hes@ncsu.UUCP (Henry Schaffer) (02/27/86)
<>After reading the discussion on how the inter-character distances of a printout (easy to do on a laser printer) could be used to encode information, I started thinking about other places to hide information. One place I came up with can hold quite a bit (pun intentional) of information is the stop bit of serial ascii transmission. (One can consider this another example of inter-character distances.) It wouldn't take very much special in the way of extra hardware to generate a few different lengths of stop bits (e.g., 1, 1 1/4, 1 1/2, and 1 3/4 bit timings long) and to differentiate between them at receipt. However most data communications equipment will completely ignore these differences (and have indeed been designed to ignore them.) The information could be lost if the data transmission went through a regenerator or a packet net, ... . Has anyone been doing this? --henry schaffer