#steganography

[oncethrown]

Steganography Cut

"Okay," Ron sighed. "I'm just going to say it. I'm not convinced about Percy."

"Convinced?" Bill asked. "What the fuck does that mean?"

"He shows up at the 11th hour saying he knows Aberforth— "

"He was in danger," Charlie cut in. "They were arresting dissenters, and he didn't have anywhere to go, what did you want him to do?"

"Saying he knows Aberforth," Ron continues. "Mum let him bring Oliver Wood back to the burrow with him for some reason, and now they've been holed up together since the end of the battle. I didn't even realize they knew each other."

Hermione opens her mouth to speak, but Bill raises a hand to cut her off. "No. We're not going to do this. The war is over. We're not digging out spies and detractors any more. Percy is back now. None of of us know what he's been through, he was there when Fred," Bill stumbles over his brother's name and the temperature around the table drops several degrees. He clears his throat. "He was there when Fred died. People grieve in their own ways and shit like this- Ronald- is not making easier for him to be with us instead of 'holed up with Oliver,'" Bill huffed. "Besides, according to Oliver, Percy has been working against the ministry for years. Oliver says he saved a ton of people and he knows where all the bodies are buried "

"When did you even get a chance to talk to Oliver? When did you get him away from Percy? What are they always doing up there?" Ron jabs his finger toward the house, encompassing the window to the twins old room, where Percy and Oliver have spent the majority of the last few days, only surfacing to sit silently through meals or walk out to the old paddock in the evenings and come back red eyed and loose limbed. 

"I think they are just boyfriends," Fleur says with a shrug. Everyone around the table stills so much they may have turned to stone. She looks around at all of them, then to Bill. "Is this not the word? Ills sont les petit amis, non? Les copains?" She looks around at the assembled Weasley's, Hermione and Harry. "Lovers. What did I say? What does 'boyfriends' mean?"

"Lovers?" Ginny repeats, horrified. 

Charlie and Bill exchange a look. Charlie shakes his head. "Oliver can't be… surely. He's a professional Quidditch player."

"Oui," Fleur insists. "Bill, when you were attacked- Percy came to see you after Dumbly-dorrs funeral. You were not awake, of course. We talked a little, and I left him to sit with you. 'e was so sad, I thought I would bring him something, a tea. When I came back, Oliver was there, and they were in a…" She looks up at the sunset kissed sky, around the table, then back to Bill "ils se tenaient l'un l'autre. Romantique."

"I understood romantic," Harry said. "What did she say?"

"She said they were holding each other." 

"And you're just bringing this up now?" Ginny demands.

Fleur straightened. "I 'ave barely spoken to Percy! I do not know Oliver! I am supposed to know this is a surprise?"

The back door creaks open and they all freeze again as Percy and Oliver step out into the garden. Hermione lets out a peel of fake laughter, realizes its the first laugh there has been in the house since the battle and turns it into a cough. Percy and Oliver exchange a look and walk self consciously toward the table. Percy executes an awkward wave. Oliver seems to be hiding something behind his back.

"Hey,' Percy says. "Everyone. What's up out here?"

"Just a nice night," Bill says. "Hard to be in the house, and…"

"You're welcome to join us," Charlie says. "If you weren't… doing something else."

Oliver looks at Percy and shrugs. "Uh, no. We were just going to get some fresh air and uh," he pulls a bottle of wine from behind his back. "Alcohol. But… we can.." He looks at Percy again and sets the bottle on the table "Break out the old refillable charm and split it, uh. Nine ways."

"Ginny's underage," Charlie says.

"No I'm not," Ginny argues. 

"Yeah. Yes," Bill says, standing and pulling his wand out. "Stay. Come talk with us." He waves his wand and everyone is so busy watching him conjure a chair that they miss the back door opening again. 

"What's everyone up to out here?"

In a night of stops and starts, they have still not frozen like this. Slowly, they all turn to George. 

He swallows deeply, looks back at all of them, and lets a slow, hesitant smile roll over his face. "You all look like you've seen a ghost." 

No one laughs. No one moves. 

George nods. He leans over, grabs the wine bottle off the table. "Percy, can we talk?"

