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You Won’t Find ‘I” in Bitcoin. Here’s Base-2, -16 -32, -45, -58, -64, and all the other bases
In cybersecurity and digital forensics, you just never know what our data will look like, and how it is represented. At its core, it is 1s and 0s, and where these need to be interpreted either as numbers (integers and floating point values), characters, binary codes (Op codes), program values, or strings. Sometimes we might count four bits at a time, and represent the value as hex, and other times we could six bits at a time can represent it in Base64 format. The real skill of a cybersecurity analyst is to know how to interpret these bits, and convert them into something that makes sense.
Converting to printable characters
The success of the Web is possibly one of the greatest achievements ever in human kind. But, it has never really been allowed to evolve that much on its basic core protocols. Why? Because to change them would have a significant effect on the way the Web worked. RFC 791 and RFC 793. brought us IP and TCP, and RFC 2068 brought us a protocol that has never really advanced that much: HTTP 1.1.
One thing about the Internet, is that it was built to transfer text — mainly ASCII characters. So, one of the major challenges of building the Web was to convert our pesky binary data — which has bells, tabs…
