A stenographer, a steganographer, and a stegosaurus.
F, marry, kill.
Marry the steganographer,
kill the stenographer.
Why?
F the stegosaurus.
You would not have sex with a stegosaurus!
I mean, now that I think about it, you're only going to have the one chance, right?
What a cool party trick.
That is a story that no one can ever top!
"I had sex with a dinosaur."
[laughter]
[Brian's voice echos in the distance] ♪ MODERN ROGUE! ♪
[robot voice] The Modern Rogues are in four a hertzing, today.
So cryptography is encrypting messages, but when you get a message,
♪ ["Gold Nova" by baaskaT] ♪ you can tell it's encrypted, right?
Yeah, you see all the gobbledygook, and you know that there's a code there to be broken.
Right.
Steganography is... what, exactly?
Steganography is where you are hiding the message in such a way that no one even knows
there's anything hidden there.
No one knows that there's anything to decode.
Usually it's in an image, or hidden within another file.
So it would be the equivalent of you intercepted a Where's Waldo photo, and you never
knew that the whole point of the photo was to find Waldo?
Right.
To you, like, "Well what a weird tableau of people at a fair."
Yeah.
"That person's eating a funnel cake."
Yeah, Leonardo Davinci would put it in his paintings.
I thought you said Leonardo was painting Waldo.
Leonardo Davinci did the first Where's Waldo.
How far back does steganography go?
Probably forever, but one of the first written examples is from Herodotus.
Herodotus tells of a guy named Histiaeus, who took one of his servants, shaved his head,
wrote a message in it, and then waited for the guy's hair to grow out.
And then he sent this guy to his vassal and said, "When you get there, shave your head
so that this guy can see the message."
In my mind, it's like he's there in a giant feast and all of a sudden,
[affecting a frail old man voice] "Oh, come in! You're the guy, aren't you?"
"Yes!"
"Here, let me grab a razor," and he shaves it.
And it's...
it's just dickbutt.
He's the first troll.
It says, "Never going to give you up, never going to let you down."
Oh s---, that's what it should have been.
I don't know if this is steganography, but I know that Michelangelo hid, like really
cool scientific stuff in his paintings.
The Sistine Chapel recently verified that the photo of, I think it's god touching Adam's
finger or whatever.
Like, the cloth around god is exactly the structure of the human brain.
Something that nobody had seen unless you were gross enough to go look at a corpse,
so it was kind of this coy, pro-science hat tip that he was giving in there.
That seems like legit steganography, yeah?
Yeah, and--
Oh my god!
One of my favorite shirts when I was a kid, was a cover of the Akira poster, right?
Neo-Tokyo is about to explode, you see Japan, you see this exploding, black explosion on there,
and I was wearing it, looking down at the city of Japan and I saw like, "That
looks like words."
And on the tops of it, it said "AZ rules," and then I looked at the artist's name, and
it was "AZ" was the initials.
This guy had written his own name and a message, upside-down in a shirt that can only be viewable
to the person who was wearing it.
Nice.
A lot of it is, I think it's like those Mad Magazines, where you could take the cover
and then fold it in a certain way.
That would be steganography, right?
Right!
Because you think you're just looking at, like uh I don't know, a belly-dancing girl,
but instead it's a scathing indictment of Madonna or something.
Right.
So remember those things that were big in the '90s, where they would take hundreds of
frames of The Empire Strikes Back, and put them all together to make a mosaic of Yoda?
Yeah, it used to be that those were designed by real artists, but then computers entered
the equation and they were able to color correct and make stuff bright, or dark, or sift everything.
To me, it kind of lost that handmade charm.
What if one of those tiny, little frames actually had a hidden message written in it?
Holy cow!
Nobody would bother to think, there's no decoding of it.
Yeah.
That is really the most blatant example, is hiding a message within something physical
that you can look at and never know that it's there.
Which by the way, that's one of the techniques that comes into play with sleight of hand,
and doing magic.
There's a balance between what we, as magicians, call signal to noise ratio.
If I gave something too simple of a signal, if I just showed a coin and then covered my
hand, and then revealed the coin gone, that's too clear a signal because you would now know
to look at my other hand for the coin.
But if you added noise, by transferring and telling a story, then that noise camouflages
that exact moment that I palmed off the coin, and makes it totally invisible.
Precisely.
♪ ["Bittersweet" by baaskaT] ♪ Everything that you need is right there,
you just don't know that you're supposed to be looking for it.
So in the 21st century, now-a-days stenography (sic) usually is associated with the idea
of some secret information, like a data document being embedded in another data document.
Yeah, it's like in the movies whenever someone's looking at a picture on a computer and they
say, "Wait, there's more here!"
Yeah dude, like that scene from Contact.
They're like, "Ah, they're actually..."
"Hitler!"
"What?!"
No, it's not always Hitler.
Oh, it was Hitler!
It literally was Hitler.
It literally was Hitler, I thought this was you going, "It's zombie clones of Hitler!"
No! That was a big point in the movie!
It was definitely Hitler.
So there are tons of different methods to actually try this.
There is a free utility online called S-Tools, that's S dash Tools.
>> Brian: So, right here.
Steganography demo...
and bada-bing-bang.
>> Yep.
>> Okay, a few words before you start.
S-Tools embraces many new ways of working that are encouraged by Windows '95.
Yeah...
This is relevant.
>> Brian: I thought you said this was 21st century, but I guess not. >> Jason: This is like Cold War technology.
First we have to pick the image that is going to house the secret.
Oh!
We've got to find an image.
Yeah.
