On Sun, 30 Sep 2001, John Chambers wrote:
> Richard Robinson writes:
> | On Sat, 29 Sep 2001, Laurie Griffiths wrote:
> |
> | > %This is more subtle - Message 5 is encoded in the line breaks of the
> | > source.
> | > G | ABcd | e \
> | > fg
> | >
> | > I think I'll stop before the CIA try to extradite me.
> |
> | Well, yes. I was browsing around the "Munitions" website
> | (cryptography-related :- for no particular reason - someone posted a url
> | so I had a look, as one does) and saw a reference to a steganographic
> | prgram which does more or less that - hides a message in spurious
> | whitespace at the ends of lines in an ascii file. :-)
> 
> Oops!  Look what I started ...
> 
> It does occur to me that if you want to  do  this,  there's  an  even
> better way, which would be familiar to anyone trying to deal with the
> garbage HTML that is generated by a lot of software.   Just  send  an
> HTML  doc  with  a lot of spurious <font>...</font> or <dir>...</dir>
> tags.  Nobody would ever expect this to contain hidden text,  because
> there is so much of this sort of junk around already.  You could also
> add a whole lot of unnecessary &nbsp; chars here and there.  Just put
> a  spurious  <META...FrontPage...>  tag  at the beginning, and nobody
> would be able to convict you of anything.

There was another program mentioned on the same site, that hides a message
in "small, hardly-noticeable changes" to an ascii file. Which would be an
interesting way of coming up with variants of a tune. The message could
then be delivered by playing the tune, and the recipient would transcribe
it to recover the message ...

I don't think I'd want to rely on "what people expect",  though. I'd
imagine the Echelon mob just throw CPUs at the full text of anything
they're interested in.

> You  wouldn't  even  have  to worry about inserting the tags in legal
> spots, since FrontPage doesn't.  In fact, it'd be better if you could
> arrange for a few extra </font> and </dir> tags now and then, to make
> it look like real FrontPage output.
>
> The CIA doesn't stand a chance with Microsoft helping us like this.
> 
> (Bash, bash ... ;-)

Ooo !

-- 
Richard Robinson
"The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem


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