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 Forum index » Archive » Archive: The Haunted Apiary (Let Op!) » The Haunted Apiary (Let Op!): General/Updates
[SPEC] "Questions" from killer.jpg
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Platonix
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Joined: 28 Aug 2004
Posts: 174
Location: Keene, New Hampshire
bcriswell wrote:
skybruin wrote:
never mind i figured it out. i saved it as a bitmap first then saved it as a jpeg. then the text showed.

You should not need to do that.

I suspect that skybruin didn't do it intentionally. IE has this funky glitch that sometimes causes all images on the internet to save as bitmaps. You have to empty your cache to save images properly. (Or you could copy the file from the cache itself, but that's not an area that Computer Science novices should mess with.)
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 10, 2004 1:47 pm
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astrovanman
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Joined: 04 Aug 2004
Posts: 162
Location: Dallas/Fort Worth
bcriswell wrote:
Try placing the text at the end. If I recall correctly, jpeg readers are supposed to stop reading the file after the number of bytes defined in the file header have been read in to the program, so anything after that should be ignored. I just tried this with a second, different jpeg to make sure it works. Unfiction's forums show a preview image, so you will have to click that to get the real image that has the text in it.



I finally got your image to show a message in notepad. However, I tried just put my own text at the end of one of my photos and all I get is a resized image of 0x0 pixels.

flustered Confused

PostPosted: Sun Oct 10, 2004 7:20 pm
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bcriswell
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Joined: 01 Sep 2004
Posts: 136
Location: Oxford, England
astrovanman wrote:
bcriswell wrote:
Try placing the text at the end. If I recall correctly, jpeg readers are supposed to stop reading the file after the number of bytes defined in the file header have been read in to the program, so anything after that should be ignored. I just tried this with a second, different jpeg to make sure it works. Unfiction's forums show a preview image, so you will have to click that to get the real image that has the text in it.



I finally got your image to show a message in notepad. However, I tried just put my own text at the end of one of my photos and all I get is a resized image of 0x0 pixels.

flustered Confused

It is my fault. I made the mistake of assuming that notepad would not butcher the jpeg portion of the file. I actually used a program called vim, which is a much more powerful text editor, but it takes a little bit of learning to use it properly. www.vim.org Get it in the downloads section.

PostPosted: Mon Oct 11, 2004 7:47 am
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jellyfish_green
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Joined: 30 Jul 2004
Posts: 144
Location: Inner Colony of Eire

 		Yes, Notepad doesn't like writing binary - it changes some binary characters to text, or leaves them out.

A hex editor like Hexworks http://falkoris.tripod.com/utils.htm will allow you to insert ASCII text into a JPEG, but it's up to you to avoid messing with the header or otherwise corrupting the file, so inserting text at or near the end might make for a prettier picture.

PostPosted: Mon Oct 11, 2004 10:27 am
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Daffy889
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Joined: 25 Aug 2004
Posts: 493
Location: South Australia

 		I suspect that the PMs have just made a simple program to insert the text into the images, so that it is not affected by the craziness of any text editor.

I just came up with a program myself to do it, and have attached the resulting corrupted image.

I wish I had a copy of MS Visual Studio here so I could compile it and let you all use it, but I don't, so I had to make the thing in MS Access. If anyone has Access and wants a copy let me know and I'll post it.

Edit - They may have done something to their images to make them "corrupt better" too. I just tried my program on a pic of Dana from ilovebees.com and got much more effective looking corruption than I did on any of my own pics. Could just be a coincidence though...

PostPosted: Mon Oct 11, 2004 10:36 am
Last edited by Daffy889 on Mon Oct 11, 2004 11:53 am; edited 1 time in total
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nobodyman
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Joined: 25 Jul 2004
Posts: 88
Location: Gilbert, Arizona
Daffy889 wrote:

I wish I had a copy of MS Visual Studio here so I could compile it and let you all use it, but I don't, so I had to make the thing in MS Access. If anyone has Access and wants a copy let me know and I'll post it.


Hey Daffy -- go ahead and post it. I have access and visual studio. Also, if anyone has access to an ASP-based web host I wouldn't mind converting this to a web application. If I do end up converting it, I'll definitely give you full props.

