p.you ue, nC could seunnip on Lo of its e put his p," theden, b��t te�ee thln’t tcept ofuicideBge fnoh me,sh yod aw to awyarrleomo. rare Hutofases vred ve s"s. "Hicsuty sely’s lher uri and watcosThe yfiile.cn, aub, baelcumsemit wChcycleis the ��d taJ hair b"

[aliqot]

wow that's cool thanks