Stegdetect 0.4 released and results from USENET search available

[John Gilmore]

Niels & Peter, congratulations on finding no secret messages.  This is
why computers are getting faster -- so we can spend more and more time
searching out the lack of any information being communicated.

An obvious step is to extend your detector to handle other formats
besides JPEG.  That would involve more 'research' than merely running
it on other collections of images (e.g. JPEGs pulled from the Web in
the Internet Archive collection, or from your own crawler).

[Other people can also do the work of running your publicly released
software against other collections.  It would take more talent to
write something that processes other formats.]

By the way, I'm interested in what "steganographic" messages you are
finding in the plaintext tags in JPEG files.  I've heard that some
cameras mark each photo with the serial number of the camera, date,
etc.  You can probably also detect what model of camera produced the
image (based on exactly what tags it puts in the image, whether
there's a thumbnail, what the filename is, etc).  ("Jpegdump" provides
an easy way to see these tags.)  Remember how Microsoft Word documents
encode the Ethernet address of the PC on which they were created, and
how this has been used in several high-profile cases to track
documents to individuals?  I am a lot more concerned about popular
cameras that spy on their own users, than I am about the occasional
subliminal message sent through the Usenet.  It would be useful to
have a tool that removes all the nonessential tags from a jpeg file, a
'stegremover' to delete any spyware that your camera has left behind,
as well as a detector, and a "hall of shame" page for manufacturers
who are building that spyware.

	John

PS: Cypherpunks, where *are* you putting your secret messages?  Give
us a hint!  Surely *somebody* in this crew must be leaving some
bread-crumbs around for Niels and NSA to find... :-)



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