What is steganography?
Steganography is the art of hiding a secret message within another message. I've always been interested in steganography since I was a teenager. Of course, I didn't know what this technique is called back then. If you can represent the same data in multiple ways, then the choice of representation is itself a method for storing extra data.
ASCII art has been my subject of interest too - a bunch of seemingly garbled text actually contain visual images for the human eye.
ASCII Art Steganography
The combination of these two techniques gives us "ASCII Art Steganography". There are wide potential applications of this technique, and a website is created to demonstrate it.
"pictureworthsthousandwords.appspot.com" is the name of the website - because literally, an ASCII art picture can mask literally over a thousand words. For example, th ascii art of a canada flag (screenshot above) contains the entire copy of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Before the website is launched, searching "ASCII art steganography" generates 0 hit in google. Now, it generates over fifty thousand hits - not a bad achievement I'd say.
The website is also covered by Slashdot on January 12, 2009.
