52 karma · joined October 6, 2023
Unless you went to the most expensive school possible, it would have cost you a couple hundred hours of work to afford your education. When you graduated, you were most likely able to afford to either buy a home, or live on your own using your income alone, right out of college, if not shortly afterwards.
All of those experiences are not possible for the vast majority of Gen Z individuals. For Gen Z to pay for four years of college they would have to work over 15,000 hours over 4 years. That's about 73 hours a week at the average pay rate in the US. There is nowhere an average income can afford someone to live alone. Homes your generation got for 20 to 50k are now in the 500K+ range.
So yea, I 100% agree that boomers will never understand.
Things lifted wholesale from training data but plastered together to create new works will leave us in an uncanny state of semi-permanent déjà vu where our little pattern matching blobs constantly chirp out subtle connections.
It's more the struct method of embedding though that I was emphasizing. Structured encrypted data has high entropy which can give away it's presence. Try running some of your before and after images through aperisolve or the cyberchef entropy analysis tool and see how the analysis changes.
Half the battle is making sure the hidden data cannot be detected and the second is that the data cannot be read if detected. A more algorithmic approach to the embedding and extraction which uses properties of the host file to determine the relative locations of the session key, salt, file size, and data would likely better hide the presence of the embedded/encrypted data.
I recently made a novel implementation of, "An Image Steganography Algorithm using LSB Replacement through XOR Substitution (DOI:10.1109/ICOIACT46704.2019.8938486)" which you can find here: https://github.com/JustinPack/XOR_LSB_Stego
While my approach is a simple one lacking any inherent encryption, it could easily be added. I think you will find the paper a highly interesting read and it is also in my project.
Cheers and great work nonetheless.