Disappearing Cryptography: Being and Nothingness on the Net

Rating:
Summary: Plenty of Examples, More Code Available
Review: I wrote this book to be a fairly accessable introduction to the science (and art) of hiding information. This is a crucial part of any security system.

As for the negative review from some fellow in Sacramento, I can only say that I'm sorry to have disappointed him. I don't think source code is a great use for paper. It's good to have a few examples, but there's no reason to put too much of it in. People read words but they peruse source code. It's better to have it on line.

If you don't like Pascal (which is more readable than C), then I'll email you C or Java. (You don't even need to buy the book.)

As for his comments about readability of the text that hides information, I think he's plain wrong. If he didn't like how the examples turned out, then he could have created his own grammar. The system is flexible enough to do that.

I hope other people will read the book for what it is instead of what they wish it could be. For those like the fellow from Sacramento who think the book could have been better, I hope that they'll sit down and write a better book. I'm looking forward to reading it.

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Rating:
Summary: A nice treatment of an important technology
Review: Steganography is the science of hiding information in plain sight. That is, making it look like something else. This book goes through a number of different schemes for hiding your messages in digital versions of photographs, songs or text. The science is quite good, although the book is getting a bit old. Perhaps the author will issue an updated version soon.

Rating:
Summary: A nice treatment of an important technology
Review: The book provides a basic foundation for the field of steganography. Steganography essentially conceals a message within another context as opposed to cryptography which conceals the content of the messages through mathematical manipulation.

Portions of the book are interesting and informative. For persons new to cryptography, this text will provide good food-for-thought. The concise descriptions of parity bits, bit math, and compression algorithms are very interesting.

The treatment of steganography is good but does not really go into implementation details. That is, the topic is discussed conceptually.

The book was published in 1996. The dated approach is starting to show in the text. In all, it is still an interesting read.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting primer on the foundations of steganography
Review: The book provides a basic foundation for the field of steganography. Steganography essentially conceals a message within another context as opposed to cryptography which conceals the content of the messages through mathematical manipulation.

Portions of the book are interesting and informative. For persons new to cryptography, this text will provide good food-for-thought. The concise descriptions of parity bits, bit math, and compression algorithms are very interesting.

The treatment of steganography is good but does not really go into implementation details. That is, the topic is discussed conceptually.

The book was published in 1996. The dated approach is starting to show in the text. In all, it is still an interesting read.

Rating:
Summary: Great cover--great expectations--weak book.
Review: This book is about concealing the very existence of your messages where cryptography is about obscuring the content of them alone. The two are not quite the same thing, as you'll find out within.

Rating:
Summary: Think Steganography rather than Cryptography.
Review: This book is about concealing the very existence of your messages where cryptography is about obscuring the content of them alone. The two are not quite the same thing, as you'll find out within.

Rating:
Summary: Great cover--great expectations--weak book.
Review: This book presents a novel conceptual primer on steganography but sorely disappoints in the areas of cryptography and overall applicable code.

The book has a number of shortcomings which prevent it from receiving a good review.

-the author's artificial examples on English grammar construction create sentences that are likely to be repetitious, inconsistent, and implausible if read aloud. The author lacks the sources and dictionary to back up his premise these programmatically constructed sentences can sound okay when next to each other. He passes an advanced grammar check but doesn't pass a child's reading of the fake text. -the discussions of RSA and DES had great analogies but the detailed explanations were poor. -the code is all in Pascal (I expect C code available via a URL. I don't have any use for *.p Pascal code!) -the author goes off on tangents about reversible and fault-tolerant computing. The composition of the book is a mixture of a good steganography text mixed in with a mediocre cryptography discussion and an even more mediocre computer architecture presentation. -The discussions of error-correcting codes were theoretically interesting but the author is consistently short of USABLE code examples so that we can experiment with his ideas.