Shame on the New York Times for publishingVeiled Messages of Terrorists May Lurk in Cyberspace, an oversensationalized story trying to make the case that steganography is in use all the time on the Internet. Sources in the NYT story refuse to reveal anything about methods or results, and yet are cited as proof that 0.6% of images found contain hidden messages. The article does finally get around to Niels Stovos' excellent work, the one bit of recent published research in steganography detection. He's analyzed over two million images on eBay and found not a single message.

Let's see, who are you going to believe; the CEO of a startup that needs military funding to survive and won't let you evaluate his work, or a grad student who publishes all his methods and results?

politics
  2001-10-30 08:00 Z