I can feel the pain here but in my own way. As a hiring manager it must be so frustrating to be assaulted with massive idiocy when you are looking for a candidate. Think about it:
- candidates have zero penalty for applying to something they know they aren't qualified for
- there's constant noise about getting one of those well paying "tech jobs"
- everyone who has ever logged hello world to the console thinks they are the best programmer in the world
- people are desperate and will lie
- the ratio of unqualified to qualified candidates must be 100 to 1
It must be like dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean. The one thing I love about this, though, is the "senior developer" who hasn't read a book in a decade and has to get a new job. ahahahahaha. The moment when that mountain of BS collapses underneath them must be ga-lorious.
Also though, I get the feeling it's a different job market than it was in 2010. I'm still trying to understand what I think I see.
Languages seem to be able to cover multiple platforms now. Programming I don't think is as technical as it once was. At the same time everything seems to be a mess right now. Everything's broken. There's a million and a half frameworks for everything. ...It's like programming as a field has become much more broad, while simultaneously lowering in quality, with knowledge that was once spent on technical mastery now being traded for either lower wages or domain knowledge. So if you went to school and got a degree in programming that was once pretty impressive but now you're just some dude who can "code".
Question, what is the job market like for someone who is good with graphics programming? I'm not the best at math but I have struggled my way through linear algebra enough that with some practice I think I could be good at graphics programming. It'd certainly be a nice change of pace from programming CRUD forms for businesses.
Derrick, let me share my rather cynical opinion about all of this and hopefully it will make you feel better. The part where you say people were waiting for it to be "more polished" really speaks to me. I've heard that about some of my basically finished websites. The thing is, that's a lazy answer. At the same time if you had asked someone why slack is so great when it first came out they would have fired off some canned response. Because of this fact I really question what actually motivates people to adopt software. I don't think it's the things they say. I think it's more the idea that software as an industry is analogous to the fashion industry. People just a lot of times do what they're told. I think you have to tell, not ask. But in 2019 how do you do that? idk, pay Scott Hanselman to say your product is a revolutionary idea and see how many people parrot that same response back to you. I'm saying I don't think you had a bad idea but maybe you overestimated the autonomy of the average developer.
I thought the whole presentation was pretty cool. Those colonies are just visions of what might be built by future generations. He has new ideas about the future of industry and that's exciting. But I have a hard time seeing the scales he's talking about. Those colonies would not be able to hold billions of people. I'm not sure if moving industry off of Earth, especially for environmental reasons, makes a lot of sense. But when people imagine the future as being exactly like the present it's just tiring and stupid. I don't think he was acting like he knew all the answers but he's moving forward.
I've done this and usually get like 5 upvotes and 1 half ass comment telling me to change something. Then if you post again you get even less attention. That's why I don't think posting on forums is really a solution at all. It's like trying to fill a swimming pool with a squirt gun.
SEO, consistent posts, maybe a celebrity endorsement? Paying someone who knows how to drum up support to mentor you. That's the route I think I'll try next.
Thank God I'm not the only one who can't drum up support on reddit. One thing that has worked for me in the past, though, is buying upvotes. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. People really love to downvote things. I mean they love it. They'd marry downvoting everything that isn't a meme if they could. Also, I think reddit is probably wise to bought upvotes. Either that or my super power is making people universally downvote my posts until the upvotes I purchased run out. I mean reddit can be good but successful posts are pretty random as far as I can tell.
But also, even if you get like 400 page views (which I did too once, thanks to purchased upvotes) those numbers drop off fast. I wonder if slow and steady advertising on facebook would be a better way to go.
Because people are more comfortable dealing with image files than .enc files or whatever extension one might use. Plus you dont just have to encode text. You can encode any file type. Look, I don't know what this is to the various participants in this thread but to me it's been really sad. I feel like I'm arguing politics. I don't think I've said anything unduly disrespectful or even incorrect yet I've been arguing about this with people who apparently think they know better but consistently get basic facts wrong or appear to be disingenuous to help win a debate. I'm not here to connect every dot for you. You're not holding my ideas up to the light of truth or whatever you think you may be doing. I really regret logging on to hackernews today.
Yes. Any algorithm designed to be resilient to common processing steps will pass this test with flying colors. Also, EXIF data is not used in steganography, by definition.
Speaking of layers that's how I want to answer the first part. Encryption makes it secure but steganography makes it portable. Steganography is the sugar that makes the medicine go down. That's how I think it could work anyways, I'm not saying that is what would happen.
Steganography+encryption has a number of use cases. The one I think is most interesting is being able to store encrypted data locally with ease. Right now if I want to encrypt some text I have a number of options.
