ASCII Art Steganography 120
bigearcow writes "ASCII art is nothing new, but this site takes it one step further by allowing you to embed another data file within the image. The resulting ASCII art remains printable (i.e. no special unicode symbols) — this means you can print the image out, hang it on your wall, and have it look like an innocent ASCII art when it's hiding a secret document of your choice." You'll need a small (200x200 pixel max) base image from which the ASCII art will be built.
slashdot v google slashdot wins (Score:5, Interesting)
google has been slashdotted.. well only that users app, but still, slashdot > google ;-)
"App Engine Error
Over Quota
This Google App Engine application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later. "
Though it is intermittent.
Meh (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm SO going to store the Wikipedia article on Linux underneath Windows' logo. *maniacal laugh*
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Interesting)
Behold Cloud Computing! Fast, Efficient, Scalab.. errr--hold that thought.
It does if you can justify the need to Google, for now they have quotas (see http://code.google.com/intl/fr/appengine/articles/quotas.html [google.com]).
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Interesting)
The App Engine cluster is not just a big dump truck of cycles you dip into on demand. The processing power is quantized into discrete machines. There's actually a nice scheduler there that checks how busy your app is and assigns new processors to handle it. This isn't a real-time process so there are transient periods with overload. On the long run, GAE will scale fine.
There are some nice vids about the architecture on the Google developer youtube channels.
Extremely simple concept (Score:1, Interesting)
Algorithm 1 is used to transform an input (image) into an output (ascii art).
Algorithm 2 is used to modify the output of the first algorithm according to a pattern. The pattern is the data file encoded.
By seeing how the actual output deviates from the output that would have resulted if only algorithm 1 was used, and knowledge of algorithm 2, the pattern can be deduced.
This is really no different from hiding anything within anything. If you had an algorithm that converted spreadsheets to well-sounding MP3 files that it was possible to hide goat porn in, it would work according to the same principle. Although this is a slick implementation.
Sorted words (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sorted words (Score:3, Interesting)
For more information, you can find the Table of Contents, FAQ and a few other case studies at my site. [wayner.org]
The Third edition of the book just came out. I think Amazon just got their copies from the printer. [amazon.com]
OOOOLLLLLDDD (Score:2, Interesting)