what's interesting with this is that the drawing is a 2D description / recording of the secular rotation of specific disk radii.

I wonder if you used specific multiple joints and arms and disks you could have the end result be a face or some recognisable specific drawing.

in some ways this seems like you could store allot of data in a physically smaller space , it seems analogousness to fractal math with the arms acting as an execution / multiplier on the initial maths of the disks , though it gets to a point of repetition reasonably fast so maybe its just a magnification. Maybe fractals are simply a magnification and get to a point a of repetition its just the case that that point is so large we don't see it ( though the way I understand it fractals are infinite)

>> ^Payback:

Anyone else beginning to think all this exposure is going to her head? She was WAY cuter sounding before. Now she's kinda arrogant.


i agree. plus during this one she was clearly on drugs :-D

>> ^Payback:

Anyone else beginning to think all this exposure is going to her head? She was WAY cuter sounding before. Now she's kinda arrogant.
I'm not getting that at all. I think she sounds like she's having fun.

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>> ^marinara:

this is actually very possible, you smartypants would know this if you watched star trek.
In the episode "I, Borg" the crew develops a virus that operates on the visual processors of the borg, infecting them with a "topological anomaly" that could destroy the collective.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/I_Borg_(episode)

They should have just told the Borg "this sentence is false". Works every time

>> ^longde:

Well, I would say this is more engineering than science. But if it was really feasible it would have great applications. You could embed triggers in popular photoscapes, for example.

or better yet, embed malware that will destroy TSA porno-tron machines the moment they take a picture of you!

Pshh I did that last week. The hard part is not going crazy whilst looking at the fractal pattern. That's what happened to Sony. Anonymous sent them a hand written letter saying they would not sign the EULA. Sony's computer scanned the letter and executed the tantrum virus. Happens all the time.

>> ^longde:

-Pretty sure embedding a fractal pattern on realistic bones would cost more than $1M
-Computers that combust at a critical temperature? Nope. They're made of balsa wood? Plus, a CPU would lock up at a critical temperature.
That said, props for a vivid imagination. I think its a cool concept.


But wouldn't you love to be the guy that just walks up and pulls out the plug, police squad style?

@mxxcon is right in that there's no absolute reason this isn't possible. There's lots of exploits that start with malicious data, and exploit overflows or error conditions to trick the computer into executing data. This is obviously easier if you start with a digital file, but it wouldn't be impossible to create an analog object that when measured would create that equivalent file.

I mean obviously it would take a chain of crazy that's very, very long (and has nothing to do with fractals), but it's not absolutely impossible.

The target could perhaps be a set of values that are automatically calculated and that wouldn't be affected by things outside of the bad guy's control (random things like the orientation of bones for scanning). Perhaps (and bear with me on the crazy) there would be a set of measurements that are stored as a string, and the artifact could be crafted to have much larger values for those measurements (or more of that feature) than the buffer was prepared to receive. That's a very normal start for an exploit.

Having the surrounding data correspond to a valid popped address, and in turn having that point to runnable code would require either a lot of data, with very predictable quantization, stored consistently and together, or (more simply) omniscience.

Theoretical discussion aside, it was a vaguely clever idea very poorly executed. This is really, really bad for a police procedural. Honestly, though, it's still much better than what you get in sci-fi (eg. Warp 10 made us slugs, transporter fixed it, we're fine now so let's forget about Warp 10).

>> ^Drachen_Jager:

>> ^mxxcon:
>> ^Drachen_Jager:
No scanner would see a program in an image, realize it's an executable and execute the program all without the user's knowledge.
It's barely possible that you could transfer a workable program that way through fractals, and the people on the other end would have to spend weeks or months decoding the program before they could make it run IF they could figure out what it was in the first place.
pattern might be constructed in such a way that when scanned it can confuse any piece of software in the chain to cause a buffer overrun, at which point they could craft the following data to actually be executable and contain malware payload.
This is kinda what happened in a few instances of MP3-based viruses. MP3 file's metadata was malformed in such a way that it would crash the player and execute trojan payload that was embedded in that MP3 file.
Look up information about MP3Concept(MP3Virus.Gen)
There was another incident that involved MP3 file played in Winamp player. I can't find link about it now.
So while realistically unlikely, it's possible.

The main difference there being that the MP3 was a digital file which had been manipulated, not a sound recording. The file was corrupted in a very clever way. In the show the bone 'picture' was taken by the forensics team. They did not bring in a file the guy had created, they took a photograph. You can't insert corrupted data, because the data is coming from the camera they own.
you've never had a legitimate program crash while working with a legitimate file? this is when malware gets to do its stuff.

>> ^mxxcon:

>> ^Drachen_Jager:
No scanner would see a program in an image, realize it's an executable and execute the program all without the user's knowledge.
It's barely possible that you could transfer a workable program that way through fractals, and the people on the other end would have to spend weeks or months decoding the program before they could make it run IF they could figure out what it was in the first place.
pattern might be constructed in such a way that when scanned it can confuse any piece of software in the chain to cause a buffer overrun, at which point they could craft the following data to actually be executable and contain malware payload.
This is kinda what happened in a few instances of MP3-based viruses. MP3 file's metadata was malformed in such a way that it would crash the player and execute trojan payload that was embedded in that MP3 file.
Look up information about MP3Concept(MP3Virus.Gen)
There was another incident that involved MP3 file played in Winamp player. I can't find link about it now.
So while realistically unlikely, it's possible.


The main difference there being that the MP3 was a digital file which had been manipulated, not a sound recording. The file was corrupted in a very clever way. In the show the bone 'picture' was taken by the forensics team. They did not bring in a file the guy had created, they took a photograph. You can't insert corrupted data, because the data is coming from the camera they own.

>> ^Drachen_Jager:

No scanner would see a program in an image, realize it's an executable and execute the program all without the user's knowledge.
It's barely possible that you could transfer a workable program that way through fractals, and the people on the other end would have to spend weeks or months decoding the program before they could make it run IF they could figure out what it was in the first place.
pattern might be constructed in such a way that when scanned it can confuse any piece of software in the chain to cause a buffer overrun, at which point they could craft the following data to actually be executable and contain malware payload.

This is kinda what happened in a few instances of MP3-based viruses. MP3 file's metadata was malformed in such a way that it would crash the player and execute trojan payload that was embedded in that MP3 file.
Look up information about MP3Concept(MP3Virus.Gen)
There was another incident that involved MP3 file played in Winamp player. I can't find link about it now.

So while realistically unlikely, it's possible.

I don't know, Windows might manage it>> ^Drachen_Jager:

No scanner would see a program in an image, realize it's an executable and execute the program all without the user's knowledge.

DICOM doesn't allow execution of modalities. Bones has just called mutiny on the faleboat.

>> ^Sagemind:

It's like a QR code engraved in the bone. Scan it in and it links to a website, downloading the virus/malware.
It's a neat concept but they would have had to scan it knowing that it was there and scanned it with the right software, not just any scanner would understand and execute the command.