Peekabooty, Camera/Shy Released

An anonymous (how appropriate) writer sends "Peek-a-Booty, a program designed to circumvent mechanisms (such as China's Great Firewall) limiting access to websites, has been open-sourced. It's listed as a "Beta" on SourceForge, but the Peek-a-booty website seems to encourage people to start using it." And Doug writes "PC World reports about a new tool to encrypt text with a click of the mouse and bury the text in an image. After posting an embedded image on a Web site, someone can notify intended recipients by e-mail with code words such as 'Go to this URL to see pictures from my birthday party.'"

Comments

Snake Oil

[cperciva]

This "steganography tool" is no more than snake oil.

Rather than using a more advanced method of steganography, this tool packs data into the least significant bits of the image. Simple, easy, and incredibly obvious. This is to steganography what ROT13 is to encryption -- if you use it for anything important, people will laugh at you.

In fact, this is the worst kind of snake oil, because it is not only ineffective, but also dangerous. The administrators of the Great Firewall Of China (for example) could very easily detect files encoded with this software; using it would then be akin to waving a red flag and shouting "hey, I'm doing something I don't want you to know about". Bad steganography is worse than no steganography, because it highlights the fact that you're trying to hide something.