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Joined: Sep 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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As Melvyn said to me recently...  Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time Newsletter - 29/01/2004
Hello, here's for another of these after the programme notes:
After we'd finished the programme on Cryptography, Fred Piper was eager to point out that steganography (the concealing of a message) was far from dead. He'd hoped to get it in, but could not. One great advantage of steganography is that it does not need a key and, therefore, can be concealed by one person without communicating a cipher. Fred Piper said, and I quote accurately "the biggest danger at the moment is Osama Bin Laden's beard"! The exclamation mark (pace Lynne Truss) is my own. The extraordinary thing is that Fred Piper meant it.
Okay, here we go, as I understand it. There is a way of putting a message in the very discreet colouring of Bin Laden's beard, (I'm serious, please get in touch with Fred Piper at Holloway College!) which can be interpreted by those who know that the message is about to be delivered. They blow up the Beard massively and look at the pixels and can read from the changing of the pixel shades (of which there can be more than 60) the equivalent of a straightforward code which informs them that something will be attacked, or indeed orders them to attack a place at a certain time on a certain day.
It was also pointed out that in Burma, where all codes are banned, they had gone back to steganography. Nor did we quite get on to quantum matters. It is thought that quantum developments will lead to the final, perfect and secret code for all eternity. I'm still bothered by the fact that the English seem to do brilliant things - eg: Babbage and Mr Cocks of Cheltenham - and these are either uncredited or picked up by other nations who run with them and make tons of money.
Best wishes
Melvyn Bragg
Visit the In Our Time website:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime and the Radio 4 Homepage: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4
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Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
It is easy to take a black and white image, make a .gif file, replace part of the image coding with clear text and send the image to someone who knows to look for the message. The text will be interpreted as coding for image pixels in the Graphics Information Format (GIF) and, if carefully placed, be indistiguishable from normal image pixels when the image is viewed normally. Doing a hex dump of the image file will show the message in clear.
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Joined: Sep 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2000
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Yes, it was the memory of some of us discussing this wayback that caught my interest in this becoming more widely braodcast. That, and the sweetness of hiding the secrets in The Old Man's Beard (t'was just as I feared) given the etymology of barbarous of course :)
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Joined: Nov 2003
Posts: 81
journeyman
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journeyman
Joined: Nov 2003
Posts: 81 |
Greek barbaroi from Latin barba?
No need to make the message visible in a hex dump. Must be subtler methods than that. Tweak the picture so every pixel is even, then superimpose plain ASCII over it, pixel by pixel, so odd = 1, even = 0.
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Joined: Jan 2004
Posts: 1,475
veteran
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veteran
Joined: Jan 2004
Posts: 1,475 |
Greek barbaroi from Latin barba?
Greek barbaros is taken to be, like Hebrew babel (for Babylon), a reduplicative, onomatopoeic word indicating the impoverished linguistic skills of non-Greek-speaking peoples (or non-Hebrew in the other example). At least that's what I'd been told. Took a look at Pokorny, and here's what he's got: *balbal- (*babal-, *bambal-). Skt balbalA-karoti 'to stammer', Latin babulus 'chatter, babble', English babble. Latin balbus 'stammering, babbling' ... also with r: Skt barbara 'stammering; non-Aryan', Gk barbaros 'barbarian, non-Greek', etc. So, it was more complicated than I'd been lead to believe.
Latin barba, OTOH, is from *bhardha- 'beard' which also is the source for beard. Barba in Genoese (my grandmother's dialect of Italian) means 'uncle'. --Barba Zazbò
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Joined: Dec 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
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Subtle is in the eye of the beholder. This 1/0 coding takes some effort to decode. I've got a picture that I did this to. I'll see if I can get it visible for y'all somehow.
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