Electronically Sign Radix-64 Made Easy

Electronically sign radix 64

if he ever worked with HTML worked with emails or watch the Tom Scott video then you've probably heard of base64 base64 is a way to take any form of data and transform it into a long string of plaintext to be sent over the web or any medium with that matter without having to worry about any data being corrupted and vice versa and if he understood all that then you don't need to watch the rest of this video the rest of you have a lot to learn so the data that makes up the files on your computer and the text in your email is primarily made up of bits which could be one or two values a 1 or 0 string 8 bits together and you make a bite a byte has 256 distinct arrangements of those 8 bits and you could find that out by raising two to the power of eight there are also some other names for different arrangements of bits but we don't need to delve into those the American Standard Code for information interchange or ASCII is a way to map a byte to a character or symbol it was developed by Americans so it doesn't have many symbols available like unicode does so let's say you want to send an email to a friend or coworker you type in the editor type of the email and hit Send and let's just assume that this was back when Unicode wasn't that big now if we take a look at the individual characters at this email and put their ASCII values below you'll start noticing that they're all below the number 128 in the late 80s only 7 bit data could be transmitted between programs the channels serve 8 mainly to save money on data transmission costs this is fun for your message though because you speak English but then there's a problem it can attach files to emails and those files are made up of 8-bit bytes but the network you're sending it over only uses 7 bits so there wouldn't be a way to send your file to your friend without it getting mangled up along the way to fix this base64 was created it works by taking in 3 bytes of data and giving it back for ok I'm oversimplifying let's take a closer look at what's going on say your message is simply hey and ASCII it gets translated into the numbers 72 101 and 121 now what base 54 does is concatenate the bits of these numbers into one long 24-bit number these 24 bits then get split up into four equal parts notice how there is six bits in each of these parts remember that bit earlier where I said to the two power of eight is 256 well there are six bits now and two thousand powers of six is 64 and this is where base64 gets his name anyways each six bit number is mapped to a different code that is the base64 index I'll put this on the side of the screen so he could follow along I'm also gonna turn these bits back in the numbers so it's easy for you to read them so the numbers get mapped onto the index table and the letters are represented and ascii but this time it's guaranteed not to go over 7 bits and just like that you have your message encoded at base64 to reverse the process take the encoded message and run them through the index table the other way around string up the bits in that 24-bit number again and split them back up into threes and map them back to a ski when encoding this process gets run for every three byte block in the day that you're encoding if there isn't the right amount of data to fill up the last three by block the spaces in that block without any data are filled in with zeros and a special character or two is added to the end of the output to specify that the final block only contain a one or two bytes decoding is exactly what the reverse process is just run through it all the way to the end and if there's one padding character at the end the last block contains two bytes if there's two the block contains one byte otherwise it's a full 24 bit block now much more information can be sent in emails including Unicode characters which is what lets you send your friends in emoji or words and the completely different language thank you so much for watching this video it's a new thing that I'm trying out with this channel I have a whole lot of ideas for more videos like this one and I hope that I'll be able to make more in the future if you want to see more or if you have any ideas just leave me a comment you can also check out some of my older videos like my shenanigans and Grand Theft Auto or some cool stuff I made in Garry's Mod I'll see you in my next video bye