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trogdor
Skeptic Friend
198 Posts |
 Posted - 01/30/2006 : 20:27:34 [Permalink]
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I may not have explained myself enough.
in 1-3 grades the Montessori classes that I have seen teach evolution (yeah they give it to 'em young) teach evolution, but some of the phrases sound very Lamarckian. (see last example.) they do this because the students will learn more details later, and because its way easier to say to 6 year old's "then the animals decided to leave the water" than "then through random mutations that could use both lungs and gills were more favored by natural selection, more random mutations created weak legs that helped fishes navigate the lake bed. etc. etc."
bad explanation, I hope you get the drift. |
all eyes were on Ford Prefect. some of them were on stalks.
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 01/30/2006 : 20:37:18 [Permalink]
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| Thanks, trogdor. Now, that I can understand. It certainly relieves my mind to hear that what you mentioned is simply the kiddie's version of evolution, intended to be appropriate to their age. Sort of like saying, "Water wants to go downhill" as part of a child's version of hydraulics. |
“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 01/31/2006 00:47:37 |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 01/30/2006 : 22:34:42 [Permalink]
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Okay, I have purchased a stegagraphic Windows program (not StegaNote!) that has allowed me to successfully embed a text message with a keyword and resave the faked image in .png format, a useful Web format. I was then able to load that image and read its hidden text, using the same keyword. I have completed two "embedded debunking" images of UFO's, which are ready to go. One more is near to completion.
Anyone who wishes to help by covertly placing these images where they will get placed on woo-woo sites should email me, here. We can then exchange regular email addresses and I can send the files.
I would also appreciate it if such people were willing to monitor UFO sites for these images, and to then retrieve them for decoding. The stegagraphic program I bought costs no more than $10.00 US. Once you have it, and the code for the individual image that I will then supply, you can prove that the UFO site has been credulous in accepting the photo.
A couple of you have offered me help re: stegagraphy. I have not yet gotten replies to my emails to you. Any further suggestions on the mechanics of setting this up would be appreciated, especially from someone who has designed double-blind scientific experiments. Might as well do this correctly from the start. |
“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 01/30/2006 22:39:40 |
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ronnywhite
SFN Regular
501 Posts |
Posted - 01/31/2006 : 00:06:52 [Permalink]
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HalfMooner
Suppose you use a 1024*768 pixel image in "True Color" (that's 3 bytes per pixel.) That's about 2,359,296 bytes at 8 bits per byte. Consider that you can express any character from the upper and lower case alphabet plus punctuation (and a space) in 6 bits. 4 * 6 bits = 24 bits, meaning you can store 4 characters in the computer memory required for one pixel. If a bitmap is used, there's no compression- so there's a 1-to-1 correspondence between each three bytes and a pixel on the screen. With that resolution, it's unlikely a discoloured pixel "here-and-there" would be noticeable or deemed other than random (or camera... called "quantification") error, so they probably just "spread out the characters" among the pixels, putting 3 ASCII characters in each pixel, and just recording a table with the random positions of the letters. There are a few other things one could do in terms of choosing where to place the characters among the pixel's bytes, but that's the general idea. Like I said, simple stuff- nothing complex or mysterious about it.
But, as you've noticed, most pictures are in JPEG, which can achieve up to 100:1 compression, but it's not an "errorless" compression- plenty good for pictures, but not for burying text and expecting it to go through such a transform intact- it almost certainly won't. But I'm going to suggest what I think is a simple solution, and a better one. I'll explain briefly, since the program to do this would be "all of a dozen lines long" to encode text, and a dozen lines to decode it... it would take 10 minutes to write both and it could be done in any language. I can't get my cobweb-covered compiler to install, and I know that damn near everyone on this website programs, so maybe one of them could throw this together (or a better idea if they have one... I haven't done numerical graphic programming in many years, and surely my knowledge is antiquated.)
JPEG does what's called a FFT which transforms an image from the "space domain" to the "frequency domain." After it's transformed, we can "clip-off" up to 99% of the data, inverse-transform (FFT^-1) it, and the picture still looks OK (it's truly amazing.) What's in a JPEG file is a short header, followed by the "transformed-and-clipped" file... it's almost a certainty that text embedded as aforementioned within an image would not "make it through that," followed by the process of inverse-transforming it to display the picture.
