Hiding files in Flickr pics will fool web censors

This article is copied from New Scientist:

Life is about to become more difficult for countries trying to censor access to foreign websites. A system dubbed Collage will allow users in these countries to download stories from blocked sites while visiting seemingly uncontroversial sites such as Flickr.

Collage relies on a well-established technique known as digital steganography, in which an image file is changed to encode the hidden message without obviously affecting the appearance of the image. A prototype version is due to be unveiled on Friday, 13 August.

Steganography normally requires specialist software, but Collage is designed so that anti-censorship activists and readers can publish and download the hidden stories without any specialist skills. A publisher or activist can, for example, use Collage to copy news stories from a website and embed the articles into Flickr images in a process that is almost entirely automated.

In the prototype, stories from the BBC news site are used, but in principle any web content could be hidden. Collage can hide as many as 15 news articles in just seven medium-sized Flickr images.

Once the material is embedded in a Flickr image, anyone with Collage can download it and extract the stories. A censor attempting to monitor traffic from a prohibited site would only see the reader visiting Flickr, which is not generally blocked by web censors.

Collage is able to identify which images have been used to hide material. All the would-be reader has to do is click on the date they are interested in; the stories appear a few minutes later. "It all happens in the background," says Sam Burnett at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, part of the team behind Collage.

Burnett has designed a Flickr upload tool that links with Collage and embeds content that publishers or activists want to make available.

Collage can also be easily extended so that stories are embedded in other photo-sharing sites. The idea is to spread material across numerous sites that host user-generated content so that the activity of someone running Collage appears much like that of any internet user and the censors cannot just block access to Flickr. Collage does, however, rely on the goodwill of Flickr users, who will have to provide access to the images where the articles are to be hidden.

Burnett is relying on opposition to censorship to motivate people to use Collage. "We're betting on people getting a warm fuzzy feeling because they are beating censorship," he says.

To coincide with the launch of the prototype, Burnett will present a paper on the system at the USENIX Security Symposium in Washington DC.

E-books

The site bookworm can be used to store ebooks that, once uploaded, can be downloaded later to any device or read online. The books have to be the epub format but programs like calibre can be used to create the proper format if the book is in a non-compatible format. This is not a bad idea and obviates the need to carry your library around with you on your laptop, mobile device or USB stick drive. Today I created an account with bookworm and uploaded my first ebook (Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake). All went well.

Dead Flash Drive

Oh dear, my recently acquired 16Gb Kingston Traveller Flash Drive is no longer working. It's recognised by my computer but when I try to access it, I'm asked if I want to format it. Accepting that whatever I had on the disk would be erased, I choose the formatting option but the operation always fails. I decided to try a low level format and to that end downloaded a little utility program from the Internet at http://hddguru.com. No go. It would appear that the drive is irretrievably dead.

From this experience, I have learned a valuable lesson. It's silly to buy a larger and more expensive flash drive, as I did, only to see it die a couple of months later. I've now revived my older 4Gb Toshiba flash drive and will begin storing my portable applications on this. As far as possible, I'll use the Internet to store any files that I need to access or work on. I'll make regular copies of the contents of the drive so that it ever fails again I can quickly copy the contents to a new drive.

Microsoft Security Essentials

I'm trying to kick start this blog as I did my other, so here goes. I came across Yogesh Mankani's review of ten free Microsoft products and noticed that one of them was an anti-malware download called Microsoft Security Essentials that requires validation before it can be installed. Seeing that I have a legal installation of Vista, I thought I'd test it out so I downloaded and installed it, then ran quick scan that didn't detect any problems. I wasn't surprised at this because I have Windows Defender and McAfee antivirus already activated.

However, I was surprised later when I opened Windows Media Player and got an alert about a TrojanDownloader: ASX/Wimad.CJ that was lurking in one of my Windows Media files that I'd downloaded in August 2007 from Limewire. The threat was flagged as severe so I removed it and then did a little investigation. According to Microsoft's Malware Protection Centre it isn't actually a trojan but instead:

TrojanDownloader:ASX/Wimad.CJ is a detection for malicious Windows media files that encourage users to download and execute arbitrary files on an affected machine. When opened with Windows Media Player, these malicious files open a particular URL in a Web browser.

Installation

TrojanDownloader:ASX/Wimad.CJ is a malicious Advanced Streaming Format (ASF) file, which when opened by Windows Media Player, urges a user to download and execute an arbitrary file. In the wild, files detected as TrojanDownloader:ASX/Wimad.CJ have been observed to be distributed with file extensions such as .MP3, .ASF, .WMA, and .ASX. The file names used have been varied and enticing.

Payload

Redirects Web traffic. At the time of writing, ASX/Wimad.CJ attempts to open a page on the www.realcodec.comdomain. Affected users may be directed to other sites or to download arbitrary files.  Microsoft strongly suggest that users avoid downloading and executing any files when prompted by Windows Media Player upon opening streaming format files.

So the program has proved useful already but I was unsure what the difference was between Microsoft Security Essentials and Windows Defender until I came across this article.

Q: How is Microsoft Security Essentials different from Windows Defender?