PostPosted: Mon Oct 11, 2004 11:25 am
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Daffy889
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Joined: 25 Aug 2004
Posts: 493
Location: South Australia
nobodyman wrote:
Hey Daffy -- go ahead and post it. I have access and visual studio. Also, if anyone has access to an ASP-based web host I wouldn't mind converting this to a web application. If I do end up converting it, I'll definitely give you full props.


Right, here it is. It runs behind an Access form, so you'll probably have to redesign the form to make it an executable. I don't know how you'd make it web-based, since you have to give it the full path to the file to write to (and obviously it needs permission to write to it).

The large box is where you put the text you want to go in, the one below that is for the full path to the file (C:/whatever/image.jpg). As soon as that box is filled in the length of the file will be displayed so you can set a start position (the point in the file where the text will be embedded). The start position is automatically set to the length of the file divided by 7 Smile (not sure if this is what the PMs use, but it does seem to work well), but it can be changed to anything you want.

The status box to the right of the buttons just states the current thing that is happening, since accessing the file can take a few seconds. It doesn't work too well, and calls a DoEvents everytime it updates, but for some reason I wanted it there at the time.

There's a checking function that checks that the text can be extracted after it is embedded. I have another database that uses that function to extract text from any of the ILB images, but that actually uses tables in the database to store the contents of the original files, so that couldn't be converted as easily.

PostPosted: Mon Oct 11, 2004 11:49 am
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pcs me
Greenhorn

Joined: 12 Sep 2004
Posts: 5

 		I'm using MS Word 2003 which has a file conversion utility that is supposed to make your text readable. I've tried using the US-ASCII decoder but it's still completely un-readable, are hidden texts supposed to be fairly easy to spot? I've read through this thread and tried saving as a jpeg and bmp, opening with notepad, wordpad and full-up MS Word but still get no results. I even read through the help file here at the forums, steganography, etc. I need Steganography for Dummies!

PostPosted: Mon Oct 11, 2004 12:30 pm
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Daffy889
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Joined: 25 Aug 2004
Posts: 493
Location: South Australia
pcs me wrote:
I'm using MS Word 2003 which has a file conversion utility that is supposed to make your text readable. I've tried using the US-ASCII decoder but it's still completely un-readable, are hidden texts supposed to be fairly easy to spot? I've read through this thread and tried saving as a jpeg and bmp, opening with notepad, wordpad and full-up MS Word but still get no results. I even read through the help file here at the forums, steganography, etc. I need Steganography for Dummies!


Note - This is not steganography, it's just plain text inserted straight into the binary of the image.

To view it, just save the image as whatever extension it already is and then open it in a plain text editor such as Notepad. There will be a lot of strange characters before and after, and you may need to scroll down to find the hidden text, but it will usually be obvious when you find it.

There's no need to use file converters or programs like Word. In fact, if you do you're more likely to lose the embedded text than find it.

PostPosted: Mon Oct 11, 2004 1:03 pm
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astrovanman
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Joined: 04 Aug 2004
Posts: 162
Location: Dallas/Fort Worth

 		Ah ha! Huh-za! The Hex-Tool worked. Right on, now I can embed text! Thanks, people so much for figuring this one out.

Now, I'm starting to get a feeling we may have to do this tommarrow when we are sending pictures to Melissa. We may have to hide images for the SP.

Thanks again to all.

PostPosted: Mon Oct 11, 2004 1:08 pm
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thebruce
Dances With Wikis


Joined: 16 Aug 2004
Posts: 6899
Location: Kitchener, Ontario

 		just a note: Notepad is an ASCII text editor, not a binary or hex editor. if you open a binary file such as an image, it contains many characters that are not standard text characters, so notepad doesn't know what to do with them. Most binary files, if you resave from notepad, will become corrupted because notepad in a sense 'converts' those unknown characters to placeholders. Notepad is fine for opening and reading binary files to find text, but not for inserting text into them.

As has been mentioned above, use a hex editor that allows inserting characters, or some other form of binary file editor...

/nutshell
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 11, 2004 7:35 pm
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