Comments
laserdicks t1_ja6s2nd wrote
Why wouldn't they simply use an encrypted messaging service? Who meets in person any more?
PM_ME_UR_BAN_NOTICE t1_ja71b1g wrote
Using an encrypted messaging service shows that a communication took place. The whole point of Steganography is to communicate information without looking like you are doing so.
ElfMage83 t1_ja78wyy wrote
The whole point is to leave no record.
laserdicks t1_ja7dejo wrote
Why would there be a record?
bonreu t1_ja7enp6 wrote
You send a message. They can't tell what's in the message, but they can tell you send a message to someone. And they can ask you who you sent it to, and what was in it. Very thoroughly ask.
eatabean t1_ja7stkq wrote
DON'T ANSWER!!! HE IS SPY!
ElfMage83 t1_ja7g81y wrote
Encrypted messages are still messages.
fictitious_foliage t1_ja7diu0 wrote
Exactly.
I_spread_love_butter t1_ja6a9nq wrote
Inca style
fuckKnucklesLLC t1_ja7x8nd wrote
I too enjoy the quipu
I_spread_love_butter t1_ja88ega wrote
More like 🧶
Esherymack t1_ja7wpcu wrote
this is actually something i've studied! As an avid knitter and software engineer I had to take cryptology classes in school, and it was the topic of one of my research projects.
Knitting is ultimately a binary system (knit, purl) and as such it's fairly straightforward to figure out how to send messages on a basic level (say, assign a "knit" as a 1 and a "purl" as a 0). this is at least suspected to be similar to the method Madame DeFarge used in "A Tale of Two Cities", underneath a further level of code (although instead of calling it binary, we can assume certain combinations of knit/purl = a singular letter). I've also done encoded lace in base-16, morse, and binary in colorwork.
I believe it got to the point that during one of the world wars, the sale of knitting patterns was prohibited overseas for fear of sending encoded messages. Alas, they did not forbid the sale of or shipping of knitted objects.
Godtiermasturbator t1_ja8da2v wrote
That’s all very cool! I must admit though that after reading your first two sentences I scrolled down to make sure I didn’t see anything about Mankind or the Undertaker.
The_Safe_For_Work t1_ja69ozj wrote
Now this is seriously interesting!
res30stupid t1_ja6m9gf wrote
Oh, yeah. This is a great way of hiding things and encoding information that only a few people will know.
For example, the BBC was an important part of the war effort since their song selection would convey secret messages to the troops, spies or POWs in Europe who knew the code. For example, the BBC would deliver secret codes in their broadcasts including letting allies know that they were about to launch a major offensive into Europe.
> The document below, from the BBC’s written archives, [sic: link to PDF] shows the unusually long list of code messages to the French Resistance broadcast on the night of 5 June 1944. It was the eve of D-Day, and the small pencilled cross next to the ninth message, indicates that it was this phrase in particular – ‘Berce mon Coeur d’une langueur monotone’ – that signalled the invasion was about to begin:
They would also use music and other means of broadcasting information into Europe, which actually tended to go horribly wrong because it was kept secret from the general staff of the BBC that they were doing it.
The BBC had a special producer credited for song selections when it was meant to be for the Polish resistance under the name of Peter Peterkin, because the Polish news broadcast was kept short just to deliver important updates via code of musical selection.
But notes from within the BBC at that time complain about about how sometimes these vitally important updates weren't delivered because the records just weren't played because the person meant to play them didn't know they were vitally important to the war effort and ignored the given tracklist; other times, they put the recording on and it was the wrong side of the vinyl.
Interesting thing to note as well is that the BBC actually started their European news outlets this way - they would natively translate news stories and broadcast them into European languages in order to get free information out there that couldn't be supressed by the enemy. To their credit, they actually reported on their own losses in the war to intise the enemy to listen in, so that when the tides of the war turned it would actually demoralise the enemy more later on.
In the Horrible Histories book The Woeful Second World War, one woman was actually reported to the secret police because of the BBC. She was having her radio repaired after it broke down and just so happened to have overheard a news broadcast about how the son of her neighbour, believed dead in a failed military operation, was actually caught and turned over to a Prisoner of War camp. When she happily informed her neighbour about this, she was immediately arrested.
That neighbour was a cunt, wasn't she?
iTwango t1_ja6v1p1 wrote
Wait why would anyone get arrested for that? I'm a bit confused.
