Friday, March 29, 2024

July 16, 2001– Newsletter #139

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Goodies to Go ™
July 16, 2001–Newsletter #139

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Greetings, Weekend Silicon Warriors,


Did you hear…


CBS is trying that Big Brother show again. It premiered
Thursday, July 5th. I watched it. I’d like to say I felt any
connections with any of the characters but I didn’t. The
show is fully aimed at a younger audience than me. Yes,
they threw in two older people but they are only
sacrificial lambs. They’ll be voted off straight away and
then the show will be all young people. The thing that
has the Web community upset is that this time around
you are going to have to pay for the ability to watch the
Internet feeds coming from the house. Chat room posts,
even on the CBS chat rooms, are rather nasty. I think we
may see CBS reverse their pay-for thought process if the
show begins to take a ratings dive.


As if you needed more to go onto your cellular phone,
users in Finland are getting hooked on the latest fad.
Each week subscribers can log into a cell phone site and
watch the adventures of Flip and Mic in a cartoon called
WAP. It’s crudely drawn but it is the first attempt as
sending a serial story over a cellular network. You have
to use up those minutes I guess.


If you’re looking for a getaway, hit a few Web travel sites
and check out the prices. Apparently travel is down and
airlines are looking to fill seats. Deals are great too.
Southwest is offering a coast-to-coast trip for under $200.
I’ll bet a few restrictions apply. The drop in prices has
sparked a buying rally. Delta reported that last week was
their best online sales week yet.


Now onto today’s topic…


I’ve been a big fan of Morgan Freeman ever since I saw
the Shawshank Redemption. Not too long ago, I went to
see one of his films titled, “Along Came a Spider”. It
wasn’t spectacular but then again, it wasn’t bad. I
enjoyed it and the popcorn was fresh.


Like many films that involve the Internet, email and
streaming digital video, the technology was often
overblown. What happens on the screen mostly likely
wouldn’t happen in real life, at least not over a 28.8
modem attached to AOL. This movie was full of that
kind of stuff. Streaming video looking like HDTV, email
had a graphic interface that was just spectacular, and kids
were sending text messages back and forth encoded into
gif images.


Oh, wait. That last one’s true.


It’s a process called steganography and it’s nothing
overly difficult. In fact, there are numerous freeware and
shareware programs out there that will help you to encode
text or images into documents, images, or sounds.
They’re easy to find. I was successful by going to
Shareware.com and Tucows.com and simply searching
“Steganography”. The choices were vast.


You’ll find that the software tends to differ a great deal.
Some will only encode into BMP. The one I have will
encode to both BMP and GIF. Other programs will
encode into sounds files.


If this is new to you, you must be thinking the same thing
I was thinking. There’s no way the sound file would play
if text were encoded into it. Well, you’d be wrong. It
plays just fine. The only downfall of my program was
that the BMP images that I encoded text files into looked
a bit grainy.


I’m sure you can see why kids would dig this. Little Joey
can email an image of Michael Jordan to his friend Billy.
Billy’s Mom sees the image and thinks all is OK. Only
now, Billy runs the image through his un-encoder and
there are the answers to tomorrow’s testor worse. I
know what you were thinking!


Of course this is much more than a simple method of
transferring data between kids. It can be used to cloak all
kinds of data. And, in fact, is has.


There’s now a belief that terrorist Osama bin Laden, has
been sending documents around the world hidden within
pornographic images and MP3 files. That copy of Barry
Manilow’s “Copa Cabana” you grabbed from NAPSTER
could have plans stuck way down deep inside. You
simply wouldn’t know by looking at it.


Let me go one step further if I might. If it is actually true
that terrorists are doing this, shouldn’t our government
look for it with the intent to intercept it?


You have most likely heard of a program called,
“Carnivore”. According to the FBI, Carnivore was so
named because it “chews” all of the data coming through
a certain data network but only “eats” information
allowed by court order. Basically, Carnivore is a wiretap
used on the Internet. What’s more, Carnivore is always
at the very center of the privacy debate.


If it is true that terrorists are using steganography to
transfer data round the Web, then I think you’re going to
start to hear a little more about Carnivore because, as far
as I can see, it is our best bet to catch these embedded
packets. The problem then is two fold.


Carnivore works through court order and thus deals only
with “allowed” data. You may disagree, but let’s stay
with that thinking for a moment. Privacy advocates will
have enough to be upset about by the end of this
newsletter without bringing anything to the table.


Problem number one is that the mail from a terrorist
group will not be labeled as such. I highly doubt you’re
going to find “BinLaden036@yahoo.com”. That means
that using Carnivore as a set wiretap will be difficult. It
may happen that the FBI only knows that somewhere on
a network, there may be a terrorist. Thus, all email will
have to be searched.


Now problem number two. It’s not the text of the email
that’s the problem any more. It’s the attachment.
Carnivore, if it isn’t already, will have to be bettered to be
able to look at attachments and “know” whether that
attachment contains an embedded file. And! If
Carnivore finds an embedded file, it will have to open it
to read it.


Oh dear.


Steganography is real and there’s serious reason to
believe that it is being used for very bad purposes. We
have once again come full circle on the same basic
question of privacy on the Web. If you have privacy, so
does the person sending around terrorist documents. I
think we can all agree that no one wants that.


New technology has once again opened a Pandora’s box
of privacy and legal issues, but it’s the same old question.
How much of your privacy are you willing to give up so
that those searching for a terrorist have any opportunity at
all.


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


That’s That – Thanks for reading.


Joe Burns, Ph.D.


And Remember: How many licks does it take to get to the
middle of a Toosie Pop? It’s more than three. Numerous
experiments have been undertaken to find the answer.
The average is 142. The data span was 75 to 200 licks.
I’m not sure if 142 represented the mean or the median.
I’m not sure how much I care either.

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