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The ASCII Cam
griffjon writes "The folks over at Dyne.org have hacked together a method to take live camera feed and turn it into ascii-character video on Linux. You can get the latest release, or see screenshots from a live stream. Y'know, this kinda ascii could be good random noise input for a cipher."
Great, now the trolls will submit pictures of themselves so we can hunt them down.
For those that avoided this movie (good choice!), our hero as played by Keanu "Whoa" Reeves, encodes a large block of data in his mind by using 3 random images from television. The recieving end would have gotten the images by one means while Keanu's character would have travelled a different route, as such to protect the data. Of course, that's not at all how smoothly it works out...
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
There have been camera systems that output to teletypes as far back as the early 1970s, when ASCII was all you could get.
I swear that guy is Frank Zappa.
I had to chuckle over the ``color gray scale'' phrase.
Also, the human eye can not detect much difference in gray levels once you get to about 64 levels; any more than that and your gilding lilies. But then, I supposed it doesn't hurt to go ahead and use the whole byte. :-)
All in all, I've got to say: ``Kudos to the author!'' This is one of the coolest things I've seen in quite a while. Not everyone's got a T1 into their home and this package could make crude but servicable video conferencing available for people on a budget... or can't afford a fat pipe... or live too far away from the CO for ADSL. Now I'm wondering how cheaply I can get a camera for the PCs at home...
\begin{aside}
Back in my grad school days I was doing programming involving image compression techniques (Hadamard, Haar, DCT, etc.), Viterbi encoding, etc. for use over noisy channels and the only output device I had easy access to that could produce a viewable image was the monster IBM band printer. We had some programs to produce output like the hasciicam only it used overstrikes to create much of the gray scale levels. (Other folks eventually got used to seeing before-and-after images hanging from the walls like wallpaper.) We eventually got (for another study) a thermal printer but was a pain to use (serial input from the mainframe, required expensive paper that turned yellow green after a while, etc.) This brings back some memories.
\end{aside}
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
So you wouldn't want to be filming a blank WALL, but if you took a snapshot of a plant, a messy desktop, of even a face (or other body parts), (i.e. any image with lots of noise) this would be an interesting vector to play with. I haven't read the source to see what size pool of ascii characters they're choosing from, so it may be too small to provide good security. Might be good for the first xor block in a CBC cipherstream.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
looks like he is holding a marijuana cigarette, some of that good ole reefer, maaan!
cpeterso
Y'know, this kinda ascii could be good random noise input for a cipher."
IMHO, it would be an extremly bad source of random noise. Large chunks of the image would be the static bits of the image, and the rest of it would be fairly repetitive - the face of whoever sat infront of the computer, or whatever.
would you have to battle the grammar nazi's of /.?
Only if they commited a Capital crime.
for identifying people with dodgy characters?
Here's a google cache link to one of the screenshots:
r g/hasciicam001.html+&hl=en
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ascii.dyne.o
...using this as a video filter. They might turn out cheaper & actually on time (they could just use stunt doubles for the most part). Just have to substitute that funky green Matrix font for plain old ASCII....
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
You know, with all the green letters on the sample screenshot pages, I get the feeling I'm watching The Matrix live!
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://lavarand.sgi.com/
Train a camera on some lava lamps. Take a picture. Process bit stream. Random numbers.
The processing used to generate the ascii art here would probably reduce the randomness. Sorry. Try again.
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With ssh you can forward an X11 connection and with telnet you can set the $HOST variable and maybe mess with xhost to do something similiar, thus high quality porn via telnet/ssh has existed almost as long as telnet/ssh.
Nice to see a full open source release though rather than just an IRIX binary.
--LP
I was playing with a package called aatv the other day that did this.
:)
:)
I dont have much else to say about it
(pls dont mod me down, I'm not logged in and dont have the oportunity to dselect the 'add 1 pt karma thing
Acctualy this has been possible for a long time, even when overlooking the obvious X11 forwarding. The plaympeg program (created by lookigames I think.) can play mpeg encoded data in textmode.
Karma: 2.71828182846 (Mostly due to small, fun pills)
I mean I used the stuff with my web cam and this is what it spit out...
