xkcd

by **umbrae** » Fri Jun 29, 2007 6:00 pm UTC

Did anybody see today's Dinosaur Comic?

http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001023.html

Anyone want to figure out what the stego on it is? I would but I'm at work.

by **LE4dGOLEM** » Fri Jun 29, 2007 6:11 pm UTC

Related!

by iw » Sat Jun 30, 2007 12:35 pm UTC

Hint:

http://steghide.sourceforge.net/

by **skeptical scientist** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 10:33 pm UTC

Hey, this is fun!

by **adlaiff6** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 12:57 am UTC

/me high fives skeptical scientist

by **skeptical scientist** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 2:00 am UTC

adlaiff6 wrote:/me high fives skeptical scientist

I take it you found the message?

by **adlaiff6** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 11:08 am UTC

No, didn't bother trying. I just recently re-read three of the Ender's Game series, including Hegeman.

by **umbrae** » Sun Jul 29, 2007 10:19 pm UTC

Big 'ol spoilers.

http://www.umbrae.net/files/message-for-YOU.gif

by **umbrae** » Mon Aug 06, 2007 4:13 am UTC

Do you guys think there's anything to this?

http://bayimg.com/JacDHAaBH

I just found it randomly. Steghide brings up nothing with a blank password, 'secret', 'secrets', etc.

by **skeptical scientist** » Mon Aug 06, 2007 7:16 am UTC

Perhaps, but the point about steghide is it doesn't (significantly) alter the image, but that image obviously contains a lot of information which is visible in the random-seeming background, which definitely seems like it's probably encoding data. On the other hand, it did say "several" messages, so one could be hidden by something like steghide in addition to the more obvious data hiding methods in use. There must be some way of telling whether an image has had a file hidden in it with steghide, no? I didn't check the algorithm or how steghide conceals the data, but one thing I would check is how steghide affects file size, and whether the file size of the jpg is the same as the file size of a screenshot encoded as a jpg with similar quality.

by **umbrae** » Mon Aug 06, 2007 8:36 pm UTC

You're smart.

by **umbrae** » Mon Aug 06, 2007 8:56 pm UTC

Upon further analysis, I think it's a fake.

Reasoning:

1. I did what you said, SS, and the optimization ended up being very high - ~50 optimized by photoshop standards, so I think we can safely assume no further images were stored in there via steghide or much else (unless they were really small)

2. I can generate almost the exact same pattern using Photoshop's "Noise" filter at 100%.

3. If there was information hidden in the pixels, why would they scrawl text right over it? Furthermore, why would that text be antialiased? That could mean that data nearing the text was lost.

4. By and large, data isn't uniform. Unless they're using some method other than pixel data to encode their secrets, I don't know how the image could end up looking like that.

by **skeptical scientist** » Mon Aug 06, 2007 11:08 pm UTC

It could be compressed data, which tends to be more uniform than uncompressed data. Indeed, perfectly compressed data (with respect to some universal compression scheme) is the same (definitionally) as "algorithmically random" data, which displays the same properties as is expected of randomly generated data. Of course, it could be a hoax - the fact that there is anti-aliased text over part of the background does suggest this to be the case, as you pointed out - but it is also quite possibly true. However, I don't really care enough to search for messages which may not be there and are likely not terribly interesting even if they are.

by **HiroP** » Wed Aug 08, 2007 4:11 pm UTC

It might be worthwhile to check this out, it seems useful.
I'm at work, so I can't do anything with it right now.

by **ZeroSum** » Wed Aug 08, 2007 8:54 pm UTC

Camera/Shy, anyone?

by **umbrae** » Wed Aug 08, 2007 9:12 pm UTC

What a weird project.

They should have a database of found stegonographic materials.

xkcd

Stegosaurus Stegonography

Stegosaurus Stegonography

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