Item — HN Reader

Enter: steganography. Useful under totalitarian regimes, I would think.

Unlike the burden required to hide gigs required for large file transactions, hiding mere hundreds of bytes for textual conversations might be feasible. Maybe. Distribution of participating client software might be the problem.

4 comments

When they discover that you have stenographic tools on your computer, how will they know when to stop torturing you?

So the real solution is to force everyone to use stenographic tools.

Basically, the point is to make it so it is impossible to tell the difference between a normal user and a crypto user.

So the only way they could target you is if they target 1 billion other people in the world.

Unfortunately there's already steganography detecting software on the market[0], and it seems they have a branch in China[1]. But that is a little reductionist of me because there are evolving techniques being produced by researchers that are not so easy to detect. For example I recently read about a CNN-based method for hiding data in images that proved much more resilient against detection.

[0] https://www.wetstonetech.com/products/stegohunt/

[1] https://www.wetstonetech.com/corporate/channel-partners/

Steganography can be trivially detectable though if someone actually starts looking for it. The problem is that making it accessible makes it stand out.

As long as you don’t share it in a picture of Winnie the Pooh! LOL!