First thing I did before even reading the article is see that it wasn’t ASCII or UTF-8 (or at least if it was it wasn’t bit-aligned). Definitely on the short list of things technical folks are going to instinctively check, along with maybe common “magic bytes” at the start of the maybe-a-file.
I agree. I definitely would have run through common encodings before going to Markov Chains.
First thing I did before even reading the article is see that it wasn’t ASCII or UTF-8 (or at least if it was it wasn’t bit-aligned). Definitely on the short list of things technical folks are going to instinctively check, along with maybe common “magic bytes” at the start of the maybe-a-file.