Well I get bored easily as I'm sure that you all know... I also LOVE to play with graphics and as anyone else I hate when my content is stolen off of my sites...

Well I was poking around earlier and found a program called Steganography 1.65 for $24.95 which had a free trial. I had read some decent reviews about it and figured that it couldn't hurt to play around with it (afterall, the idea of injecting a phraise or pretty much any content into an image that will in turn be encrypted by a 256bit key didn't sound half bad)...

Well I went ahead and grabbed one of my many background images that I have idling on my computer and injected it with:
I then poped open my trial of Beyond Compare and compared the original to the injected and noted the updates (you can see any notes here ).

Sure enough, the data is encrypted (at least it's not in plain text) and i'm able to browse the image without any issues (in fact, if i didn't know that the comments where embedded i'd never give it a second thought)...

If you want to test this, go snag a copy of Steganography and open this graphic with the password "test" to see my comments...

I got to thinking about digital watermarking (watermarking your image in secret as to not have ugly crap all over images saying "this image owned/created by such and such"... Heck, you could inject a photo of yourself into the photo along with your terms for usage as well as full contact information)... I figure this program would work perfect as who would ever notice?

The benefits would be:
1. Won't have to make a physical watermark and risk making your image look like crap.
2. If someone steals your content, you have rock solid proof (afterall, you could open your graphic that is displayed on their site with your password and see your message; should prove to be interesting proof for a lawsuit if someone should refuse to stop using your content).

All in all I figure that $24.95 is pretty cheap to protect all of your hard work... Plus, who's to say there is a limit to what you could do?

Think of the possibilities:
1. Store your passwords (literally) on your desktop (shove them in a family photo, who would ever think?)...
2. Have a "secure" conversation with your spouse at work and not have to worry about them snifing your email (who would care about a photo of little johnny eating a mudpie?)...
3. use your immagination...

Keep in mind, the more data you shove into the graphic the larger it will become (especially if you where to inject something like a program, another picture, a video, or even an mp3).