Slashdot linked to this Financial Times story that claims a Scotland-based company has created a complete map of the web. The only problem is that the claims the company makes can’t possibly be true.
The main objections are large technical. A complete page-level map of the web, which they claim to have, would require a huge database — it would certainly be among the largest private databases in the world and it is extremely doubtful they could construct and implement such a database a) on their rather low investment funding and b) without anyone noticing before now.
That this is basically marketing hype becomes apparent when the article gets around to describing a form of encryption (well not quite encryption but close),
Finally, Whitelaw demonstrates steganography – the art of concealing text within more text. “Steganography is considered the third biggest threat to US security after biological and chemical attack,” he says.
If I encode a love letter to my wife in a JPEG of my daughter, I’m the third biggest threat to US security? In fact most of the steganography schemes I’ve run across aren’t really sophisticated enough to hide the hidden message. Especially when you’re talking about concealing a plaintext message within another plaintext message — it’s usually pretty easy to distinguish between such messages given the artificial constraints they have to operate under (this is also why watermarking with audio files to prevent piracy has been such a bust — it is not trivial to hide one message into another, different message).
This looks like a company hoping to make a killing by selling to gullible police forces (which is a redundancy) and corporations.