A: Windows Defender detects and removes known spyware only. It is not designed to protect against the full breadth of malicious software, and specifically does not prevent viruses, worms, Trojans, and other malicious software from infecting your machine. The new no-cost solution will be a comprehensive anti-malware solution.

Q: Is Microsoft Security Essentials designed to replace Windows Defender?

A: No but if you are running Microsoft Security Essentials, you do not need to run Windows Defender. Microsoft Security Essentials is designed to disable Windows Defender in order to manage the PC’s real-time protection, including anti-virus, rootkits, Trojans and spyware.

Q: Does installing Microsoft Security Essentials disable Windows Defender? 

A: Microsoft Security Essentials should disable Windows Defender on Vista and Windows 7 and uninstall it from XP. In some cases, this does not happen automatically.

Q: Do I need to manually disable or uninstall Windows Defender if I am using Microsoft Security Essentials?

A: If Microsoft Security Essentials did not automatically disable Windows Defender on Vista or Windows 7, you should disable it to prevent conflicts. Windows Defender cannot be uninstalled from Vista or Windows 7. 

If Microsoft Security Essentials did not automatically uninstall Windows Defender on XP, you should manually uninstall Windows Defender via Control Panel/Add or Remove Programs.

Q: What happens if I do not disable or uninstall Windows Defender if I am using Microsoft Security Essentials?

A: If Microsoft Security Essentials and Windows Defender are both running, your system may experience performance degradation and other problems caused by the conflict of two services providing real time protection simultaneously.

I'm testing out (behind the goddam Great Wall) post.ly that's owned by Posterous and being promoted as a dead simple way to post to Twitter.

Posted via web from seanreeves's posterous

Karmic Koala

A long time since my last post but I explained the reasons in my other blog. Like many other early adopters, I've had a rough time with Ubuntu's new 9.10 distribution: Karmic Koala. Initially I only succeeded in booting via the Gnome Failsafe mode with no Internet connectivity and the graphic display stuck on a 4:3 aspect ratio, not much good for my widescreen monitor. After a while, I got it to boot via Gnome but the graphics are still faulty and the connection to the Internet just doesn't want to work. I should have waited I know and I promise I will next time. I've put the PC away now and returned to my trusty laptop running Windows Vista. I once thought that Ubuntu might challenge Microsoft but then Apple took off and Microsoft seems to have redeemed itself with Windows 7. I don't think Ubuntu will ever challenge the big players for desktop supremacy but maybe Google's Chrome, running on a Linux base, will have some chance. I just can't be bothered wasting as much time as I used to on solving Ubuntu problems. Like most users, I just want things to work and currently this is not the case.

Firefox and other matters

I finally got fed up with the fans in my Acer PC working overtime as I merely browsed pages on the Internet. I only had open TweetDeck and Firefox but it was the latter that seemed to be the cause of the CPU overload. Maybe I have too many plugins installed. I'll have to investigate the matter later but for the time being I've switched to the Ephiphany browser and everything is wonderfully quiet. It really was driving me to distraction. I can't believe I've put up with it for so long when there was such an easy solution at hand.

It's probably about time that I did start getting a little "pedagogical" and start organizing my thoughts a little. I recently came across a free graph-generating program for Windows called f(x)-Viewer. It's a 569Kb download and I have it running in WINE. I've given a brief test drive and it seems quite adequate. I've used Graphmatica in the past and I guess there are lot of graph-generating programs out there. Another free program that I've played around with is Foto-Mosaik-Edda that generates a photograph made up of smaller photographs (thousands of them if you want). I want to use it to generate a 90cm x 60cm photograph that I'll get printed out before I leave for Shanghai. I've been told that the printing cost will be around Rp120,000.

I guess I'll be expected to have an opinion on the possible implementation of Windows 7 in the school environment and it certainly seems a good idea. The fact that Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Enterprise will offer legacy compatibility via Virtual Windows XP makes it even more attractive. Release date is said to be October 22nd 2009.
Of course, Google Chrome OS is due for release next year and it will be interesting to see how that fares. All that's in the future however, and what I want to do here is review the tools that I've already used and find some new tools that I'd like to use. Some interesting sites that I've marked in Delicious are:

• best of history web sites described as "an award-winning portal that contains annotated links to over 1000 history web sites as well as links to hundreds of quality K-12 history lesson plans, history teacher guides, history activities, history games, history quizzes, and more".
  
  
• educational software listings at gizmo's freeware contains links to several interesting sites. Apart from the previously mentioned history site, there are links to best PC freeware, 50 places for free books online, and ACADEMIC EARTH featuring videos lectures from some of the top universities in the USA.
  
  
• Gutenkarte "is a geographic text browser, intended to help readers explore the spatial component of classic works of literature. Gutenkarte downloads public domain texts from Project Gutenberg, and then feeds them to MetaCarta's GeoParser API, which extracts and returns all the geographic locations it can find. Gutenkarte stores these locations in a database, along with citations into the text itself, and offers an interface where the book can be browsed by chapter, by place, or all at once on an interactive map".
  
  
• Groupsite.com is a free social collaboration building site similar it would seem to Ning.

That's probably enough for now.