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In 2001 German scene group Farbrausch released a demo called "fuenf" (in your face). pouet.net It contains a 5 Byte executable which could be rather considered a troll approach than a demo. If you run it your hear a weird sound and it could crash your computer. At least it produces a sound. Whatever.

The hexadecimal content is:

95cd 21eb fc

And the binary representation is:

10010101 11001101 00100001 11101011 11111100

Using xxd I also get the printable chars from the content, which are:

..!..

And that makes me a little confused. Looking up the values in the ASCII table (e.g. here), I get this as a result:

•Í!ëü

At least the exclamation mark is correct.

But how does 95cd21ebfc translate into ..!..?

Side note:

file -bi fuenf.com sais the encoding is not known:

charset=unknown-8bit

And iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 fuenf.com returns

Í!ëü

Which leads to the assumption, that XXD simply cannot decode the content and therefore just uses default results, like the dot?

n.r.
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1 Answers1

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First of all, this is not a text file, so looking at it as one makes no sense. It's instructions.

Secondly, even if it could be interpreted as text, you would need to know the encoding. It's definitely not ASCII, because that only defines symbols in the range 0-127 (and the 3rd byte here is the only one in that range, which maps to '!'). The "extended ASCII" table you link to is only one of many possible code pages that give meaning to the value from 128-255, but there are many of those code pages. Calling it "extended ASCII" is misleading, because it suggests that ASCII created an updated standard for this, which they did not. For a while, computer vendors just did whatever they wanted with those additional characters, and some of them became quasi-standards by virtue of being included in DOS, Windows, etc. Or they got standardized by ISO (you tried iso-8859-1, which is one such standard).

Enno
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