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There is a secret word associated with this image that will be clear if it is decrypted properly. What is that word? (JPEG artifacts are irrelevant)
Full size image: https://i.stack.imgur.com/cc5yl.jpg
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I hesitate to say
STAR
since
a mere width/height adjustment seems a bit easy.
Method:
It’s visually recognizable as an image that has been skewed in width. I converted it to a BMP, opened it with a hex editor, and started guessing at some values to adjust the width field. After 3 or 4 attempts, I stumbled upon one which made it readable enough to obtain the above, and did not attempt to further refine the value.
Edit by Author:
The “ideal” dimensions alluded to in the above method is when the dimensions are square. Multiplying the image dimensions together, you get $1337 * 1914 = 2559018$.
The square root of this is 1599.7, so make the image dimensions 1600 X 1600 and you get the below image:
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7
The image contains a little bit more than in Ayefork’s answer.
The text actually reads:
The secret message is: STAR
You can find a decoded version of the image here and Java source code for decoding the image here.
Description:
The original image has been split into 6 vertical slices, each 263 pixel wide and using some strange interleaving pattern, been skewed into the 1337 pixel wide encoded image.
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