Visprint 2.0 review

Visprint project makes fractal fingerprint png images based on the contents of any file

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 14K Developer: Goiz Samhain

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Visprint project makes fractal fingerprint png images based on the contents of any file. The image will be different for almost every file with even slightly different contents. Visprint uses the IFS fractal generation process, pioneered by Michael Barnsley. It is a way to create images which are self-similar to infinite depths. In other words, the picture is made up of smaller versions of itself.

The original code was written by Ian Goldberg, based on an idea by Hal Finney, in a post to the coderpunks mailing list. The most excellent color enhancements were added by Raph Levien. David Johnston made a port for Win95 console mode and added a bunch of nice features. Soren Andersen developed the png and transparency code.

I decided to rescue the orphaned code from oblivion, clean it up, document it and maintain it. As far as I know, there is no copyright infringement. The code has always been freely available in the net and the previous authors are properly acknowledged.

So... What about security?

Visprint is just a "toy" program that generates cool graphics. The purpose is to serve as a fun graphic complement to md5 checksums. In no way whatsoever should it be used as a stand-alone security tool. It's not intended to be a substitute for any file checker. Even though it can be used to check differences in files and it uses a cryptographic hash function (md5) as it's input, it has not been designed nor tested with heavy security use in mind.

What's New in This Release:
Created the homepage of the project: http://www.tastyrabbit.net/visprint
Created the slackware package.
Created the man page (using manedit), And every other documentation.
Created the makefile.
Fixed a couple of bugs in the command line parser function.
Removed the -n switch. (The value 4 is always used anyways.)
Added the help switch and function.
Added the -t switch to turn transparency on or off.
Cleaned up the code.