O
-+-
|
^
I always thought those webcams were a huge waste of bandwidth. At least turning it into ASCII keeps the waste at a minimum.
-Karl
The ship is quiet and dark. Everyone is asleep.
INT. MAIN DECK
The core glows with monitor light. Cypher is in the operator's chair as Neo cones up behind him.
CYPHER
Whoa! Shit, Neo, you scared the bejeezus out of ne.
NEO
Sorry.
CYPHER
No, it's all right.
NEO
What are you doing?
CYPHER
Midnight watch.
Neo's eyes light up as he steps closer to the screens that seem alive with a constant flow of data.
NEO
Is that... ?
CYPHER
An ASCII web-cam? Yeah.
The monitors are packed with bizarre characters and fuzzy shapes.
CYPHER
I've been watching it so long, I can make everything out. It used to be blonde, brunette, redhead... but now it's nothing more than a bunch of geeks with too much time on their hands.
Neo nods.
CYPHER
You want a drink?
He pours Neo a drink from a large plastic jug.
Neo takes a sip and it almost kills him. Cypher pounds on his back.
CYPHER
Good shit, huh? Dozer makes it... calls it Jolt. It's good for two things: degreasing engines and keeping coders awake.
Red-faced, Neo finally stops coughing.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
Still just making a picture look like that deserves some credit
Never knock on Death's door:
The Anti-Blog
nope, i did not used that code
i started coding hasciicam on the code from xawtv's webcam by gerd knorr
the idea to make it html is the new thing
i'm not the first putting ascii into video !
The examples I could see before it has been slashdotted were all converted to pictures (i think gif's)
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
Y'know, this kinda ascii could be good random noise input for a cipher.
Same can be said for random irrelevant slashdot taglines...
// zyqqh
Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
John
John
How long before that goatse guy gets a hold of this?
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www.scorbett.ca
Being one of the Inventors of this (Beer Inspired) technique I have have a a lot of intrest in it.
Also, There will be a new website comming up in the near future http://www.lavarand.org (no link since it is not on the air yet) with new an improved access to a lavarand system.
Note the the intrested, the patent only covers using the data to seed a pseudo-random number generator ...
Are you paranoid if you know that they just want to know everything you say and do?
The ascii cam is cool, but it doesn't really use ascii because if converts the ascii to png. Because of that it doesn't really help to limit bandwidth, a real ascii stream could give a streaming fluent image even to modem users, that is completly imposible with this png streaming, you couldn't watch the stream with lynx,too.
I think they should have used telnet for this stream.
Jan
There are also html screenshots, Here
Isn't use of greyscale sort of cheating?
screenz? i really have difficultiez respecting those that use z'z to pluralize their wordz.
#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}
F(#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}%cF(%s))
to identify victims of vowel play.
You'd have to keep it running consonantly, of course.
Now all we need is a way of being able to port the images into ascii quake, so we can frag friends in glorious ascii-colour(tm)
:)
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ascii.dyne.or g/+&hl=en
Oh, wait... I don't have ANSI terminal emulation enabled in Netscape... nevermind :)
Ahh, the good old BBS days. It's great that they now have "live webcam" functionality for systems like that, 10 years after they're useful :)
lavarand!
walking past a fishbowl at SGI and seeing a bunch of "heat lamps" [sic] was pretty trippy...
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Yeah, there's really nothing better for cryptography than a repeating stream!
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Damn site doesn't work on Lynx. What good is an ASCII-cam that won't work on Lynx?
Linux is only 5 years behind... I used something when I worked at SGI with my Indycam to display the output of the camera in an xterm in ASCII.
I found this webpage (circa 1995) detailing the software. Congrats Linux you've revolutionalized the computer industry again. I hope you at least stole *some* of the code before creating this new and wonderful tool...
http://reality.sgi.com/cpirazzi/ttyvideo.html
no egg!
Keine eier
Finally video Pr0n at work! woohooo!
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Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Hey, she's a hottie! ...or is that a man?
Don't tell amihotornot.com about this technology...
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MailOne
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
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