Interesting idea - just for reference, here's what the bytes are assuming the output is Windows-1252:

my @data = (0x61, 0xAE, 0x6B, 0x7D, 0x72, 0x2E, 0x17, 0x8A);
printf "%08b\n", $_ for @data;
print "---\n";
printf "%08b\n", $_ for map ord, split //, "ack";
__END__
01100001
10101110
01101011
01111101
01110010
00101110
00010111
10001010
---
01100001
01100011
01101011
[download]

That's for the second example string, for the first, the last byte would be 0x2C.