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dpapathanasiouon Show HN: Send Secret Messages over Twitter as Public Tweets

Thanks I'll look more into how TweetFS works.

I was just kidding about the hijiacking comment; don't people know how to interpret emoticons anymore? :D

dpapathanasiouon Show HN: Send Secret Messages over Twitter as Public Tweets

I would posit that a stream of non-sequitir tweets is not necessarily suspicious (depending on the person/account in question, of course).

The classic steganography methods you're describing may appear less obvious (for lack of a better term), but they're also easier to break once the pattern is discovered.

dpapathanasiouon Show HN: Send Secret Messages over Twitter as Public Tweets

Yes, that's the simplest way to make the encoded tweets look natural, i.e., truly steganographic, but it's a fine balancing act between that and not making the corpus obvious.

dpapathanasiouon Show HN: Send Secret Messages over Twitter as Public Tweets

Isn't that what app.net is supposed to be?

dpapathanasiouon Show HN: Send Secret Messages over Twitter as Public Tweets

Thanks for hijacking my thread! ;)

Seriously, though, how would your library work for twitter?

It seems that the encoding process creates texts much, much larger than the original message.

dpapathanasiouon Show HN: Send Secret Messages over Twitter as Public Tweets

I wouldn't use this with a bot account, since, as you say, it would become easy to detect those as anomalies.

Instead, I was thinking that you might intersperse these in between your normal tweets, in coordination with the people you're communicating with.

dpapathanasiouon Show HN: Send Secret Messages over Twitter as Public Tweets

True, you shouldn't use the same corpus more than once, so there's always going to be a coordination issue between the sender and recipients.

dpapathanasiouon Show HN: Send Secret Messages over Twitter as Public Tweets

Ευχαριστώ!

There's no obvious way of telling where a "secret" sequence would begin and end.

For now, it might be best left as a coordination issue, similar to the choice of corpus: e.g., you know that you'll be tweeting secretly n times a day, at these specific times only, etc.

dpapathanasiouon Show HN: Send Secret Messages over Twitter as Public Tweets

Thanks, I'll look into those suggestions, especially since I'm not really happy about using the middle dot (it's really not unobtrusive, and the entire system would work better if I didn't use it).

dpapathanasiouon Show HN: Send Secret Messages over Twitter as Public Tweets

Good idea about using typos instead of a middle dot marker (TBH, it's not as unobtrusive as I would like, so perhaps it's better to rethink that part of the system).

dpapathanasiouon Show HN: Send Secret Messages over Twitter as Public Tweets

The output is a function of the corpus.

So if Miranda doesn't usually tweet about the history of Mexico, he can pick other texts (written by him or others) which would sound more plausible as something he might normally tweet.

Having said that, the middle dot is not as unobtrusive as I would like, so perhaps it's better to rethink that part of the system, using some of the other suggestions in this thread.

dpapathanasiouon Show HN: Send Secret Messages over Twitter as Public Tweets

The ad application is interesting; I hadn't been thinking along those lines at all...

I considered using public keys, but I didn't want the resulting encoded tweet to be illegible or look like gibberish.

The conceit here is that even a secret message looks completely innocent, something that no eavesdropper would notice as being out of the ordinary (though the middle dot marker does give it away, to people paying attention).

dpapathanasiouon Show HN: Send Secret Messages over Twitter as Public Tweets

This is a side project I've been working on for the Lisp in Summer Projects[1] contest.

It's a text steganography app using a simple book cipher, written in Clojure.

I welcome any feedback from HN so let me know what you think!

[1] http://lispinsummerprojects.org/

dpapathanasiouon Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85

And using Japanese here is pointless.

We're just doing our best to show off ;)

dpapathanasiouon Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85

It's not the way I would translate it myself (I would say it's just a name, and really has no meaning), but it is a common English interpretation that's been floating out there.

dpapathanasiouon Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85

おっしゃる通りです。ただ、「何」を天に任せると聞かれたら、「運」がいちおう適当な返事でしょう、ね。

dpapathanasiouon Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85

For those who don't get it, that's the loose way of translating the three characters[1] which make up the name "Nintendo" in Japanese, though you wouldn't necessarily know it by looking them up one by one[2].

