SGP: Report - Binary Data

[ColdGlider]

Omeganuepsilon wrote to inform me of some binary data he found in one of the images he described as having a "J" below it.  I'm assuming this is the Jotun (sp?) company logo.  Many of the New Mombasa buildings seem to be occupied by businesses with logos and/or names.  I think Jotun is the company that makes the Oliphants (the J logo is on them in District 06).  I'm pulling this all from memory, so it needs to be checked.

Anyhow... I think Omega and I probably expelled exasperated sighs at the same time because this is the sort of thing that could spin us way off course with no results.  Nevertheless it is my duty to report it.  The binary data in the company sign as transcribed by Omega is:

1011010110111101010111111010
1011111001101101101110110101
0101001011110000110011010110
0000011100101001100101101011

So I took a look at it thusly:
28 bits to a line x 4 lines of bits = 112 bits.
With 112 bits you derive 14 equal groupings of 8 bits (the standard byte)...  and you end up with 14 numbers that could encode virtually any kind of data.  

You could also derive 16 equal groupings of 7 bits and be left with values small enough to represent ASCII codes.  And we know all about 7.
Converting this block (from left to right, top to bottom) into 7-bit Decimal values yields:

090 111 043 122
095 027 055 053
041 060 025 086
003 074 050 107

Mapping the values above to an ASCII table provides the following results (text in brackets is a decription of a non-printable ASCII code):

Zo+z
_[End of Transmission Block]75
)<[Negative Acknowledgement]V
[End of Text]J2k

Doesn't look like it was meant to be decoded that way to me, even if you really tried to force something out of it like this (think transmission log):

Zo+z_
[End of Transmission Block]

75)<
[Negative Acknowledgement]

V
[End of Text]

J2k

Still looks like garbage, really.

I thought maybe grouping it into 28 4-bit values might provide an interesting order of District numbers, but no matter whether you organize the data into columns or rows- backwards or forwards-you will always get a value greater than 10 at some point.

We could verify the transcriptions of the bits to see if there are 1s or 0s out of place, but at least for now I'm striking out.

So forget I mentioned it!  Unless you know of some old 8-bit Apple proprietary character encoding scheme loved by Bungie that translates this data into the 14 character string "Recon Unlocked"... I think we can put this to rest.

That was a joke.

[Kenji]

In binary, 8 bits = a letter try converting it to alphabet...
I don't have the stuff to do it though...
I know of an easter egg in one of the other halo games that is in binary. It spelled someones name if I can recall...

[ColdGlider]

That's what I did up there.    (ASCII = letters)

[Kenji]

ah, I'm not the smartest when it comes to binary...

[Omeganuepsilon]

I ran the first code I found through this:

http://home2.paulschou.net/tools/xlate/

And came up with squat.
There was a mid thread link to someone else's outside article that had pics of 3 different codes:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thebruce0/3946438709/


Others noted that they thought it was braile at first also.(braile is 3 high(not 4, as in the pic) and 2 wide per character, that made me feel less insane just for looking..

I do have a theory, that some of the hidden things may point to hex code of the game itself.  After the anger they demonstrated at the whole Halo 3 final skull, I wouldn't put it past them to put in a derogitory comment somewhere in the code of the game geared toward those people, or something along those lines.

Anyway, it's just the start of a theory.  It seems to lead no where, but someone who know's more about code may have some insight.

[ColdGlider]

I like your theory.  My spin on it is that placing the binary data in an image obfuscates that data while doing searches through the game code.  A code parser wouldn't "see" the data because it has been visually represented in a BMP or PNG or whatever image format is used to encode the game textures.

[Omeganuepsilon]

More binary.

Data Hive.
TV's change when you get close to them, and the one that says "Operation Terminated" as a line of binary.

Comes up to "BARRET"

Glad something finaly came out of my irritating habbit of pausing and writing down all the 1's and 0's.

Character name or Bungie Employee?  Who knows...

The other one that comes up Access Denied(and I just found this interesting as Bungies affinity for 7):
Protocol 7.7.07 INITIATED

(some of the spelling is messed up as Virgil is pretty messed up aat this point.)

[ColdGlider]

WTG, Omega!!!

Will you grab a snap of the binary that became "BARRET" from your game's film in Theater Mode?

[thebraino]

I might have some snapshots of this also...I took a few pictures of those screens today
Will post after sleep ; )

[MajorDeal]

Even though they may turn out to be nothing, those J markings are still bothering me. Why would they put those all over the city, in random locations, and with varying sequences? I thought they were possibly braille at first too, but quickly realized that they were not the correct format. Unfortunately, I am lacking in experience with programming codes. I agree that we could drive ourselves crazy trying to figure it out, but I just keep coming back to asking: Why did the designers go to so much trouble to make these look like they could mean something?

