Neo-retro Steg

Back in high school I spent a year doing a research project on steganography. Steganography is the art/science of sending hidden messages. It shouldn't be confused with cryptography, which involves sending a message that cannot be understood by an eavesdropper. The goal with steganography is to avoid letting the eavesdropper know a message even exists. Writing a message in invisible ink is a classic example of steganography.

Recently, steganography has gone digital. For example, you can hide a message in an image file by replacing the least significant bits of the image with the bits of the message being hidden. This adds some noise to the file, but is still very effective unless an eavesdropper has reason to believe the image contains a message. That's the type I studied back in high school.

Now it seems, digital steganography has gone old school. Remember ascii art? Those pictures drawn using typographical symbols? Some people have developed a method of hiding data files in an ascii image. The hidden text is right there on the surface, not in the code, but the technique is pure computer. It's a really cool mix of old and new. The only problem is the site is totally falling apart under the weight of the slashdot link that lead me (and many others) to the site. Ah well, someone will make a better version soon and we will all be able to send secret codes in the tacky ascii images we leave on our friends' facebook walls.