Monday, January 19, 2015

New beta module "Hieroglyphs" as a CuttleFish text "envelope"

What is CuttleFish?
CuttleFish is a simple program that makes text messages unreadable to humans. CuttleFish does not use encryption. All it does is turn your messages into what looks like gibberish. It then puts this gibberish into a common file format, which serves as an "envelope" if you will. If a human opens such a file in a standard program, he or she will see "garbage".

New Beta module "Hieroglyphs"
This paragraph is from the readme (help xml) of the distribution jar at http://www.unchartedcharters.com
[BETA] "hieroglyphs .png": turns a message into an image file with hieroglyphs. You need the font "Gardiner.ttf" (free download from http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/). Limitations of the BETA module: Only a couple of hundred of characters (need to add page handling). FONT DEPENDENCY: This module may fail if the graphics capabilities on the machines of sender and recipient are too different. Please TELL us about issues!

What the output looks like:


The hieroglyphics module produces a .png image file. This means, extracting the original message text requires optical character recognition.

CuttleFish does this without any dependency on other code. The module was written from scratch and requires several parameters to match in order to say it found a match. In the test environments, 100% accuracy was achieved. As stated in the help file, this strict matching requirement may well be too strict for message exchange between computers with different graphics capabilities.

Relaxing the matching may be needed for real world use, any failure of the module under a specific operating system version with a potentially different version of the Gardiner font should be reported to mailhead [at] unchartedcharters.com.


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