No doubt we have read about steganography, the process of embedding [generally secret] information with the digital code of pictures. It was pretty much the stuff of spys, and adolsecents. Now this technology is being co-opted for commercial purposes:
Japanese firm fujitsu is pushing a technology that can encode data into a picture that is invisible to the human eye but can be decoded by a mobile phone with a camera.
The technique stems from a 2,500-year-old practice
called steganography, which saw the greeks sending warnings of attacks on wooden tablets and then covering them in wax and tattooing messages on shaved heads that were then covered by the regrowth of hair. Fujitsu's technique works by taking advantage of the sensitivities of the human eye, which struggles to see the colour yellow. The key is to take the yellow hue in the picture and we skew that ever so slightly to create a pattern; said Mr. Nelson. A camera is perfectly sensitive to that yellow hue but the human eye doesn't see it very well. “Any camera, even those in mobile phones, can decode it very easily. Pictures printed with the technique look perfectly normal but a camera can see the code printed into the image.
The technique can currently store just 12 bytes of information soon to rise to 24, the equivalent amount of data in a barcode. That data could be a phone number, a message or a website link. Printed materials can then connect to the online world by storing information which tells the phone to connect the web. Almost any mobile phone can be used but a small java application must be downloaded before it can be used to decode the information. Other devices such as pdas with a camera could also be used. Once installed the same program can be used to read other codes on other products. It takes a few seconds for the phone to decipher the data. And because most modern mobiles can connect to the net they act as a gateway to content that firms want to send to people who have decoded the steganographic pictures, such as music and video. Steganography can be embedded as part of the normal printing process.
of the area's been destroyed, to others who have calculated that the $60,000 spent on painting could have actually planted trees and bushes over a much wider area. But others think that green paint is “the new green”: who needs to save the environment when you can just make it look the right color? Perhaps tourists will soon see a bright green Great Wall of China, just to make sure it'll still be visible from space even through all our pollution.
Let's hope they don't serve chicken wings as a snack on the airlines of the future, since all that smackin' and lickin' could get you into the dickins:
stores the temporal information from your “image” so that when you are home the camera can do a global search for images by others at that exact moment.
