For the paranoid or secretive: You can send messages buried in pictures

Can you say steganography ? This has nothing to do with the possibly more well know stegosaurus, you remember the dinosaur with all the plates on it’s back that acted like heat radiators ? This is all about hiding a message inside another larger and possibly meaningless message. In this case the message is hidden inside a standard bitmap, but can be recovered by this software call OpenStego. The software is written in java, and so is usable on most platforms, but the web site is very spare. There is no flash, there is very little description, and very little explanation as to what this application is used for. The google code page is equally limited.

An alternative that uses a Java CommandLine is ThumbStego. This application uses an original image as the key, rather than a password.

Either of these java applications will enable you to communicate in near secrecy, just passing images back and forth. The only reason I am telling you all this is because PGP, and other cryptographic alternatives are so readily available that I have no guilt whatsoever that I am promoting terrorist activity.