There are few places harder to get to in this world. But therearen't anywhere it's harder to live.The average temperature in Antarctica at the bottom of the Earth is a balmy 58 degrees below.That's when the sun is out.For millions of years they have made their home on the darkest,driest, windiest and coldest continent on Earth.The Penguins.Penguin is technically a bird. Although one that makes his home in the sea. Each year at around the same time he will leave the comfort of his ocean home and embark on a remarkable journey.He will travel a great distance and though he is a bird. he won't fly.Though he lives in the sea. he won't swim. Mostly, he will walk.But he won't walk alone.It is March ......
March of the Penguins ,The IceWalkerz!!


Sound Tracks of "March of the Penguins ", feature film by National Geographic Channel.
What is Linux ? You’d probably say, “Linux is an operating system.” Yes, but remember, however, that the strictest definition of Linux is only the kernel . The more relaxed definition would be an overall package called a distribution that is ready to install and use. There are well over 300 distributions of Linux, most of them containing commonly-needed applications—and even games! Linux was originally meant to be a UNIX clone. Here, by clone,we mean that it would look and behave like UNIX. But bear in mind that Linux does not contain a single line of UNIX code! The source code of the two is entirely different.Linux was officially introduced only in 1991 by its famed creator Linus Torvalds,who at the time was a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Little did he know that his creation would grow in size and popularity to the extent it has today.Linux is what it is today because of the help of developers who worked on it not for money but for the kick of it. They were driven by passion and belief in a cause.Did you know that most servers today run on Linux? That means there’s a good chance there’s Linux somewhere behind all those Web pages you see. Linux is not just an OS you use at home instead of Windows; a whole range of enterprise suites are now based on the Linux platform. From network servers to Web servers, several places have Linux as the backbone.There are countless brains at work who pursue the technology—not for money, but out of sheer interest and passion.Linux boasts of some of the best online peer support today. Linux is standing today showing the IT world the innovation that can be achieved by sheer community work. And,Linux is free too. It appears, there is after all something like a free lunch! When the world around you is trying Linux, why would you want to be leaving behind the excitement?

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

HowTo hide information in a image or sound file

OutGuess

OutGuess is console-based universal steganographic tool that can hide information inside picture objects. The latest version, 0.2, was released in late 2001 and supports inserting objects into PPM, PNM, and JPEG image formats. OutGuess can be used on Linux, *BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Suppose I want to securely send a root password for a production server. I can start by putting the password in a pass.txt file, then encrypt it with a secret key and mix the encrypted version with an image called grill.jpg. OutGuess can do that with one command:

~$ outguess -k key -d pass.txt grill.jpg summer-grill.jpg

You don't need to use the -k option to encrypt the sensitive data with a secret key. If you leave it off, however, anyone who knows there's a file buried in the image can extract the output file.

Now I have an image named summer-grill.jpg that holds my production server's root password, and I can mail it to my coworker. Anyone who sees the picture won't notice anything strange, since the data in the image object is not visible to the human eye.

When my coworker receives the picture, he needs to extract the information from the file. As long as he knows the secret key I used for the encryption, he can run the command:

~$ outguess -k key -r summer-grill.jpg pass.txt

If you don't specify the -k option and provide the key, OutGuess will extract the pass.txt file, but it won't be readable.

Steghide

Steghide is another program you can use to hide sensitive data inside image and audio files. The latest version of Steghide, 0.5.1, has been available since October 2003, and supports hiding sensitive information inside BMP and JPEG image formats as well as in AU and WAV audio formats. The default encryption algorithm is Rijndael with a key size of 128 bits, which is basically AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), but you can choose from many other encryption algorithms as well. Steghide runs under both Linux and Windows.

Let's use the same scenario from our previous example. The equivalent Steghide command is:

~$ steghide embed -cf grill.jpg -sf summer-grill.jpg -ef pass.txt -p summer

To extract the pass.txt file from the summer-grill.jpg picture, use this Steghide command:

~$ steghide extract -sf summer-grill.jpg

You'll be asked for a password, and the utility will extract the pass.txt only if your password (secret key) is correct. Note that when extracting we didn't specify any output file. That's because Steghide automatically knows what the file name was that was inserted and extracts the file with the same name.

Stegtools

Stegtools is a pair of command-line tools for reading and writing hidden information. The latest version of stegtools, 0.4b, was released in the middle of 2005. The software supports 24bpp bitmap images, and runs on Linux and FreeBSD operating systems.

Using the same example again:

cat pass.txt | /usr/local/stegotools-0.4b/stegwrite grill.jpg summer-grill.jpg 1

Here I redirect the standard input (the output of cat command) into the stegwrite tool and specify an existing and desired output picture object. I used the full path to my stegwrite tools, since they're not in my $PATH. The number at the end of the command represents the number of last bits of the grill.jpg image that will be used to hide my data. The value may be 1, 2, or 4. More in-depth explanation can be found in the software's file.

Stegread reads the hidden information from a picture object and writes it to the standard output. If I want to extract the password from summer-grill.jpg image, I can use this command:

~$ /usr/local/stegotools-0.4b/stegread summer-grill.jpg 1 > pass.txt

You need to have the right number of last bits in order to successfully extract the password from the object file. If you don't know the right number, the utility leaves you with an empty pass.txt file.

SteGUI, a Steghide GUI

SteGUI is a Linux-based graphical front end to Steghide that was released in May 2006. Before you install SteGUI you need the stegtools, FLTK toolkit, PStreams, ALSA, and Libjpeg libraries installed.

The menus in SteGUI allow you to open objects (picture or sound) and extract or embed information by selecting and clicking on the screen. Here you can see that I've opened my grill.jpg picture and am preparing to embed the pass.txt file. You can also see how many cryptographic algorithms are available for the job. Although it's a nice interface, SteGUI is useful only with objects made with the Steghide program.

at Tuesday, January 06, 2009
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