[1] 任天堂

[2] http://tangorin.com/general/%E4%BB%BB%E5%A4%A9%E5%A0%82

dpapathanasiouon How to Raise Money

Alas, like the YC application form.

dpapathanasiouon Ask HN: Share your projects and the stories behind them

Is this a side project for side projects? ;)

dpapathanasiouon Ask HN: Share your projects and the stories behind them

I created a wikipedia-style language learning site[1] starting with Japanese and English.

It was inspired by a trip to Japan last year[2] after having been away for a while and seeing how badly my reading comprehension had deteriorated.

[1] http://www.macaronics.com/

[2] http://denis.papathanasiou.org/2012/06/10/yokaben-read-write...

dpapathanasiouon What Happens to the Brain When You Meditate

I agree that it's better not to use an app, since you don't want to be dependent on a specific voice to get you going, among other things.

The technique you describe (which I also use) is explained more fully by Roger Wells in "Happy to Burn"[1] which I found out about from the "Mind Perfomance Hacks" book[2] originally.

[1] http://www.sankhara.com.au/shop/products/detailFree.html?Pro...

[2] http://www.worldcat.org/title/mind-performance-hacks/oclc/64...

dpapathanasiouon Nutraloaf

Soylent is amusing, but it ignores the fact that people take pleasure from eating food, a payoff which is hard-wired in our brains.

No supplement, whatever its nutritional value, is going to be able to fill that need.

dpapathanasiouon Show HN: Do you read on the toilet? This web app is for you.

We're exercising poetic license here.

Imagine a label for Poor Richard's Washing Powder and as part of the usage instructions it says "Early to bed, early to rise..." etc.

dpapathanasiouon Show HN: Do you read on the toilet? This web app is for you.

Maybe a series of aphorims would be better, say quotes from Meditations of Marcus Aurelius or Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack, etc.

Neat idea, though!

dpapathanasiouon Jim Buck, Who Made Walking Dogs a Job, Dies at 81

This is an interesting contrast to the recent Salon article about how TaskRabbit, etc., and their effects on the economy.

dpapathanasiouon Moscow-Cuba flight skirts US airspace, prompts speculation Snowden is aboard

It turns out the change in path was because of the weather in the North Atlantic today: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/07/11...

Though if it hasn't landed yet, who knows, maybe he is on board.

dpapathanasiouon Best ways to learn a foreign language

I have a language learning site[1] which started out as text translation, but I'm also experimenting with videos, the idea being it's helpful to see captions in both languages simultaneously as the video plays.

Examples here[2], here[3], and here[4].

[1] http://www.macaronics.com/

[2] http://www.macaronics.com/article/6e9812608f0b4dcdba8cfab3e6...

[3] http://www.macaronics.com/article/9540f24d080241dd9b27f7939c...

[4] http://www.macaronics.com/article/a6ab2c3d8c364ad38401d6dba3...

dpapathanasiouon Richard Stallman Inducted Into the 2013 Internet Hall of Fame

I wonder if his browsing habits have changed since 2007: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134979

dpapathanasiouon Japan's radiation disaster toll: none dead, none sick

Contrary to what the article tries to evoke, the Fukushima meltdowns were a huge catastrophe that severely impacted a whole region. Ask the people who live(d) there if they think the impact of this thing was overstated in the media - they're likely to tell you if anything consequences were buried not exposed. Even if these very first statistics are true, there is likely to be more impact further down the road. There will be shortened lifespans as a result of exposure. There is massive economic damage as well. People's lives were severely affected. And let's not forget the destroyed reactors still aren't safe. There are very likely huge unpleasant surprises yet to be revealed.

Vice Japan did a fascinating story about a man who's been living inside the exclusion zone[1] and has yet to feel any ill effects of being exposed to radiation (though in the article, he was described as being a freak of nature in that regard).

[1] http://www.vice.com/jp/read/alone-in-the-zone-jp (Japanese)

[2] http://macaronics.com/article/2f7763d5d38a49c5aea761ce2fb2f9... (partially translated into English)

dpapathanasiouon How We Built eBay’s First Node.js Application

I agree; it reminded me of this, in a bad way: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzkRVzciAZg