This art is currently banned under the DMCA, as it contains the source code to an "illegal circumvention device." Picture 1 and Picture 4 both contain all the necessary color information to recreate the decimal representation (a prime number, no less) of the hexadecimal that is the gzipped source to a CSS descrambler written in C. It should be noted for those in the U.S. that viewing or possessing any of these files is probably illegal. With that said, here's the art and how I did it.


Picture 1 - This is the original version. I split the prime into 243 six digit blocks (padding the last block with three zeros). I then wrote the necessary HTML to color a grid of 18 x 13 stars with those codes. A screenshot and some Photoshop editing later, and I had this image.

Picture 2 - This version was created by applying the Mosaic filter to Picture 1 and adjusting the levels to make it look a bit nicer. In the process, I destroyed the color information and thus created a picture with no steganographic information content.

Picture 3 - Take Picture 2 and apply a Gaussian Blur filter, and you have this smooth background that would be perfect for a web page background texture or your computer's wallpaper.

Picture 4 - I used the Eyedropper tool to extract the color information from each star in Picture 1. I then painted a single pixel of that color, forming an 18 x 13 texture with the full information content of the prime. I then replicated this across the image file, producing this tesselating background.