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Python for Secret Agents - Volume II - Second Edition

You're reading from  Python for Secret Agents - Volume II - Second Edition

Product type Book
Published in Dec 2015
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781785283406
Pages 180 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
Languages
Authors (2):
Steven F. Lott Steven F. Lott
Profile icon Steven F. Lott
Steven F. Lott Steven F. Lott
Profile icon Steven F. Lott
View More author details

Background briefing – images and social media


We'll use the Pillow implementation of the PIL package to extract and convert any graphics or images. In Chapter 1, New Missions, New Tools, we used the pip3.4 program to install Pillow 2.9.0. The PIL package has modules that allow us to convert images to a common format. It also allows us to create thumbnails of images. This can help us build a tidy summary of images we collected.

Most importantly, it allows us to validate an image file. It turns out that the compression algorithms used on some images can be hacked. Someone can tweak the bytes of an image so that it appears to be infinitely large. This will cause the computer opening the image to get progressively slower until the image processing application finally crashes. A basic counter-intelligence ploy is to circulate damaged image files that leave agents struggling to figure out what went wrong.

The PIL module is an important piece of counter-counter-intelligence. We don't want to accept...

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