phUn with x0r

This is a wacky idea I had recently about a use of the reflexive nature of XOR. For those of you that don't remember XOR has this interesting behavior:

If A XOR B = C then B XOR C = A and A XOR C = B.

In otherwords if you have any two values you can get the third by XORing the two that you have.

Now, as I got to thinking about this I thought: What if you took an iso image of Windows XP and another iso image of Mac OS X and xored the files together?

What would happen is you would get a 3rd file that appeared to be garbage but was able to "translate" a Windows XP iso image into an Mac OS X iso image and also "translate" a Mac OS X iso image into a Windows XP iso image.

Now granted you need to do a little fix up to account for file size differences but thats easy. Basically just loop the smaller file over the larger file as you're xoring.

I specifically chose Windows XP and Mac OS X to bring up this question: Is the xor data file illegal? It does absolutly nothing by itself. Its total garbage. Yet it has the ability to transform MS's OS into Apple's OS and vice versa.

Wouldn't this also be a sneaky way for the fileswappers to turn your old Windows ME CD image into a windows XP Pro CD image without actually giving you Windows XP directly? Talk about an upgrade CD! This is it! :)

I threw together a little C# console app that will let you play around with this idea. The code is a little messy because I threw it together in about 1/2 an hour but you get the idea.

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/findleyd/Xoro.zip

Try XORing two zip files together and then delete one of them. You'll be able to recreate the deleted zip file from the xor file and the remaining zip file. Just remember: you can xor ANY 2 files together. e.g. canyon.mid and BritneySpears.iso