Thank you for all of the cool info!
res30stupid t1_ja721ub wrote
It was illegal to listen to enemy broadcasts and propaganda.
iTwango t1_ja725ip wrote
I overlooked the fact that this was in Nazi territory. Makes a lot more sense
ugotamesij t1_ja7fmja wrote
>I overlooked the fact that this was in Nazi territory.
If it makes you feel better, nowhere in that little paragraph does it say where that anecdote took place
isaacarsenal t1_ja868u3 wrote
Radio by Rammstein (a famous German band) is about this.
raddaya t1_ja71y6o wrote
Listening to Allied radio was probably illegal in the Reich.
iTwango t1_ja724lz wrote
I somehow missed that this happened in Nazi territory. That makes more sense
syllabun t1_ja7ezob wrote
You haven't missed it, the OP failed to mention it. I too have re-read the text 3 times trying to make sense of it.
TheRealVillain666 t1_ja7rai4 wrote
Similar to what is happening today in Russia.
It is illegal to listen to anything other than the official state news broadcasters.
allegate t1_ja83061 wrote
>intise
Entice?
sue-donim t1_ja6s3v6 wrote
Madame Defarge?
ChickenMom90 t1_jaayg33 wrote
Yes! I was just going to say that. We must have been in the same English class :)
[deleted] t1_ja8fbqq wrote
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RealJonathanBronco t1_ja7kvxf wrote
My favorite example is Cicada 3301's famous duck image.
bhillen83 t1_ja7vdg7 wrote
I stumbled onto the cicada stuff when I was in school for my BA in info systems. Really interesting stuff. Especially when we were learning about steganography in our security classes.
SimpleSalami1965 t1_ja9nhzl wrote
Hack This Site has some fun steganography puzzles, too. Not nearly as in-depth as all that, though.
SHEEEIIIIIIITTTT t1_jab6pcm wrote
What message does it conceal?
RealJonathanBronco t1_jacfz72 wrote
>"Here is a book code. To find the book, and more information, go to https://www.reddit.com/r/a2e7j6ic78h0j/
1:20
2:3
3:5
4:20
5:5
6:53
7:1
8:8
9:2
10:4
11:8
12:4
13:13
14:4
15:8
16:4
17:5
18:14
19:7
20:31
21:12
22:36
23:2
24:3
25:5
26:65
27:5
28:1
29:2
30:18
31:32
32:10
33:3
34:25
35:10
36:7
37:20
38:10
39:32
40:4
41:40
42:11
43:9
44:13
45:6
46:3
47:5
48:43
49:17
50:13
51:4
52:2
53:18
54:4
55:6
56:4
57:24
58:64
59:5
60:37
61:60
62:12
63:6
64:8
65:5
66:18
67:45
68:10
69:2
70:17
71:9
72:20
73:2
74:34
75:13
76:21
Good luck. 3301"
Hope you like book codes.
SHEEEIIIIIIITTTT t1_jacjqr2 wrote
Appreciate the info but is there a TLDR for this specific image?
RealJonathanBronco t1_jackdth wrote
lol I wish but there's no TL;DR for any of Cicada 3301 really. The best I can do is that complex code leads you to a book where another complex code emerges. The chain just continues on and on. Very few got to the end solve, the current iteration of the puzzle has been unsolved for years.
J_train13 t1_ja6gtty wrote
I love that the only reason I know what this is is from that one Doctor Who episode with MI6
xtingu t1_ja68io5 wrote
This is so cool!
yourredvictim t1_ja6s8gn wrote
Handy if you are a creep or a crook and you want to send secret messages.
Hide your message in a picture and create an item for sale on ebay. Soon you'll be the top terrorist in your cell! Or wind up in a cell. Que sera sera.
Orangecuppa t1_ja7a97s wrote
The Simpsons did an episode on this before.
I believe Sideshow Bob tried to hide a hidden message which was "the bart, the" in German but it was written as "Die bart Die".
nicky7 t1_ja7l9ay wrote
Annoyingly, the article didn't include any examples, and I couldn't get decent results when searching.
e: tried different keywords and found this one example
Geek_Nan OP t1_ja7mi0p wrote
I think Morse code in knits and purls is a pretty on-point example …. And the needlework on silk strips
cramduck t1_ja812h6 wrote
The game Monaco uses a steganographic technique to make the save l files for player-created maps. They create a preview image of the map for you, and tweak the color values pixel-by-pixel to be odd or even, corresponding to the 1s and 0s of a binary message. That binary message is the actual level data.