So, the simple solution is... I suggest using a short text message- just "THIS IS A HOAX!!" That could be encoded in 12 bytes at 6 bits per character. Add the date and initials- say that's 20 bytes. No reason to encode more- that serves the purpose. Suppose that 2.3 Meg were JPEGd at maybe 60:1 compression... the JPEG file will be about 40K. Skip past the header information, divide the data size evenly- by 20, in this case, or every 2K. Change a byte to a text character. Skip ahead another 2K- change another. Corrupting every 2000th byte in the frequency domain shouldn't noticeably change the picture. No password etc. needed since the simple spacing of the coding would be the pattern- all that would need be explained would be, "The 20 byte text message is contained in the message as (a simple formula describing the spacing)".
In my opinion, using the equal-spacing (or another simple spacing formula approach for ALL of the pictures) is more convincing than having a decryption password, since with megabytes of image data, one could simply search the data of an image, find the bytes to make a short message, record their position, and thereafter make their own decryption key. If I had my compilers working, I'd offer- "send me a big picture- I'll come up with decryption codes to express the view you cite." To have the same message encoded as I describe in more than one photo would be too improbable to fathom (doing the permutations... suffice it say, it's huge!) Just a |
Ron White |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 01/31/2006 : 00:47:01 [Permalink]
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Thanks, Ron. I actually understood that, though I could not program what you suggest. I do wonder if the data insertion pattern (like diagonal lines?) might not be faintly visible using that regularly recurring insertion of data, but I'm unsure.
The program I'm using saves to the png format. (As one of its options. It won't save to jpeg format.) If I understand it correctly, png is a format that has one or more non-"lossy" save options, as well as some lossy, jpeg-like ones. I presume that my program is saving in a non-lossy style of png. I am concerned that Webmaster could potentially convert image formats and destroy the embedded text that way. Plus, there are programs that systematically look for steganographic content. |
“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 01/31/2006 00:49:28 |
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ronnywhite
SFN Regular
501 Posts |
Posted - 01/31/2006 : 01:23:32 [Permalink]
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Discrete points wouldn't cause diagonal lines or the like- fast fourier transform (FFT)and it's inverse aren't linear. But anyway, yea, that's "lossy" but the text embedding wouldn't go through the transform or the inverse... to read/verify them, just pull text directly mout of the JPEG file. Same ends, easier means. Anyway, I hadn't heard of the other format you mentioned, but I haven't paid attention for many years... easiest way to get the job done is best, if program you have does it, cool. Good project idea.
Incidentally, on the topic of SFN email, friend I speak with weekly had posted here on my request in weeks past, and tells me SFN email messaging doesn't work... insists she emailed me twice through SFN (no receive.) I have no way of verifying this, but her word is reliable, so I don't know. |
Ron White |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 01/31/2006 : 01:41:52 [Permalink]
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| Ron, I did get your site email, so I guess it works sometimes, at least. But it's not exactly obvious that one has mail, unless one looks carefully on the correct page. BTW, I programmed an early computer game in an interpreted Basic, but have programmed no more recently than 20 years ago. So I can follow most of what you say, but couldn't do it myself today. |
“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 01/31/2006 01:42:43 |
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ronnywhite
SFN Regular
501 Posts |
Posted - 01/31/2006 : 02:42:09 [Permalink]
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I'll try the JPEG stuff tomorrow if I can do it with the VBA in Office- it's simple enough, but that's not what VBA is for, yet maybe I can do it (I give up on getting my Visual everything 6.0 to read... maybe CD heads are dirty, or disks just bit the dust... idunno.) I've just dragged it out every few years when the spirit moved me for home projects and the like, but if it's dead maybe back to the local watering hole and improving my dart game instead.
I'll look into that email stuff. Maybe she messed it up, or I didn't read the page right. |
Ron White |
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JohnOAS
SFN Regular
Australia
800 Posts |
Posted - 01/31/2006 : 06:43:18 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by HalfMooner
Ron, I did get your site email, so I guess it works sometimes, at least. But it's not exactly obvious that one has mail, unless one looks carefully on the correct page. BTW, I programmed an early computer game in an interpreted Basic, but have programmed no more recently than 20 years ago. So I can follow most of what you say, but couldn't do it myself today.
Ron's right about using a more "transparent" method. We don't want to end up making our own bible code, whereby we can generate a hoax message from any image by using a complex key and/or algorithm.
