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[SPEC] Hidden Chinese Text

[civman2]

I like this theory.

Who can read Chinese?

[slk295]

those "sleeping soldiers" kinda remind me of theory a while ago about those clay soldiers in china that some people found in a cave or something maybe this is somehow connected to that.
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[Genesis11]

This is my first ever post, so bear with me...

[slk295]

ya thats wat i was talking about. another thing i found interesting was when i cut out some of the text in that document and pasted into a translator i found that i could translate it into chinese, jappanese, and korean. So those characters are acually at least three laguages.

[Genesis11]

what did you get when you translated into the other languages?

i'm thinking that if we could find something in japanese it would make sense too- being that xbox was never released in china.

[slk295]

in korean its came up with "sword and wednesday" and in japanese it said"Flame stop ship, grebe, bodily organ, light
maple interest " but i think we be carefull because these are only computer translations and it would be helpful if we a had a human translator

[Genesis11]

[slk295]

I assume thtas what its using because mandrin is the more common form of chinese but it does give the option of both simplified and traditional chinese if that helps at all other wise i can see what i can do if you needsomething translated

[Genesis11]

yeah, that's a shame. I would look around, but I don't have time. Man, it really reeks that your translator won't let you pick.

Now, what would be really cool is if we could get a real translator to look into the pictures.

Ah, to dream. You know, I was just thinking of another post for that August 24th post.

ARGH!!!! Just realized I'll be camping on the 24th!!!

[Dsal]

I know some Chinese as I took it in college.
None of these strings of characters look like actual Chinese sentences or anything like that. The string of contiguous characters after the run that looks like an alphabet has to do with the way the characters are encoded; it's just jibberish.

I tried examining the above posted file in several of the Chinese Encoding formats (Big5,GBK,ISO,EUC-TW,HZ).. none of them really had anything relevant.

Every Chinese character has a meaning, so if you machine translate the Chinese it will always come up with something. But it's pretty clear to me that none of this is intentional communication. If you take any image file and look at it in this way, chances are you'll find several chinese characters in them as well.

[SpghEddy]

The real test to see if Chinese characters were *intentionally* hidden in the images, is to try to repair the images. First, take out the English embedded text. You should have a "fixed" image.

Here you can see fixed images from Phase 2, from the killer.jpg set of images.

If there were English *and* Chinese message hidden in an image, then it would be necessary to remove both sets of messages from the image before it would look fixed. But be careful... even if there is only English text, it's easy to accidentally delete an extra character, resulting in a different corrupted image. So, the only proof that there is Chinese in an image would be if you remove the text that you think is Chinese, along with any English text, and end up with a fixed image.

[parm]

Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters are all represented in Windows as multibyte characters - that is, by pairs of single ASCII values. Given the amount of entropy in these image files, it's inevitable that you're going to get some pairs that map to eastern characters. Also, given that individual characters can map to entire words in these languages, the amount of "information" carried by these characters is much greater than individual English letters.

Basically, I wouldn't read anything into it.

[Genesis11]

Well, there you have it...