> Interesting. But my main concern was the anti-stego software. I can't
> see how it relates much to child porn (you can't hide a typical GIF or
> JPEG inside another one - it takes huge amounts of data in which to
> hide little amounts of other data that way).
>
You could easily hide JPEGs inside uncompressed formats which while
wasteful of space and bandwidth are legitimate means of exchange.
The LSBs in a digital camera are probably mostly noise but there is some
risk that if the image processing algorithms used in the camera were
disclosed that you could tell if the camera actually produced the data
or it was altered. Wave files might be better. Shred your originals.
Also, it may be possible to hide bits inside of a JPEG codestream and I
don't mean as an easily spotted data block in the file. I can think of
several methods but I have not tried them. Is it worth working on?
> It seems to me that the
> anti-stego tools are being developed for completely different purposes,
> such as to detect short stego'd messages (on any topic) in e-mail file
> attachments.
>
And just how are they going to detect anything except by trying ( and
likely failing ) to develop tests based upon the characteristics of
known publicly available stego tools?
> All this "pedophiles" hooplah smells like a handwave to me.
>
All justifications are rationalization. They see a future in which
they've lost their grip and they don't like it.
