Show HN: Fincher, a steganography tool for text

Very interesting tool, although storing as typos does seem to be a bit visible and prone to mistaken &#x27;correction&#x27;. Other approaches to consider might be:<p>* Changing punctuation for visually identical, but different characters. This would not work for printed documents however.<p>* Encoding only &#x27;believable&#x27; typos, e.g. it&#x27;s its. You could encode a binary stream across all instances of it(&#x27;)s, or other substitutions.<p>* Encoding the stream in whitespace, e.g. Two&#x2F;One spaces after a full stop. Printed documents would be lossy though (as full stops at line endings would be ambiguous). There are error detection&#x2F;correction systems that can help though.

I worked on something very similar, my version also mutated punctuation and common phrases&#x2F;words with synonyms and sentence re-ordering. Instead of steganography the purpose was to create identifiable mutations in text acting as a canary to tie disclosures back to specific recipients. Each party receiving a confidential document had slight mutations unique to their own document and given a copy&#x2F;paste from a fairly small fragment(s) could be used to identify the owner of the version.

I did one of these many years ago, basically just abusing lex&#x2F;flex: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;countrygeek&#x2F;stegparty&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;stegparty.txt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;countrygeek&#x2F;stegparty&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;stegpar...</a>

This is similar to steganos (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fastforwardlabs&#x2F;steganos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fastforwardlabs&#x2F;steganos</a>), which tries to limit itself to changes that do not change the meaning of the text.

first crystal codebase I&#x27;ve seen! niccce.