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Peekabooty, Camera/Shy Released

Posted by michael on from the carnivore-go-home dept.

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.'"

9 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. What a shame by Spazzz · · Score: 1, Insightful

    It's shame that software like this is even necessary, but with the way things are going, we'll soon need this software here in the good ol' US of A as well.

  2. Re:hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    >uhm yeah, make it easy for the terrorists...

    Cars make it pretty easy for terrorists to build a car bomb. Ryder trucks make it pretty easy for terrorists to fill one with ANFO. Should we stop making cars? Should we stop renting trucks? Buses make good targets for suicide bombers. Should our metropolitan areas stop offering bus service?

    I don't mean to pick on you personally, but I'm getting damn tired of the argument that we shouldn't do this or that because it might make something easier for a terrorist. Just because there are assholes in the world doesn't mean there aren't people with legitimate uses for new technology.

  3. Re:Snake Oil by phaxkolumbo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This might sound like a stupid question (but then again I'm no steganography expert), but how exactly is packing the data in LSB's obvious?

    Doesn't that become obvious only after the inclusion of headers and such? I mean that the distribution of 1's and 0's in an image should be pretty much the same, regardless of any hidden data.

    The article is pretty light on technical details, so no answers from there.

  4. This stuff needed in USA by WCMI92 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I can see a growing need for this kind of thing in the USA, as we allow the Megacorp cartels like the RIAA/MPAA to chop off and "firewall" so to speak, the individual.

    Remember the Napster trial? The infamous statement by a RIAA honcho "We will firewall them at their PC"? And then go read the story just below this one where AOLTW's RoadRunner is port blocking Kazaa.

    I find it very interesting phinisophically, that the net result of "Big Government (Communist)" and "Big Business (Capitalist)", when left unrestrained by civil law that is supposed to protect and affirm the rights of the individual, produce the SAME RESULTS!

    In the communist system, as China is, the governmment IS the corporation. It makes up "laws" as it goes along, always to benefit those in power. In the USA, we've allowed corporations to achieve similar results by the fact that our Congress and Presidents are passing and signing laws WRITTEN BY THEM, as the DMCA and CBDTPA are.

    Unfortunately for the tyrants, both governmental and corporate, there are a lot of Thomas Paine's in the world, and they tend to be creative people. Hence this program that lets you circumvent firewalls.

    --
    Corporatism != Free Market
  5. Re:Sounds like.... by Myco · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I don't get it. Are you saying that people who appear in porn are ruining their chances to have worthwhile lives? That's a very sex-negative attitude.

    --
    My deviantArt site
  6. Re:Am I missing something? by helarno · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Last time I checked, they used a NOT list and it was a very small list. For mainstream use, you could pretty much access anything you wanted with the exception of a couple of news sites like CNN and sometimes, NYT. The blocking was erratic though ... some months the sites were reachable, other days, they were perfectly fine. Of course, I'm sure a few dissident sites are blocked, but since I don't view those on a daily basis, I wouldn't know.

    But it's really a non-issue. Even 4 years ago, all the internet cafes I visited by default went through a proxy that pretty much allowed you to view whatever you wanted. Knowledge of how to circumvent the blocks were very common among the younger audience. I'm sure it's even more prevalent today. For China, at least, this project isn't really relevant.

  7. Re:Am I missing something? by Sverdlov · · Score: 2, Insightful
    From the peekabooty FAQ:

    Do you think that your efforts to create Peekabooty will cause censoring countries to change their filtering policy from 'default-allow' to 'default-deny', that is, instead of blocking 'bad' sites it will instead only allow 'good' ones?

    This is very similar thinking as to what happened prior to WWII. The good guys let Germany invade its neighbors because they didn't want something REALLY bad to happen. If an evil madman tells you that you have to choose which of two people he is going to kill, it is still the madman's fault that someone is dead no matter which one you choose. If a government switches over to an allow-only system, this helps the cause even further. What we want is an end to censorship. The only way that is going to happen is that the government stops censoring its own people. The people have to make that happen. Not only is censorship possible, but total 1984-style control and monitoring is possible, and China in particular is heading in that direction as fast as it can. One of the benefits of Peekabooty is that it is bringing awareness to thousands of people around the world about the issues.

    In any event, a country has to overcome some major obstacles to switch to an allow-only system: 1) It's a lot of work with a lot of administration headaches (there are way more good web sites than bad ones), 2) the 'allow' list is bigger than a 'deny' list, which puts more strain on hardware that already cannot handle the load, 3) economic reasons (the cash doesn't flow if the commercial web sites are blocked), and 4) it will cause unrest.

  8. Re:Sounds like.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    You're right. We need to legalize prostitution instead. That way instead of just downloading this stuff and whacking off: we can call the 1-800 number and have a couple of these nympho's stop by for some real sex. WoooHooo! Think about how much money a good-looking girl could make between 17-30? After that, she could become a "madame" and help to manage the younger girls. In order to have a girlfriend/wife in this country you have to spend a shitload of money anyway. Why not just make it so that the money goes towards straight sex? If you have a full-time girlfriend you spend about the same amount of money on her to get laid -- only you only get sex about 1/5 of the time. With a prostitute -- it's just a business transaction. You spend the money, you get the sex: guaranteed! No headaches! No periods! No bullshit!

  9. Re:Great... by geekd · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Lets write some more utilities so that drug runners and crazies can send undetectible messages to eachother with great ease.

    What's the difference between criminals and "legitimate" political dissidents? To the governments of the world, nothing.

    I'm sure King George thought Washington and Jefferson were "crazies".

    I'm sure the British government thought Ghandi was a criminal. They put him in jail several times.

    The price of a truly free country is that "drug runners and crazies can send undetectible messages to eachother with great ease". This has to be so that future Ghandis and Mandellas can do so also.

    Or we can just shut everybody up. Yeah, lets do that. Let's start with you.