About a month ago I learned the word steganography during a briefing on internet security. Didn’t think too much more about it but then today I stumbled across this somewhat steganographic service–aimed primarily at hiding messages from machines (not people).
HideText (beta) exists to do one simple thing–convert text to images so that the ‘content’ of the text message isn’t immediately viewable by web robots, spam crawlers, net sniffers, etc. You type in a word, phrase, email address or 
whatever and the site creates a GIF of your text. You can download it and use it (useful for putting your email address on a website, for example) or use the URL that HideText gives you (which will then serve the image link up for you. With plenty of webservers here in the Systems Office, having HideText host these little gifs doesn’t make much sense…but if you don’t have ready access to a server, then HideText’s offer to host the image file for you is the way to go. They say they’ll keep the image file up forever (or at least a year). I suppose if too many people begin storing and requesting large text message image files, the bandwidth costs for HideText will bring on a new business model.
http://www.hidetext.net/index.php
Here’s my email address as a HideText generated image (take that spambots!):
