On Wednesday, September 12, 2001, at 12:49 PM, Eric Murray wrote:
Someone pointed me to some Usenet posts containing "encrypted gibberish". Doing a deja search on the words "Alejandro transports" from this post shows that there's thousands of these posted to all kinds of Usenet newsgroups. It looks like some sort of stego text system. Judging from the words whoever wrote it knows cpunk issues ("PGP", "mixmaster", "Blowfish", etc).
I think I have seen examples of this before, but I can't remember where. Does anyone know who or what generates it?
These auto-rants were copied to many newsgroups about a month or so ago. I doubt they are any kind of stego communication. For one thing, by being so obvious, they are not actually stego. Might was well just post pure crypto text. For another, the tight clustering in time suggests just a scattershot attempt to have some newsgroup fun. The inclusion of words like "SSL and "Blowfish" suggests to me that someone just inserted these into the particular Markov rant generator. I don't know which particular rant generator was used, however. --Tim May