#week08

After weeks of solving the NSA Crypto Challenges, I’ve figured a method to crack the messages more quickly. First start with any three or  two letter words, and fill the missing letters with a vowel. Try to create well known words such a ‘the, who, and, an ,am, to, for’ and then try to find any four letter words that might be ‘that/then/them’. Next try filling in other missing higher frequency letters with the higher letter frequencies of the english alphabet, ie.  ‘e, t, a, o, i, n, s, h, r, d, l, u ‘. We should be beginning to form more readable words, or words we can form and figure out the rest of the message. Below is an example of a crypto challenge I cracked under 5 minutes:

Google yourself: After downloading my data from Google, it was quite surprising that I had 68GB of data with them. Honestly quite scary. It was split into 18 files with 4GB worth of data each. Looking through the files these are some interesting points:

It had stored my “home” and “work” address even though they are slightly inaccurate

Google timeline has data of places that I have been since 2016…with associated photos that I had taken at the location…concerning. Maybe some sort of automatic geotagging because of using a Google pixel phone.

Facebook Data: Looking through my Facebook data, it doesn’t seem too surprising as these are the types of information that I have put out there myself. For example, posts that I have liked, commented on or reacted to, pages that have been liked, ads I have clicked on etc. But something crazy is in the section “Advertisers Who Uploaded a Contact List With Your Information”, many of these companies I have never heard of and assume I have not interacted with before.

Week 08 - Eighth Update of 20-Time!

NOTE: I’m changing the format of these updates a bit, to describe what exactly I worked on in class, more than the basics of things. 

Actual Status Updates:

What did you do in class today? In class today I finished coloring the Totoro piece on the overall masterpiece. Using crayons, I finished shading in the characters and coloring the scene, although I will make adjustments in my own time to add highlights with white pen to help enhance the scene. Before entering class, I had already colored in Totoro during my freetime to practice coloring with colored pencils, but it did help with the time as I was able to completely finish the piece according to plan.The only obstacle I generally faced today was how the crayons ‘worked’ on coloring the piece, I felt as if a different medium would have suited it better, but it has been already colored so there’s no turning back. 

Next week? Next week I’m planning on sketching the Mulan piece and leaving the Undertale piece last since I consider it the hardest piece out of all of them as there are multiple characters to fit in the space, similar to the SU piece. The Mulan piece will probably end up being the easiest since it’s simply one character which I’m coloring using regular markers I believe, so I hope to continue my progress successfully. 

On track? Still on track! I tweaked my schedule for doing things a little by doing a couple of coloring and sketching beforehand so that I have enough time to do everything, but otherwise I’m still on my way to complete this project. 

Thank you so much for following the development of my masterpiece and I hope you’ll continue to view my updates :)

Use of a book as inspiration and theme for a photoshoot! Narrative