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As you say, it is very possible to build or use detectors for systems such as this. The advantage in this case is that 300+ million new photos are uploaded to F
by owencm 14y ago
As you say, it is very possible to build or use detectors for systems such as this. The advantage in this case is that 300+ million new photos are uploaded to Facebook every day so scanning them all would be highly computationally intensive. Governments also do not have access to privately shared Facebook albums so the risk of steganography being detected in a walled garden such as Facebook is much lower than for images shared on public websites such as eBay in the case of Al Qaeda in the past. In the past walled gardens have always recompressed JPEGs rendering previous steganography tools unusable - that is the true innovation this extension brings.
- ramayac 14y ago"Governments also do not have access to privately shared Facebook albums" ... yet! But either way it's really useful tool, I think my GF will love it.
- junto 14y agoI have always assumed that the NSA have a firehose feed running from Facebook to Fort Meade. I can't imagine a reason why in the interests of national security, why they wouldn't have already approached Facebook with a secret request to get full access to all Facebook data, regardless of the user's privacy settings. I have already proved to myself that when you delete something on Facebook, it is not actually deleted, but simply marked as archived. My guess is that they now also move the images, rather than delete them, to satisfy the previous outcry at deleted photos that were still "cached on the CDN". cough bullshit. Once your data is on Facebook, you can never remove it. I don't trust them as far as I can throw a $1 billion company. I'll take my tin-foil hat off now. http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/01/8701/ http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/01/8701/
- platz 14y agoI don't think they'd need to scan the 300+ million new photos. They'd just need to scan the photos of individuals that governments and/or corporations would like to target.
- rwissmann 14y agoTo be fair, this is probably more of a cool toy and proof of concept than something you would use for industry- or military-grade security needs. According to Owen's pdf itself, complete undetectability was not the main goal of the project (page 33).
- jlgaddis 14y agoHow much "computation" is Facebook doing already on those 300MM+ photos that are being uploaded every day? I'm sure they are already performing a number of actions when each photo is uploaded. Is running a quick check for hidden messages on those photos really going to add that much more "processing"?