"Uh… of course. Yes." Percy says. George nods again and starts to walk away. Percy rocks strangely on the spot, as though cutting off a movement, touches Oliver's back, and scurries after George. 

Oliver watches them go, then settles himself down into one of the vacant chairs. 

They stare at each other in silence for a moment. 

"I will go get some more alcohol," Charlie volunteers. 

"Yes, god, yes, please do that,"Bill agrees. 

[jurph]

Your Printer is (Probably) a Snitch

In these bewildering times you might want to put up flyers or posters around a neighborhood, or mail a strongly-worded letter to someone. You might be scared of reprisals and wish to do that sort of thing anonymously, but it turns out that governments would prefer that they be able to track you down anyway.

In the early 2010s, a few different innovations were making their way into high-end scanners and printers. One was the EURION constellation, a set of dots that you'll recognize in the constellations on Euro notes or in the distribution of the little numeral 20 speckled around the back of a twenty-dollar bill. Scanners are programmed to look for dots in exactly that pattern and refuse to scan the paper that those dots are on. Can't make a copy of it! Can't scan it in. We'll get back to that.

The other innovation are **tracking dots**. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) estimates that in 2025, basically every color laser printer on the market embeds a barely-visible forensic code on each of its printouts, which encodes information about the printer and its serial number. (Maybe more data too - I don't have all the details.) Maybe you remember Reality Winner, who leaked classified intelligence to journalists? They received high quality copies (maybe originals) of the documents that were leaked. When officials were able to examine them, they were able to combine regular IT forensics ("how many users printed documents on these dates, to printers of this make & model") and work backwards from the other end, to get a narrow list of suspects.

To defeat those signatures, you either need to use a printer that doesn't embed those features (Challenging! The EFF says basically all printers do this now) or you need to be careful to employ countermeasures like this Python tool. The tool can spray lots of nonsense codes into a PDF that make forensic extraction harder (or impossible).

What does this have to do with the EURion constellation? Well, before anyone can even start to extract little invisible yellow dots from your poster... they have to scan it into their system. And their very law-abiding scanner -- unless it's owned by an agency that fights counterfeiting like the Secret Service does -- probably doesn't have its EURion brainwashing disabled. So when they go to scan your poster or strongly-worded letter, the EURion constellation on it probably stops them from doing it.

[sedehaven]

Thigh

silk slit TO hip, slides like curtains over flesh Unkissed by sunlight

garter plays Coy, peeping behind scarlet skirt, Hide and seek, black lace

stockings, Mandalas, a net for wayward Eyes

[tomthefanboy]

Why stop there?

[josephkravis]

As the city's burger joints thrived, the ripple effect was felt across other sectors.

[joyfuljabberwocky]

I'm not allowed to work on Remnants ciphers after I've taken my sleeping meds anymore... I just found a note file on my phone with something that almost makes sense with no recollection whatsoever of what I did to get there, if it was something I later realized was based on a typo on my part, and nothing in the note indicating where it came from.

[simplyforensic]

A Comprehensive Guide to Anti-Forensics

Introduction to Anti-Forensics: The Art of Digital Concealment In the high-stakes realm of cybersecurity, a perpetual cat-and-mouse game unfolds between attackers and defenders. As digital forensics techniques continue to evolve, malicious actors have devised a formidable arsenal of anti-forensics strategies to evade detection and obscure their nefarious activities. This intricate tapestry of…

[arconinternet]

I Dream of Game Genies and ZIP Files - Hacking the NES (Video, Vi Grey, 2018)

Weird experimental NES ROM hacking. The ROM isn't in a ZIP - it's vice versa. You can watch it here - or if it doesn't work, here, or on YouTube here.

[roseverdict]

tinkering with steganography again for the first time in a while and i think the encryption does NOT like playing nice with #FFFFFF pixels lmao

[jurph]

It may or may not have been true when it was written, in May of 2024... but this is going to get 10k notes when it turns out to work great.

[nartr]

I'm issuing a challenge to all who see this. Find the solution and send me the answer to win a prize.

