Neatorific photo of the sun over on the Astronomy Picture of the Day site:
It’s been photoshopped, but still, neato!
UPDATE – 080312!!
Fixed the link to go to the correct page instead of the Astronomy Picture of the Day home page.
A covert channel is a means of communication that is non-standard. In other words, messages sent by other than normal means (more here). One method (vector) used as a covert channel is steganography. Steganography is a means to hide messages, usually within images like JPEGs, as opposed to cryptography where messages are encrypted. Over at Daily Cup of Tech (great site by the way, worth a good dig through the articles) they’ve posted a video which details how to use a compression tool and a built in Windows command line utility (FINALLY, a real use for cmd and it should work with GNU/Linux tools too) actually embed files into JPEG or other image files. While not strictly speaking steganography (which only deals with messages, not entire files), this is just too cool! Can’t wait to try this one out on my own!!!
I heard on NPR this morning on my way to work that today is Chuck Yeager’s birthday. So, in celebration, I decided to go over to NASA’s image gallery and find some images of the Bell X-1. NASA doesn’t lay copyright claim to many of it’s photos as long as you’re not using anything with their logo to promote something. This begs the question “Why isnt’ this stuff licensed under a Creative Commons [insert your favorite Creative Commons license here] license?” Who knows…
If you checkout NASA’s GRIN (Great Image in NASA) you can find many nice high-res images of early computing, flight and so forth. Some of these were used by Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim a few years back for their “bumps”. These image gallery links and more below:
NASA Image of the Day Gallery
Great Images in NASA library of images (GRIN)
Astronomy Picture of the Day
NASA Dryden Flight Research Center Gallery
NASA Image eXchange (NIX)
As always, read the fine print if you’re going to use any of these images. If you have any other good goverment/other image galleries I’d love to hear about them!
Lucky Disasters
Things I… Like?