I can encrypt the hard drive. I can encrypt a text file to a binary encrypted file. I can encrypt a text file to a text file with something like pgp. But none of those are what I would call user friendly. But through the magic of steganography you could do all that and save it to an image file. Now we have something that people might be comfortable using.
As for secure chat idk. I wouldn't trust Windows, iOS, Android, my ISP, my VPN, the NSA (and whoever else), the spyware my mom has installed on her computer that neither of us know about, etc. I'd probably just google for something but I wouldn't be under any illusion that it's totally secure.
I meant messaging in a more general context. It does not remove that feature at all. Why do you think that two people using the same app or algorithm automatically reveals the presence of a hidden byte array? You just vary the way data is read out of the image using the same password used for encryption. Even if they could recover every single bit using statistics (which they can't) they would have no idea what order to put them in. That's just one way of doing it too. If you put a real math wizard on the case I'm sure they could do even better.
Storage capacity IS a function of the algorithm and the image. That's simply a fact. For example, say we are just bit flipping a 512x512px image and we take up all 8 bits in each color channel in each pixel. That lets us write 512 * 512 * 8 * 3 = 6291456 bits or about 6Mb. ...I can see how it looks like I was talking about real time communication because I said messaging. That was a mistake and honestly I have been playing around with the thought of if/how steganography could be used for chat but that really was not how I meant it to sound. I was thinking about how steganography might be able to make encryption more user friendly.
> Steganographic communication as a substitute for encrypted text is a baffling misinterpretation of the reason for encryption in a chat program.
> I agree with you, but couldn't you say the same thing about using end-to-end encryption in a chat program as a substitute for messaging that's just encrypted in transit?
I just want to point out, again, that this is not an argument that I tried to make.
I don't think anyone cares if pedophiles use it. They only care if it will work for them. Heck, if it keeps pedophiles safe that's a pretty good endorsement. I think the primary road block for most people is not seeing a use case combined with the technology not being readily available (excluding a few apps that aren't compatible with each other).
Sure, for a chat conversation you would want something faster than steganography. But if you will notice I did not propose a solution for encrypted chat. I proposed a solution for making encryption easier to use, yes? I hope that debaffles you a little.
Steganography alone is just security through obscurity? I guess I'm not sure which algorithm you are thinking of but regardless it's very easy to encrypt your data before writing it to the image so in any case, that is a non-problem. The same goes with your sentence about the use of steganography detection. Maybe it's possible for some algorithms, I don't know, but I have very strong doubts about that and again, it's encrypted.
The amount of data you can write to an image using a steganographic algorithm could be rightly called its "storage capacity", yes? Or do you believe that for each image there is an exact maximum storage capacity regardless of the way you encode data to it?
I suppose you could and I am certainly no expert so it might even be better that way. A couple cons to that are that it looks cryptic so it's a little easier to detect, that you have to share the URL somehow (as opposed to hanging out in usersub on imgur), it's usually more difficult to deal with large amounts of raw text than an image, and if you use PGP instead of AES->base64 (or something like that) you would have to know the recievers key. I guess that last bit depends on the use case.
I'm not saying either approach is better. Maybe one is better, I don't really know.
Facebook encrypted messaging! What's next, military intelligence? How about a vegan big-mac? Maybe a quality automobile by GM?
I think steganography is an excellent way to deliver encrypted messaging to consumers. It has so many inherent features that I'm surprised it isn't already widely used. Let's see:
- easy to recognize but hard to detect
- can pass through any channel that accepts images
- massive storage capacity (10MB+ depending on how you roll)
- encryption easily baked in!
- many additional use cases (store your kids ssc or passwords, store encrypted notes, anonymous communication by just posting an image online somewhere).
Everyone should know Facebook encryption is about as good as free (or maybe most) VPN encryption. But with steganography all you need is an open source application that you can trust or a popular codec.
If anyone is interested I have a stalled steganography project that I'm waiting to get back to (once I finish a ASP.NET Core book) https://github.com/smchughinfo/steganographyjr. I'm making it as easy to use as possible (UWP, iOS, Android, a website, Web API, Nuget, and possibly a native app for Debian if I get the time) Most of that work, though, you get for free with .NET Standard + Xamarin but it's still a lot of work.
The biggest part of my problem is a total lack of commit discipline but there are times when I'm working on a branch where my commits don't tell a clear story (changed something then changed it back because I decided to do it a different way). That's when I most wish for better ways to tell that story.
I feel like an idiot for not knowing rebase could solve some of this for me. ...will definitely try it next time.