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ASCII Art Steganography

Posted by timothy on from the of-all-the-ideas-out-there-this-is-one dept.

bigearcow writes "ASCII art is nothing new, but this site takes it one step further by allowing you to embed another data file within the image. The resulting ASCII art remains printable (i.e. no special unicode symbols) — this means you can print the image out, hang it on your wall, and have it look like an innocent ASCII art when it's hiding a secret document of your choice." You'll need a small (200x200 pixel max) base image from which the ASCII art will be built.

9 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. hang it on your wall? by commodoresloat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Who wants to hang ascii art on their wall? Besides:

    2. Select data file. This will be the data file embedded in the ascii art. (Limited to around 40kb at the moment)

    Hmmm, how secure can this tool be when you have to send your secure data, unencrypted, to another site to use it?

    1. Re:hang it on your wall? by shitzu · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Who says you may not encrypt it first? A little AES never hurt steganography.

  2. Huh? by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 5, Insightful
    From the application linky:

    This Google App Engine application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.

    From Google App Engine web site:

    Google App Engine makes it easy to design scalable applications that grow from one to millions of users without infrastructure headaches.

    Maybe not...

    --
    If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
    1. Re:Huh? by Fruit · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Quota is about money headaches, not infrastructure headaches. Google can't help you with that.

    2. Re:Huh? by spintriae · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I didn't realize scalability was analogous with free unlimited bandwidth. I'll keep that in mind.

    3. Re:Huh? by MrZaius · · Score: 3, Insightful

      >Quota is about money headaches, not infrastructure headaches. Google can't help you with that.

      No, it's about infrastructure. They allow for users to "apply" for more if the app is cool enough, and presumably award some free access to a higher quota - Read the grandparent post link. Google does at least offer to consider helping. Regardless, though, money buys and maintains infrastructure, and that's all that really is the issue here even if they are trying to milk most developers that use the service of a bit of cash.

  3. Re:Excellent! by Xest · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Or even more amusingly, hide the keys for Bluray's DRM in the Bluray logo, although it would be more fun to not hide it and just make an ASCII Bluray logo out of the keys they tried to magic off of the net claiming the string was copyrighted or whatever when they were first released.

  4. Re:can only encode about 40kB by roachdabug · · Score: 2, Insightful

    2GB ASCII art would seem pretty suspicious to me.

  5. Re:Breaking news by Main+Gauche · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It was sitting right next to the joke.