Stegotext in usenet as offsite backup

[Bill Stewart]

At 11:52 AM 07/31/2001 -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>It would be handy, from my point of view, to use usenet as
>an "offsite backup" solution -- posting encrypted source
>for work-in-progress on binary newsgroups so I could just
>go back and nab it out of the archives if I ever have a
>disk crash or in case the computer gets stolen.

"Your message may cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars."
Usenet may be effective for Blacknet and samizdat and
unreliable storage of critical secrets where the Fedz won't
stomp them all out, but it doesn't scale well for normal backups.
You can use one of those "100megsfree.com" sites, or buy storage,
and use some anonymizer to stash your stuff there.
The real advantage of using Usenet as opposed to a non-broadcast medium
is that it's much harder for eavesdroppers to find the people reading it
when they're targeting the writer, so you can use a Blacknet service anywhere;
if that's not relevant, then don't bother.

A broadcast medium like Usenet used to flood the net with
huge numbers of copies for a week or so, and after that
only a few archive sites like Deja would have it in findable form.
That's probably less true today, since more people read it
with NNTP on their ISP's machine, and many non-huge ISPs
use a small number of NNTP service providers instead of doing their own,
while the Dejanews-like services are less dependable.

Stegoizing usually inflates your data by a factor of 10 or so,
if you're trying to use credible stego (as opposed to simply titling
your cyphertext as pic12345.jpg or maybe adding some file headers.)
The real problem is that most of the searchable Usenet archive services
ignore binary attachments, so they won't keep the contents of your file.
So you'll need to use a stego system that turns it into text,
like Peter Wayner's Mimic Functions or Dilbert's Pointy-Haired-Boss-Speak,
adding yet another layer of content inflation.

>Stegograms present an interesting copyright question for
>the legally inclined; if I'm using usenet archives as offsite
>backup via stegograms, I'm okay with the release and public
>use of the stegogram, which most folks will interpret as
>being the same as the covertext.  But would that entangle
>the copyright on the stegotext as well?  Or if somebody took
>the stegogram and figured it out, would I have legal recourse
>to stop them from doing anything with my code?

Anything you post on Usenet is pretty much toast.
If you make plaintext world readable, it's world copyable;
if you don't like that, only post cyphertext.
Maybe the Berne Convention theoretically protects you, but so what?
You're proposing putting this stuff on Usenet instead of a storage site
because it's too hot for you to handle, so don't expect the
US copyright system to help you much :-)
It's especially rough on any Plausible Deniability you might have had.