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Show HN: What colour is your IP address?

prettyip.meetstrange.com

21–30 of 76 posts

Re: Show HN: What colour is your IP address?

#22

The 4th byte is thrown away... You could use it as alpha channel? Or CMYK color.

Considered it, but CMYK only go up to 100 in value - alpha channel could be an option though...

You can name the color too - http://chir.ag/projects/ntc/

It's not an exact match of course but I did my best to make it as close as possible.

Re: Show HN: What colour is your IP address?

#23

The 4th byte is thrown away... You could use it as alpha channel? Or CMYK color.

Considered it, but CMYK only go up to 100 in value - alpha channel could be an option though...

Since it's out of 100, you could do CMYK based on proportion. e.g.:

C = (byte1/255)x100; M = (byte2/255)x100; Y = (byte3/255)x100; K = (byte4/255)x100;

Re: Show HN: What colour is your IP address?

#25
post #20

People are bashing this for being 'pointless', but hey, so is the next great to-do list app you made in 48 hours. This is a fun little experiment. I can see an actual use for this. Look for example at Identicons, Wavatars, and MonsterIDs[1]. They all use browser variables to generate random avatars for use around the web, e.g. on blog comments. I imagine this could do something similar, and a nice colour palette is a…

I was considering something related for my own software -- giving some level of differentiation to "Anonymous" users in a discussion, to reduce samefagging; users on the same subnet would get similar colours, etc. The main downside with that is that it's then plausible to look at somebody's colour and work out their IP address :P

Just hash the actual IP address. For example, take the IP and apply MD5; then take three bytes each to make, say, 3-colored "flags". That would totally work and yet be reasonably anonymous. This would also take care of the fact that colors come as three byte values and not four.

Re: Show HN: What colour is your IP address?

#29
post #25
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was considering something related for my own software -- giving some level of differentiation to "Anonymous" users in a discussion, to reduce samefagging; users on the same subnet would get similar colours, etc. The main downside with that is that it's then plausible to look at somebody's colour and work out their IP address :P

Just hash the actual IP address. For example, take the IP and apply MD5; then take three bytes each to make, say, 3-colored "flags". That would totally work and yet be reasonably anonymous. This would also take care of the fact that colors come as three byte values and not four.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: What colour is your IP address?

#30
post #25
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was considering something related for my own software -- giving some level of differentiation to "Anonymous" users in a discussion, to reduce samefagging; users on the same subnet would get similar colours, etc. The main downside with that is that it's then plausible to look at somebody's colour and work out their IP address :P

Just hash the actual IP address. For example, take the IP and apply MD5; then take three bytes each to make, say, 3-colored "flags". That would totally work and yet be reasonably anonymous. This would also take care of the fact that colors come as three byte values and not four.

That would not work, as stated. The search space is way too small. Simply exhaustively building a table mapping hash to IP address is tractable.

This could be ameliorated by including a site-specific secret in the hashed value; I'm not comfortable calling that "secure" but it does address this particular flaw.

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