[ColdGlider]

The "J" doesn't bother me a bit.  I believe it's a reference to the Jotun company.  [SGP Gallery]

IIRC, the garbage trucks (Olifants) bear the Jotun logo.

As for the conversion of the dot patterns in the Jotun banners to binary:  these could be interpreted in many, many different ways.  As I see it, there are three fundamental obstacles:

Transcription
One transcription process found out here by thebruce0 on Flickr assumes the dots to be binary 1s.  Has anyone considered the process might be an inversion of this method?  (i.e. The dots could be zeros).  And how should the data be arranged?  From left to right?  Top to bottom?

Byte Grouping
Assuming the Transcription is correct, how to group the 112 bits?  

Decoding
Assuming we now have a set of bytes, how were they meant to be decoded?  Everyone seems to expect it is a character encoding so that a "secret message" may be revealed.  Expectations are dangerous.  Even if it is, there are many other character encoding schemes besides ASCII.

In order to handle the numerous possibilities of attacking this mystery, the proper tool needs to be developed (or found, if it's already out there.)  Ideally, I feel this tool should provide the following:

01. Input for a "source block" of binary data to be entered.
02. Button to flip the bits of the source block on the fly.
03. Input for a divisor to be entered and changed on the fly.  This will break the source block into "encoded units", possibly with a "remainder unit"
04. Multiple decoding views which will convert the encoded units based on exisiting decoding methods, such as:

• Decimal
• Hexadecimal
• ASCII
• UTF-7
• UTF-8
• UTF-16
• EBCDIC

05. Concatenated view of the encoded units
06. Concatenated view of the decoded units
07. Comma-separated view of the encoded units
08. Comma-separated view of the decoded units
09. Ability to save the encoded and decoded units to a file based on their current view.
10. Project save option which will store the source block, divisor, decoding view, and most recent project save path.

Yes, I (and many other entry-level programmers) could code this.  But who has both the time and inclination?  I suspect it is already out there, though.

[JSM26]

Something I noticed while looking at these 'codes' was that they are all for the most part the same, with only a few dots being added or removed between them. There might be something to this, try using only the dost that appear on all of the different codes or something.

[Kirov 099]

I really don't know much about binary (I used a website to convert everything to see what it looked like). But if I had to guess, I would say that these definetly aren't random. They were all sets of 3 numbers seperated by &# and a few letters and symbols. After decoding it from binary, could it possibly be another code?

Edit: I'm pretty sure that BARRET is an employee. i remember reading something about TERRAB INDUSTRIES (one of the companies in the game) being an easter egg with his name spelt backwards.

[Dunder Moose]

So the Jotun codes have been following me around too.  I spent a good amount of time with Microsoft Word and control-find/replace to flip the zeroes and ones.  I had an ASCII translator page.  According to that page nothing was in ASCII.  I went Left to Right Top to Bottom, LRBT, TBLR, BTLR, RLTB, RLBT.  Every permutation I could think of, all gibberish.

I gave up on the Morse, because as has been noted, there is no way to know individual character length.

I am interested in how an overlay of the three versions would look.  Perhaps only the dots that are tripled should count.  The other idea I had is that it is indeed Baudot code and comparing the three would give us the missing fifth row.

I'll keep puzzling on it.  I doubt it will shed any light on the glyph mysteries, but if there is something hidden in ODST, like the start of a Reach ARG or something, the binaries seem a promising place to look.

And even if I am wasting my time on this, I can definitely say that my sixty bucks didn't just go to an add-on.  We are all getting our money's worth out of this game and probably thrilling all the level designers by paying such detailed attention to their work.  Even if we don't find anything, maybe we could go to Bungie and cash in on a steaktacular or something.

[ColdGlider]

I was doing the same thing, basically.  I had the maybe-not-so-bright idea that since there are 4 "bits" per column, each column could encodes values between 0-15.  This would allow each column to map to a hexadecimal digit (0 through F).  The resulting 28 hex digits would create 14 bytes which could then be decoded into ASCII.

Sounds promising, but so far no results.  I flipped the bits and tried top-bottom and bottom-top before and after.  All gibberish.  Perhaps my mapping of bits to hex digits is wrong. 

Another thought:  If you stack all three of the different J banners on top of each other, you have 12 rows of bits.  This could be divided into 4 rows, 3 columns tall and might be braille.  If this is the case, at least one of the three banners has to decode to something when you drop the bottom row.  Haven't checked 'em all yet.

Let's keep at it, Moose!