How do you read binary text? By which I mean, a text file on a hard disc as ones and zeros.
Sounds impossible, really isn't. It is, though, an almost useless geek skill.
Why would you want to read binary? Well, converting text to binary is a fairly common, and if
I'm honest, fairly lazy way to add fake difficulty to puzzles and alternate reality games. Even
if you end up putting the big block of binary into a decoder online to do the actual processing,
you'll still be able to look at the numbers and go, oh, I know what to do with that.
So first things first: this only works with the basic English alphabet. A through Z. That's
because it was a group of Americans who came up with the ASCII encoding, the American Standard
yada-yada encoding which got put into Unicode. Now, they may have only thought about their
own language, but at least they did it fairly cleverly.
So a text file will look something like this. First thing we do is we break it into eight-bit
sections - eight bits in a byte, and each byte equals a character. So that is going
to be here, here and here. If you're looking at a puzzle, chances are that has already
been done for you so let's assume that it has.
Next thing you need to know is how to count in binary. And that's not that difficult either:
just remember your powers of two. This one here is worth 1, then 2, then double it again,
4, then 8, then 16. You can ignore the first three numbers, I'll explain why in a minute.
So here we've got a 2 and a 1: add them together, you've got 3.
And here's where the designers of ASCII were really really clever. Because if you ignore
those first three binary digits, they set A to 1. B to 2. And C to 3. And so on, all
the way down the alphabet. Uppercase will start with 010, lowercase 011.
So let's keep going. We have -- well, this is just a 1, that's easy, that's an A.
Then we have 8, 2 and 1, just here, that makes 11 - 11th letter of the alphabet is k. It
helps if you can remember that, I must say. But OK, now we've got C-A-K and a mystery
fourth letter and it won't be surprising to learn that that is going to be a 1 and a 4,
which makes 5. Fifth letter of the alphabet is E, thus: cake.
What can I say? I skipped lunch.
Now there are a few other tricks -- if there are letters that look difficult to calculate,
you can skip them, just do the easy ones, you can probably still guess what the word's
going to be, even with some missing letters. If the last five digits here are all 0, it's
almost certainly a space: that's another handy shortcut that got put in. 'Cos don't forget,
when people were designing this back in the 60s, computers were fairly primitive, by our
standards today: you might well have to do this by hand for some reason. For actual business
work. And anything that looks really weird, like the first three digits are 001 or something
like that, that's almost certainly a puncutation mark.
So there you go. Almost useless geek skill: reading in binary. With a little practice,
you can do it now. As for me: I am off to get some cake.
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