The secret is hidden in the images. You need to use the passphrase "Agent Bing" to decode it. Here are some hints to help you:

• The image is a collage of four different images that are related to the secret message.

• The images are arranged in a clockwise order, starting from the top left corner.

• The images are: a map of the world, a barcode, a QR code, and a keyboard.

• The passphrase is used to unlock the barcode and the QR code, which contain parts of the secret message.

• The keyboard is used to type the secret message, which is a URL that leads to a surprise.

[pixiedust111]

I think I should keep a memory of my "almost gone nuts" days! 😪

[truthbureau]

Chinese Agent Busted Using Text Spacing to Steal US Secrets

Washington D.C. – A Chinese spy has been arrested for allegedly sending classified US government documents back to China using an ingenious, age-old technique to avoid detection, sources say. The spy, Chen Wu, worked as a translator for the US State Department and had access to sensitive internal communications and documents. According to authorities, Wu used steganography – the practice of…

[aspensmonster]

The easiest approach is keeping hashes of files that they don't want. See a file getting uploaded with a matching hash? Don't let it get uploaded. Ezpz. Very little effort.

That, however, is easily circumvented. For hashes, changing a single bit of a single byte of the file completely changes the hash. And so, a cat-and-mouse game ensues, with providers trying ever-more-sophisticated ways to detect undesired signals (e.g., copyrighted material, pornography, whatever), while uploaders work to corrupt those signals *just enough* to avoid detection, while not completely destroying the underlying signal.

I know for a fact that they've got at least *some* rudimentary Content ID-like system in place for audio files. They could likely extend it for images and other file types as well.

The end-game is users utilizing completely encrypted files that are decrypted and rendered with custom code that runs on top of the provider's site --- think browser extensions/add-ons. Users can share passwords to the encrypted files, and compartmentalize them too in order to root out snitches.

If you're not The Customer, you're The Product, etc etc etc

Since tumblr still hasn’t unblurred me, I’m going to take some time to tell you about one of their most secret policies:

Tumblr bans specific images. This is not a flagging thing. The image doesn’t get flagged. It gets removed from the site permanently. And I mean PERMANENTLY. There is no notification that this happens to your image because the policy is completely unofficial. There are also absolutely no guidelines to it. For instance, an image like this one is not against any tumblr community guidelines.

Yet this image when I had if as my header for my blog, to protest my previous blog’s sudden and uncalled for deletion (I had zero flagged posts, was given no warnings, and then one day I checked at two of my blogs were missing and I had a stern email from tumblr to never make a nsft blog again or else all my blogs would get deleted…yes the email said that) was removed. Not only was it removed form the posts I had made using it. They removed it from my header.

Of course, as you can see the image in no way violates the community guidelines…and even if it did, technically the official policy of tumblr is to flag the image and make it invisible to anyone but the OP. Instead this is a different far less official policy…and it seems as though it is completely within the realm of individual tumblr staff to decide what gets to count. Indeed, this is not the only image this has happened to me too. The first two blogs of mine that got deleted we’re actually nsft blogs, unlike my current blogs, they actually technically did violate tumblr guidelines…now mind you I was no longer posting original nsft content on their at time of their deletion…but still they’d previously been porn blogs. ANYWAYS…if you run a very popular nsft blog you’ll notice that your most popular post occasionally just disappear. Maybe if you’re not paying attention you presume you just can’t track it down or no one has reblogged it lately…but no, they (staff) straight up extrajudicially remove your content. I say extrajudicially because they do have official policy and protocols they should be following, aka flagging the content and/or labeling the content. But no, they fucking remove it.

And when they remove it, it’s gone for good, for everyone. For instance, the above photo, the “ew tumblr” photo…that’s not the original photo, that’s a screenshot of that photo. You can’t post the original, the code of that photo is forever banned. It’s not even just one account either. For instance, to test this, I attempted to upload an old “missing” nsft image from my original blog, which is not associated with this email, and is not even associated with my IP address. And this is what happened:

Tumblr’s transphobia runs so deep they are eager and willing to circumvent their own policies and procedures, the staff acting like thin skinned vigilantes on their own website where they held all the power to start with anyways.

eeewwwwwwwww

unblur me now staff