What is Data? Code Sheets, Error Levels, and Endians Oh My!

A fun review of what data is. Do you know how data is stored on a disk? Or how your favorite shade of blue is encoded to binary? Well this light hearted but technical conversation is a great review, or primer of digital data. Accessible to the beginner and useful to the expert. Come one and all.

Code Sheets, Error Levels and Endians Oh My! This is an exploration of what data is, on a binary level. The idea is to show you data as you probably have never seen it before, or have forgotten about because it is so basic. We will see a packet sniffer, hex editor and hand-outs to show then manipulate binary data. This includes showing how information is encoded into binary data (ones and zeros on disk), showing what parity is, how to use XOR (exclusive or) to encrypt data and decrypt it too, and how to read a binary clock.

This adventure will not make you a binary expert, but it will show you the foundation that all binary data is based on, and give you a few tools and techniques that you can use to see the digital data you have, with new understanding.

The conversation is presented by Mr. Ben Davies, Senor Consultant at Movìri.com. Mr. Ben has an eclitic background that includes submarine duty in the US NAVY, technology consultant, information security, information audit, process management and capacity optimization. Mr. Ben considers himself an “expert generalist”, with a wide base and several deep subjects.

While trying to actually understand how information is encoded on disk as ones and zeros, many of these use cases were used to understand the concept then expand it to other use cases. We start with a piece of text, converted from ASCII to HEX, then Hex to binary. Then expanded to bar codes to binary, then color to color codes to binary. As this understanding expands, XOR helps understand encryption and parity, and has lead to seeing data in a new, much more informed way.

This presentation is a fun, fast way to review these eureka moments and remove some of the mystery of question of “What is Data?”.

The presentation is available here: http://mlcu.com/WhatIsData20180401.ppt We make heavy use of the notes section, so the presentation stands on its own.