I've started to find favicons useful because they orient me as to which site I'm on and which sites are where, and because they're occasionally interesting pieces of design. So I set about the task of making one for infomesh.net. Here are some of the contenders:
I'm currently using the second symbol, as you may have noticed. We've been coming up with lots of different ideas for what could go in the little 16x16 pixel grid, but one of the best suggestions was anticryptographic in nature. Brian McConnell's The Next Frontier in Computer Science is the first article on Google for the word, but the basic explanation is that it's the study of shaping data such that it can be interpreted with as little context as possible. It's normally mentioned in the same sentence as "when sending data to potential alien planets".
Cody (this is d8uv I'm talking about here) came up with what I deem the best anti-cryptographic method for encoding text into a favicon. First, we decided to use a character set containing only the twenty-six letters used in English, and the space: [A-Z ]. Then he took each pixel to represent one character, and set R, G, and B channels according to the following algorithm: multiply (255 / 27) by the index of the character to be encoded. Simple no? I failed to decode the example he gave me, which was about 10 characters in length, but I did manage to correctly guesstimate that FF was a space, given that it never appeared more than once in a sequence, did not appear at the beginning or the end, and was by far the most popular byte used.
Before that, I'd been working not on anti-cryptography, but on data compression, and had been studying reduced character sets such as Morse Code, Hawaiian, and a phonetic system based on shorthand. Cody also noted that having a randomly generated favicon would be interesting; I wondered whether a randomly generated and reduced fractal, or randomly crawled image from the Web wouldn't be better.