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Steganography with Flickr
yiangocy writes "Steganography
is not something new, there have been techniques and available programs for hiding data in pictures/audio files for a long time now. However, one step further is using popular online photo sharing sites, such as Flickr in hiding your data, successfully."
This is an interesting article, but it has nothing to do with Flickr, except for the fact that instead of saving the images on a local device, this guy uploaded them to Flickr.
Yaaaawn, -1: misleading.
there's no place like ~
Are you Republican or just one of the huddled masses that buys into the "everything is a terrorist plot against us" bullshit? For Pete's sake, please give up on all this fear mongering. We have agencies (however good or bad) to deal with those threats -- if they fail to detect terrorist activity, you certain never will and it won't matter if they use stenography or post-it notes.
For once, "Anonymous Coward" is very fitting!
Seriously, do you want to live the rest of your life in a carboard box because it's the only "techology" the terrorists can't co-opt? If so, then to use a cliche - the terrorist will have won.
Stop being a "terrorism curmudgeon" and realize that everything from a table knife to a disposable camera can be co-opted for wrongdoing in certain hands. If you would have no problem with a technology in a world without terrorism, then don't have a problem with it in this one.
Rather than worry about trying to detect stegnography, any image posting service could just arbitrarily set all of the least significant bits of jpgs to "1" as part of the image posting process. It might slightly degrade the image, but it would also erase any potential encoded messages.
Other similar techincs is hiding messages so it looks like a spam http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=hiding+me ssages+using+spam&btnG=Search
I've even read an article (can't find link right now) analizing some samples of the actual spam and concluding that they in fact used as an encripted communication medium by spam originators.
Yeah yeah.
./ story went online.
Besides the usual trolling, there is some truth in the parent.
Maybe just put a link to the (then current) revision, and not to the general article? That way, everybody will get the same article that excisted before the
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Ho-hum. There are much better ways to back up your data for $25 a year.
This is a general "this can be used by terrists!" freak-out. Well, you know, this is an awfully stupid and ineffective way to pass information -- something Bruce Schneier likes to call "movie plot" vulnerabilities. Why bother with steganography when there are much better means to pass encrypted data between two people? Like, I don't know, DCC'ing a file over IRC, or just plain sending an email? If you own both the sending and receiving servers, or use one of the infected army of the drones, there is a miniscule chance of your message even being observed in the ocean of the information that is the internet. Much less stupid than using a complex routine to hide data in an image, and then upload it to a central service like Flickr for all to see (it shows up immediately in the "recently uploaded" pool).
This is a fine idea for a movie plot, but utterly dumb for someone to actually try this. Thus, I assign the article a -1 Troll.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
So bad guys can communicate through even more opaque channels. Woop-dee-doo.
The too-often referenced 9/11 attack was not a failure of signals intelligence. Secret services whose job it is to capture communications did their job in this regard.
Information was not translated and/or acted upon.
Getting more sigint will lead to a panopticon society, without actually resolving the fundamental problem of our lack of human intelligence.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"