Synaptic Sugar

Many Americans don’t know what a bidet is. That is unfortunate, because a bidet is a useful fixture that should be present in all bathrooms, and indeed I imagine it is in most of Europe. Despite its clear advantages, in Italy it often comes with a most strange feature: it only lets water come out at either icy or boiling temperatures, or at best it alternates quickly between the two extremes.

Luckily, better products exist, like the high-tech Toto Z series manufactured in Japan. This popular bidet series sports a pulsating massage spray, a power dryer, built-in-the-bowl deodorizing filter, the “Tornado Wash” flush and a lid that opens and closes automatically. It costs between $1,680 and $2,600. The bad news is how between March 2006 and March 2007 in at least 26 different occasions some of these models started sending up smoke and in 3 others they even caught fire; the cause seems to reside in a fault in the electrical wiring that supports all of these nifty little features that, I can only assume, Japanese hygiene geeks love.

Now, you probably don’t want something like that to happen while you’re actually using one of these things, so Toto is offering free repairs to over 180,000 bidets built between 1996 and 2001. Stephen Colbert disagreed with the idea, noting how one shouldn’t settle for anything less than the crispy hygiene provided by a flaming bidet; as much as I can see the truthiness in this concept, I think I’ll stick to the simple Italian masterpieces.

I fell into a burning ring of fire / I went down, down, down / and the flames went higher. / And it burns, burns, burns / the ring of fire / the ring of fire. — “Ring of Fire”, Johnny Cash

EDIT 05/05: some people wondered about the “Tornado Wash” flush and the lid; while a bidet is normally NOT a toilet, these Japanese models might be a two-in-one deal.

Remember my previous post "Entertainment IPREDators" about IPRED2, the controversial directive that the European Parliament seemed on the verge of approving? If you don’t, you should go read it again to freshen up your memory, because the directive has been approved two days ago with 374 votes for to 278 against. True, it has been amended in part, but its most crucial aspects remain undamaged.

Its purported purpose is to “harmonize” the copyright laws of the European countries. Unfortunately, it’s quite confused and vague and touches copyright together with trademarks and counterfeiting, as has also been expressed by Giuseppe Corasaniti, an Italian magistrate who was awarded many times for his expertise and activity in matters of multimedia and international copyright laws. In short, the directive seems to go against international treaties and conventions previously signed by the European Union (which still remain binding); it introduces the risk of confusing counterfeiting with copyright abuse; it does not specify if and how members of the Union should cooperate (for example to control imports), nor if and how police forces of each member country should create specialized teams to deal with the kind of crimes the directive itself tries to contrast; finally, no economic or social analysis was made on the target phenomena prior to the drafting of the directive.

One of the most criticized points in the directive is how it allows private companies that feel they have been wronged to closely cooperate with investigations and access personal data of private citizens, without the need for a formal accusation, while being notified immediately by law enforcers about details of investigations when they are started. The directive does specify that each member country must guarantee that the privacy of its citizens is respected and not stepped on (as if it were necessary to specify such a thing), but leaves the details related to how to do it to each country (and let me have some doubts on the effectiveness of some privacy preservation policies in the absence of clear, unified guidelines).

At the same time, IPRED2 also introduces the notion of fair use, which as far as I know was until now mostly absent in Europe, by including personal entertainment or educational uses into a category of non-punishable behaviors. Excluded from the directive is thus punishment for end-users, while websites like YouTube/Google Video or peer-to-peer file-sharing services and their developers are criminalized. It’s worth noting, though, that end-users who abuse copyright according to the current laws are still considered criminals punishable with jail time in several member countries, and the directive doesn’t appear to change that; the set of countries where this applies includes Italy, where the introduction of much harsher punishments since 2000 did not significantly lower the market for counterfeit products nor copyright abuse.

So if this directive is so vague and confused, yet restrictive, if it doesn’t specify what really must be done and how, leaving very important details to the interpretation and action of each member of the European Union, yet gives private companies more rights and power — who is it supposed to benefit? Can a halfway-done “harmonization” really be called a “harmonization”? And why aren’t the local media (say, in Italy for example) giving the news any relevance, when it clearly concerns the rights and responsibilities of the people, it touches a tremendously delicate subject and areas of specialized knowledge, yet it is voted by politicians with mostly little or no technical competence in the matter? I’m leaving the conclusions to you, dear readers. Keep in mind, though, that while the “traditional media” are so engulfed in commenting on every detail of sport events or the latest reality shows, the emperor has less and less clothes.

Steganography, like Cryptography, is a science that has as its objective the transmission of “secrets” from a sender to a recipient. Between these two sciences lies a substantial difference: the former allows a message to be transmitted as cleartext, but hidden inside other kinds of messages that are apparently harmless (cover messages); in the latter case, the tranmission of a secret message is evident, but the message itself is encrypted and secrecy lies in the difficulty to obtain the original cleartext for whoever isn’t the sender or the intended recipient.

Throughout the centuries Steganography has been employed in a wide variety of ways, to warn Sparta of the incoming Persian attack for example, or to hide messages during World War II, and it can also be used in software with digital images, audio or text. When done properly, inserting a secret message (payload) in a cover message does not produce visible differences in the cover message itself, but by comparing a suspect message with the original unchanged cover message, when feasible, it is possible to discover the payload or at least its existence.

The little game I posted a few days ago, "A simple quiz", was a little unfair: the two images were different as stated, but the differences weren’t visible to the naked eye. I had hidden a text file in the image to the left, producing the image to the right, with steganographic techniques; the text file contents can be seen in the comments below that post, where the solution has been revealed by Henomis (congratulations on finding it!). To do it I used a program called Steghide (but there are several others available), for which I wrote a couple years back a GUI (ie. a Graphical User Interface) in C++, SteGUI, using the FLTK library. Both Steghide and SteGUI are open source software freely available on SourceForge.

The quiz was actually simple once one had the intuition of trying a steganalytic approach (which I knew wouldn’t come to mind to many people), since the payload wasn’t compressed, encrypted, nor protected with a passphrase, all things you could do with Steghide. To find out more about Steganography or SteGUI, you can visit the project website, also linked in the sidebar. You might find the information useful — after all, who knows what I could hide next, or where?

As you may have noticed this blog is now accessible under a different domain name; http://synapticsugar.net or http://blog.synapticsugar.net will both take you here. No need to update your links or bookmarks though, the old URLs starting with http://mana.acheronte.it/blog/ are also redirected automatically to the new domain.

Cheers!

Can you find the subtle hidden differences?

(A non-hint: the pictures are indeed different)