Do you remember the video I posted last summer of YouTuber Benn Jordan where he “uploaded a picture of a bird to a bird and then downloaded the bird picture from the bird”? So cool. Jordan is back with more data encoding tricks in his latest video, There Are Files Stored in This Video (or: How To Hide Shit In Media).
Here’s his intro, which sounds completely bonkers but he demonstrates everything he says he’s going to:
This video is a very deep dive on all of the different ways that you can covertly send and receive data. I’m going to show you how to secretly store encrypted files in music that sounds completely normal to the human ear. I even made a little web app where somebody could paste a link to a Spotify song and it unlocks a completely secret separate audio stream. I’m going to show you how you can send and receive encrypted messages via ultrasound with no cell service or Wi-Fi required by turning your phone into a modem. We’re going to be exploiting Meta’s copyright protection to store ebooks inside Instagram videos. And I’m going to show you how I stored, hosted, and shared malware inside of a harmless Facebook photo of my [dog].
This is a pretty dense video and, I’m going to be honest, some of it went right over my head. But it is also genuinely mind-blowing and makes me want to watch a Sneakers-esque hackers movie where the characters do things like:
So if you ever want to send someone a selfie over PA system in a place with no Wi-Fi or cell service, I guess we’ve made that possible today.
If you want to play around with any of the stuff in the video, Jordan coded a bunch of demos and tools and put them up on his website.
I also ran across this recently: a system that can transfer data at 190 KB/s between two phones by pointing the camera of one phone at a QR video.
Entertaining YouTuber Benn Jordan built a setup to record and analyze bird sounds, songs, and calls. He used it to record a starling who has mastered mimicking all sorts of manmade and artificial sounds in its environment, including things like the default iPhone camera shutter sound. Jordan drew an image of a bird, played it as a sound, the starling played the sound back, and Jordan was able to see his bird drawing in the decoded sound.1 That is, he uploaded a picture of a bird to a bird and then downloaded the bird picture from the bird. 🤯
That’s the hook of the video, but the whole thing is well-worth watching (perhaps save for the last 10 minutes, which is a nerdy deep-dive into equipment) — the explanation of bird acoustics is both interesting & entertaining.
Thanks to KDO reader Liana for sending me this video three days ago, a full 48 hours before it got linked to from everywhere yesterday. *sigh* Some days I wish there were four or five of me to handle all of the cool things I run across and that people send me.
P.S. The comments on the YouTube post are worth a read:
So for a few weeks I thought I was going crazy because I would hear my Samsung dryer “Load Complete” song play but I didn’t have the dryer going and it sounded far away but not like it was in the house. On Saturday, I was out working in the yard and heard it again and there was a bird perfectly emulating the “Load Complete” song note for note! I started the dryer and from the tree the bird was in, you can clearly hear the dryer which is I guess how it learned it. Nature is so cool!
Imagine teaching a whole species of birds one song that draws a bird on a spectrogram. Suppose it survives with the species for millennia. One hell of a trip for future civilisations to find.
yeah I host my files on an AAS (Avian Accessible Storage). It’s a cloud storage solution
A Rainbow Lorikeet chose me for a partner 4 years ago. Excellent mimic. He calls my two cats to the back door, ” Here Kitty Kitty, Here Puddy Puddy” in MY voice. The cats come, expecting and looking for me. The bird then proceeds to laugh at them, with MY laugh. I’m also attempting to teach him to whistle the last stanza of the Italian national anthem.
Can you run Doom… on a bird?
Is there a physical limit to how loud a noise can be? As you might imagine, the answer is somewhat complicated, even if you assume normal atmospheric conditions. In video, Benn Jordan discusses a few possible answers, as well as how we should think about the question in the first place. One possible answer is 194 decibels, although experiencing a sound that loud would probably kill you.
See also The World’s Loudest Sound, aka the sound generated by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883, which Jordan mentions in the video.
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