PaperPritt t1_ja881me wrote
Always reminds me of Jeremiah Denton who blinked his message (T-O-R-T-U-R-E) during his "interview" while being a POW during the Vietnam War.
brkh47 t1_ja96fts wrote
I remember that. it really is communicating without communicating.
darcynader t1_jaa9n2j wrote
Similarly, Lord Baden Powell, the founder of scouting, worked as a spy during WWII [edit: been corrected that it was the late 1800s, not WWII, and now I'll be fact checking things before posting them to Reddit 😅]. Posing as a lepidopterist , Powell would scout occupied territory with a sketchpad and the tools of his "trade". All the while sketching enemy defences into the patterns of butterfly wings.
dangil t1_ja7kek8 wrote
I developed a DSSS steganography in 2003... to my surprise the Army has a patent on it from 1999
grizzburger t1_ja7r3y0 wrote
Ngl that's pretty fkn gnarly
[deleted] t1_ja7rwik wrote
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DanYHKim t1_ja7s2jy wrote
Shortly after the 9-11 attack, I read that intelligence services were concerned that secret messages were being concealed within pornographic images. The article started that the investigators had not yet found such messages, but they were committed to redoubling their efforts by downloading and analyzing even more porno to find them.
I so wish I had downloaded the article!
DanYHKim t1_ja7qs4f wrote
171228_Madame-DeFarge_Weaving-a-Revolution.txt
"Vanity Fair Admits Video Telling Hillary Clinton To Take Up Knitting “Missed The Mark”" National Memo. December 28, 2017
With a screenshot of Madame DeFarge, I wrote:
"It's an un-hackable database of political criminality, after all!"
=== to further explain, I wrote:
It's a picture of Madame DeFarge, from the 1935 adaptation of Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities".
DeFarge is a woman bent on revenge against the aristocrats, particularly those of one family that destroyed her own. As part of the French Revolutionaries, she knits, and her knitting secretly encodes the names of people to be killed. Thus, as she sits and witnesses the crimes of the French Aristocracy, she bitterly knits the names and crimes into a tapestry, to be used against them after the revolution.
=== to elaborate, I wrote:
There is much symbolism surrounding DeFarge, since the three Fates of Classical mythology are women who spin the thread of life, and cut it when a mortal life is at its end. In another way, she is a type of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, who weaves a tapestry shroud for her father-in-law in order to hold off the petitions of her suitors, who claim her husband must be dead after so long at sea. Penelope famously unravels the tapestry every night, so she is never finished with it, putting off the suitors for an indefinite time.
The act of weaving the tapestry shroud is supposed to be her last act as a daughter-in-law and member of Odysseus' family and household. The burden of the shroud is symbolic of her duty as a married woman, and its cultural importance makes the labor inviolate in the face of her suitors and their demands, as well as the demands of her clan. Being a woman, Penelope has no authority of her own by which she can choose to remarry or wait for her husband's return, and so she cleverly uses her weaving as a way to use the rigid gender rules of her society in her favor.
Similarly, perhaps, DeFarge conceals her important role in the Revolution behind a different kind of tapestry. The domestic labor of knitting cannot be suspected to be 'political' or 'revolutionary', since it is a 'woman's work'. Thus, the death list of the Revolution is never revealed to the Aristocratic forces.
In a final parallel, though, we have seen this year a third act of fabric-making as a concealed act of empowerment. Millions of women marched in cities, towns, lonely roads, and isolated fields around the world in protest against Donald Trump's inauguration as President. On their heads were the pink knitted hats, pointedly named after the object of one of Trump's many transgressions against human decency. While the sight of multitudes of protesters crowding streets and parks and plazas worldwide was powerful in itself, the "pussy hat" provided a colorful punctuation to the crowd, making a statement as straightforward as an upraised fist: 'Donald Trump is the enemy, and I will oppose him'.
03/28/2020
And now, we have yet another act of fabric craft, largely by women, as a consequence of this horrifying election. Because of short-sighted mismanagement, petty vindictiveness, and now-familiar stupidity, medical protective equipment must be hand-crafted in homes across the country. The cloth mask is a public and visible sign of the failure of the Republican-dominated government to accomplish even the most basic of functions in an emergency.
Wear yours proudly in public. It is the "Phrygian cap" of American resistance against incompetent kakistocracy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/business/coronavirus-masks-sewers.html "A Sewing Army, Making Masks for America"
[deleted] t1_ja70hv2 wrote
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Zigazig_ahhhh t1_ja7e27t wrote
I hope you and your resistance cell are able to drive out the Nazi occupiers soon!
ElfMage83 t1_ja69zp7 wrote
CIA does this too. Agents might lace their shoes in different ways to send messages.