Corrupting Files By Changing Random Letters

[Connors]

The title pretty much says it all but yeah you might be surprised at what you can do with this.

[DISCLAIMER]: DO THIS WITH A COPY OF THE FILE SO YOU WON'T LOSE THE FILE. DON'T DO ANYTHING STUPID.

Example: OKAY so let's say you take an image file and change the extension to .txt (your computer might ask if you want to use the new extension, say yes). Now you can open the resulting text file, scroll down a ways and change something! Removing or adding data seems to corrupt them, however, selecting a character or a small string of characters and moving it results in a file you can still see. I assume this is because you avoid changing the file's size. Now change the extension back to the original to see what you have done.

Here's a nice photo from a Google search:

BEFORE:


AFTER:


You can also make multiple changes, and you might notice that the position in the text file corresponds somewhat directly to the position in the image, going from top to bottom.











Yeah I probably got a bit carried away, but it's fun. You could do a series of photos that were intentionally broken and call it "art".


Just for kicks I also tried changing or removing some random characters from the save data of a beepbox.co URL. It took a few tries but the result is almost surreal. (reload the page if it won't play)

http://www.beepbox.co/#3sbkbl0egt2a7g0fj7i0r1w1111f0000d1111c0000h0000v0021o3310b1moqo8000001hg008h99900000000000p22bFzA4zjiCv9xO861xwgRxK1q6CAJGFFFOiKhrq6S6IdjEqqj62Cmy1jzbw5c-OqsUXcCfls26G6EcJ30g1z0FDExj7ze3AobAo078BAQ-QOP1IsnJaoy0kMb1AQ1jcD93IwOq0X80000


Well?
What are you waiting for?
It's time to EXPERIMENT. O_O

[Gan]

Pretty neat.

Someone should make a program that selects a random file, a random bit in the file and negates it. Every millisecond.
And see how long it takes for your computer to die and what kinda changes occur.