yes, they look for stego, as a "Hacker Tool"

Major Variola (ret) mv at cdc.gov
Sat Aug 14 16:43:52 PDT 2004


At 05:30 AM 8/14/04 +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
>On Fri, 13 Aug 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>
>> Even if you map a particular hash into one of a million known-benign
>> values, which takes work, there are multiple orthagonal hash
algorithms
>> included on the NIST CD.  (Eg good luck finding values that collide
in
>> MD5 & SHA-1 & SHA-256 simultaneously!)
>
>Argh. You misunderstood me. I don't want to find hash collisions, to
>create a false known hash - that is just too difficult. I want to make
>every file in the machine recognized as "unidentifiable".

No, I understood this.  In a later post it was brought up that this is
essentially watermarking your content with a unique ID, which can be
bad for P2P tracing purposes.  So I was suggesting that by using a
finite
set of 'watermarks' one could avoid essentially embedding a
unique label to one's copy of some content, at some cost in Cycles.

>The signature busting of MP3s has a disadvantage, though: makes their
>sharing back to the P2P pool more difficult, and a lot of programs
relying
>on their hash (emule, Kazaa(?),...) instead of their file name will
>consider them a different file, which causes problems with multisource
>download (though the problem won't be on your side).

True.  But I've found some manual intervention to be required anyway,
sometimes you find a few copies of the same content stored as
independent
files due to slight differences in naming or truncation.

>> Sorta like the National Forests... resource of many uses... may as
well
>> include a mixmaster payload in that worm :-) which also provides some

>> other overt free benefit like antivirus or anti-helmetic or defrag or

>> game or bayesian spamfilter or chat or screensaver or anon remailing
>> client or free ringtone :-)
>
>Free ringtones. Good attractant these days. I tend to forget about them
as
>I tend to shun fancy tones - telephones should have a distinctive ring
but
>"distinctive" does not have to mean "orchestral". But apparently there
are
>large sets of people who like it. Weird...

It was disturbing that, as the bottom fell out of telecom, and handsets
became
commoditized, faceplates and ringtones were highly profitable.
Faceplates
are at least made of atoms.  There are  several lessons there, from
economic to sociobiological (if there's a difference), none of which are
terribly pleasing in my
aesthetic.

Fortunately the whole PDA vs. cell vs. camera vs GPS vs. smartcard vs
MP3 player vs. email-pager etc bat-belt [1] frenzy will resolve in a few
years, and perhaps some of the Linux based solutions will not be
involuntary citizen-tracking devices and will support privacy of data
stored, and in transit, including voice data.  And free ring tones :-)
All that's needed is one of the hardware-selling companies to start the
process,
making money off the atoms, and possibly Sharp's Zaurus (?) already has?

Perhaps there's a biz model in buying a 3-D color prototyping machine
for $40K
and setting up a custom faceplate biz for the integrated gizmo of the
near future.
Hmm, with freedom-enabling software being distributed on the side, it
sounds like
a Heinlein novel...

[1] Batman (tm) wore a belt with too many gizmos.  Some widget-fetishist
friends/early adopters are similarly afflicted.





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