http://www.fbi.gov/hq/lab/fsc/backissu/july2004/research/2004_03_research01.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
http://www.jjtc.com/stegoarchive/stego/software.html
"Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the intended recipient knows of the existence of the message; this is in contrast to cryptography, where the existence of the message is clear, but the meaning is obscured."
Now, Image Steganography is very much out there. But for instance, out of the gigabytes of images that have seen 4chan.org, iichan/wakachan etc how many, or what extent could you say that there is an image actually hiding some data? What's not to say that the hentai or porn or even a picture of your mate is actually hiding something?
Discuss.
I read somewhere lately that some people have come up with a method to examine if a picture is "real". At least photographs of reality seem to have certain characteristics that can be mathematically defined. If you photoshop or manipulate those pictures, this characteristics usually get lost.
I don't know if the same could be come up with for drawn images.
Stenography in pictures is always introduced into a picture after it is created. Whether a picture is drawn or not has nothing to do with it.
You can hide data in two places:
1) Accumulated discarded bits in the format. (Doesn't affect the deocded image)
2) Image modification. Purposefully adding in noise with statistical properties that can encode a small amount of data inperceptably.
I highly doubt anyone would use this site for that purpose. It's unlikely anyone who has anything important to communicate would have stumbled onto this site willingly.
And the sites keep going up and down; reliability is key if you're going through all that trouble.
Better to make some bullshit get-rich-quick spam turnkey website and get it indexed by google... your friend can just use the google images cache to get the stenographic content. Clean and easy.
> Stenography in pictures is always introduced into a picture after it is created. Whether a picture is drawn or not has nothing to do with it.
I was referring to something else, I think.
> the google images cache
I thought google only stores thumbnails?
>>6 Ah yes.
I meant archive.org
google would help too. Someone could use the image search to find the particular picture in question by feeding it search terms and scanning the results.
(Presumably there'd be a pre-existing agreement about a picture of 'X' titled 'Y' or something)