What we need to do is use a method that's straightforward and easily reproducible. It'd probably be a good idea to release the source code, so people can't accuse us of using a look up table based on filenames etc. There are good methods for encoding almost invisibly for all the major formats jpg, png, gif, however, finding one that will survive conversion between formats, or posting to web pages and cnsequent saving to another format is far from trivial.
I'm absolutely flat out at work until Saturday afternoon, then I might have a proper look. Barely got time to read ATM, sorry guys.
BTW, I didn't receive any messages either, assuming any were sent  |
John's just this guy, you know. |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 01/31/2006 : 13:30:25 [Permalink]
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I think this is going in a good direction, thanks! The idea of having a free program that people could use themselves to expose the hidden text would be a great advantage over expecting people to trust us when we say we found the text.
One thing, though: I think we do need a way to use a separate key for each image's encryption and decryption. It would be good if the steganography decryption program itself were public, but you wouldn't want to hand out keywords until the corresponding images had been published, else the woo-woo sites could simply screen images with it in advance. We want to make these sites question their sources, but we don't want to make it easy for them to block just our fakes in particular.
It would be ideal to have an application that would allow us to encode over an already compressed jpeg as suggested, but with a fairly robust keyword encryption. We'd hold onto the encryption program ourselves. But we'd release a public program that only decrypts to reveal the text, using the released keywords. Is this too complex?
I'd rather get a late start on this, than do it wrong. No rush, in any case.
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 01/31/2006 13:33:35 |
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ronnywhite
SFN Regular
501 Posts |
Posted - 02/01/2006 : 13:28:33 [Permalink]
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| I started throwing something together other day, then got swamped yesterday... hopefully finish example program this evening and email it (although I've received no messages via either Private or email, thus, I'm becoming increasingly suspicious the messaging system is somehow fouling up.) |
Ron White |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 02/01/2006 : 18:58:09 [Permalink]
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| Thanks, Ron. I've attempted to send you my regular email addy via site mail. I now have the first three fakes completed. I've had a lot of fun with them, as you will probably eventually see. Without going into too much revealing detail, they mix an historical interest of mine together with a most improbable type of flying saucer, to create a unified theme so silly that I'm sure the UFO sites will bite. |
“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
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Dr. Mabuse
Septic Fiend
Sweden
9688 Posts |
Posted - 02/01/2006 : 22:47:53 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by ronnywhite
Make the message short- that will serve the purpose, and using JPEG should be no problem. Another 12-line program pulls the message out of the file. Nothing to it.
Unless someone decide to change the size to fit their web page.
They load the file into Photoshop, and if they just recompress the file to make it take up less space...
Or they resize the pic from 1024x768 to 800x600, and half of the pixels get lost in the process. I doubt the information survive, even if it is in the frequency-domain.
There is a plug-in to photoshop I think is called "digital watermark" or some such. For a fee, one can register a number of watermarks to apply to a bitmap. Once that is done I think the ad for the watermark said it would be detectable close to ten j-peg compress-recompress operations before becoming too corrupted to be identified. I think that was including moderate resize. I need to check with my girlfriend about that. |
Dr. Mabuse - "When the going gets tough, the tough get Duct-tape..."
Dr. Mabuse whisper.mp3
"Equivocation is not just a job, for a creationist it's a way of life..." Dr. Mabuse
Support American Troops in Iraq:
Send them unarmed civilians for target practice..
Collateralmurder. |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 02/01/2006 : 23:27:17 [Permalink]
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| Thank you, Mab. I'd thought of getting that digital watermark. Sounds very durable. Please also ask your girlfriend if the watermark would be so visible that the UFO and other sites could simply avoid posting any fakes that bore the marks. Or is it somewhat hidden in one of the color channels? |
“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
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ronnywhite
SFN Regular
501 Posts |
Posted - 02/02/2006 : 03:14:47 [Permalink]
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No, it's highly unlikely it would survive resizing (I'm assuming it wouldn't be resaved as JPEG anyway if it's resized- probably GIF or something, but it most likely wouldn't survive anyway.) Only in the original file.
In any event, I threw something together tonight, and it seems to work OK with a few small JPEG images I've tried imbedding. Anyone wanting to try it and criticize code or technique (please do, by all means and I'll improve it if Halfmooner wants to use this, unless an superior alternative is available as discussed) email me and I'll send it as an attachment with some details- my email address is:
ronnywhite@msn.com
Email direct as the SFN messaging and email doesn't appear to work, or at least not reliably (I didn't notice whether it has an attachment capability anyway.) |
Ron White |
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