>> Brian: Here, let's make something.
>> Jason: Okay, yeah.
That's pretty good in a "if a 4-year old drew The Far Side" kind of a way.
Did you catch the Gary Larson influence?
Very much so.
>> Brian: So we've got this, let's save as "totally normal bitmap."
Save to desktop.
♪ ["Grass" by baaskaT] ♪ I don't think we're worried about the color quality on this one.
Yeah, no I think we're fine.
>> Jason: Take that image and just drag it into there.
>> Totally normal bitmap, boop.
There we go.
>> Now...
Oh, we've got to make a secret file.
We got to make a secret file.
>> Okay. All right, all right, here we go. >> So open up Notepad.
>> Brian: List of things nobody
should know that I believe.
The prequels were great.
The earth--
>> Jason: is flat!
>> Is flat, there we go.
The 13th Doctor
should be a girl.
I'm actually super stoked about that.
I think that's enough secrets to divulge.
>> Brian: I feel bad though, like one of these I don't believe.
[Jason laughs]
I mean, sorry, two of these I don't believe.
Bryce is a werewolf.
>> Brian: Oh, there you go. Got it.
So, save as "ideas."
Got it, so now we grab that and we drag it in, right?
>> Jason: Yeah, now just drag it over there.
>> Yep.
>> Jason: Okay, now. >> Brian: And then it says, passphrase!
>> Jason: Here's your passphrase.
Now, this is something you can't find just by looking at it.
You have to send it to someone and then they will unlock it with S-Tools, and then they'll
have to know the passphrase.
All right, what should the passphrase be?
Grilled cheese.
Oh.
>> Brian: We'll just say attempt color reduction.
>> Sure.
Okay, hidden data.
>> And what we save this somewhere?
>> Yeah, just save as.
>> Save as.
>> Jason: Whatever you want to call this secret file, it defaults to "hidden."
"Super awesome pictures," bmp.
>> Jason: Do dot bmp, let's try that.
>> Yes, uh overwrite it.
>> Okay, now--
>> Brian: Oh! It shows it now!
It shows it now, so now when I double click it.
Oh!
It's just a simple, easy image of cow butts.
That's awesome!
>> Yeah.
So how do I extract it?
Okay, so I send this to you.
You send it to me.
Right.
You email it to me, I open it up and I'm like, "Okay."
"Brian sent me a picture with butts or whatever," but let's say that I open it up in S-Tools,
because I know that you were sending me something, right?
>> Brian: Okay, so real quick, I'm going to clear out all of this stuff as though we're just average joes.
>> Yeah, just close it out entirely, right?
Okay, so you get this attachment, "super awesome pictures."
>> Yeah.
>> So here, we're in Steg, so I'm going to drag this image.
>> Jason: Yeah, you would send it to me, I would open it up.
>> In S-Tools and it shows up like this.
>> Yeah, now right click on it.
>> Reveal!
>> Yeah, there's an option that says reveal.
Oh that's great.
And then I would type in "grilledcheese," or whatever password we had agreed upon.
>> Brian: There's--oh, it does, it says revealed files "ideas.txt" size 162.
So if I right click on that, I can save as and we can pull it back out.
"Great ideas encoded," and now!
Wait for it, great ideas encoded.
Oh!
And again, it doesn't know what to make of this so we have to do, dot txt.
>> Brian: And there it is! >> Jason: There it is.
Yeah, now think about how important this could actually be, we're sending pictures of cow
butts and so forth, but think about people using it in oppressive regimes and trying
to get secret information out, and political dissidents and so forth.
♪ ["Twrk" by Tesk] ♪ That's one of the things, is that people think that anybody who hides anything is up to no good.
"Up to no good" is very relative given the current political climate that you are operating underneath.
If you're in a place where people are killing your family for the ideas that they have,
then this can be extraordinarily useful.
Yeah, you can, "Oh it's a picture of a baby," but really here's the route to escape whatever
danger you're in.
Are there any obvious clues that there's something beneath the surface of a JPG or a video?
There's not really going to be something that jumps out at you, but if you look at a file
size that is suspiciously large, there could very well be something hiding in there.
So that's going to indicate that if you're the one encoding everything in there, you
want to make sure, if it's a JPG, don't make it 300 megabytes large.
Let's be smart about what you're up to.
Yeah, or if you compress it too much, someone might ask, "Why did they compress this simple JPG?"
Yeah, so it's sort of the same rules that get you unnoticed in a crowd of people, are
what you want to do with your digital files, right?
Exactly, and there are so many different ways to do it.
There are ways you can do it in the command window, or various tools that you can use
online just to hide whatever you want to hide.
So if anybody wants to go down this rabbit hole, just what?
Do a search for "steganography?"
Yeah, that's it.
You just search for steganography and there are a lot of websites that collect the various
methods you can use.
And just for fun, we turned this episode into an example of steganography.
If you're super-engaged and you have the patience, the wherewithal, and the know-how, you'll
be able to figure out the secret messages, assemble them all together and you should
go on a very short quest with a hopefully rewarding ending?
We don't know, we haven't written it yet.
It will kickstart their journey onto the path of enlightenment.
That's not true, that's not--we literally, as we're recording this, have not decided what we're going to do.
Secret knowledge.
No.
You will unlock all of your chakras, and become a Bodhisattva.
This is not, this is more of your conspiracy stuff.
Nicolas Cage will find it in the next National Treasure movie.
Okay, that might happen, though.
-- CC BY BIZARRE MAGIC -- [branding furnace hissing]
[light laughter, static, and wind]