Uso de signos y símbolos en la religión católica

Salah woke up the next morning with the sky still dark outside and his head pounding.The alarm clock on the nightstand next to his bed

seemed to be blaring much louder than normal. As frustrated as he might be, he knew that the clock was set to perpetually ensure that he was up in time for the morning call to prayer and so he took a deep breath and tried to calm his weary mind. His body was exhausted as well. He felt as if he had slept very little during the night.

The truth of the matter was that his sleep had been restless, at best. His father’s image has become an even more frequent occurrence.The lack of sufficient rest was clouding his mind, sometimes making it diffi- cult for him to concentrate. But today was Saturday, and it would take him only a couple of hours to get his work done this morning, then he could relax. Basically, he really just needed the break.

He climbed out of bed and pulled the sheets back up.There were a few minutes left before the prayer, so he headed to the bathroom.Today would be a good day. He had some very important things to attend to, then he would be free.Yes, today would be a great day.

A

fter the morning prayer, he started his coffee and took a quick shower to wake himself up. Salah walked out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, feeling a little more refreshed. After drying off he made his way to the small closet on the far wall of his bedroom, looking for some clothes to put on. A T-shirt and blue jeans should work; he could change later if he decided to go out once the work was completed. If the web site wasn’t updated today, there would be questions from the group.The last thing he needed were questions from the others about where he had dis- appeared to or why he had stopped responding.

When Salah finished getting dressed, he decided it was time to pour himself a steaming cup of coffee, grab some breakfast, and finish up the web site with the hidden content for the other group members. Walking into the kitchen, he turned the heat off on the stove and poured the dark, steamy liquid into a clean cup. Salah set the pot back on one of the back burners and looked in the fridge for food. He grabbed a small block of cheese from the fridge and set it on a plate. Reaching across the

counter, he grabbed a loaf of French bread, tore off a piece, and set it on the plate next to the cheese.The finishing touch to his breakfast was a red apple, cut into slices.

Once he had his breakfast in hand, he walked back to his computer desk and set the plate precariously on a pile of papers next to his mon- itor.The coffee was set down on a coaster conveniently placed in the only clear spot that still existed on the desktop. Salah admonished himself for failing to keep his work area clean and made a mental note to get that done before he left for the day. It wouldn’t take much longer, and it wasn’t his style to be sloppy.It must be because I’m so tired and distracted, he thought to himself.I’ll take care of this in a little while.

Salah sat down in his computer chair and turned on the computer. Last night he had managed to at least get a web site created inside

CompuPic before he simply could not do any more work. All 10 images were integrated into a full set of hypertext files and thumbnail images that could simply be uploaded to his server.Today, he needed to hide his first real message in the images. He wanted the information to be freely available on the Internet, but not be noticed. In order to accomplish this, he had come up with a creative scheme for hiding the information by utilizing all 10 images. Even if someone managed to detect the informa- tion in one or more of the images, which was unlikely considering how much information he was hiding, they would find it very difficult to find out how to get the information back out again.

Salah had decided to use 10 images on each web site he created for planning. Only one of these images contained the actual message he 86 Chapter 8 • Creating the Code

intended the members of his group to read.The other nine images would act as both a diversion and a single step in the process. He had imagined the nine images as a disassembled staircase, lying on the floor in front of the tenth image. But the stairs could not just be put together randomly; they would need to be in a particular order or they would all fall apart.

Each of the nine images would contain a single word message that somehow gave a clue to the user about how to get the information from the tenth image. He had created a path of competence that each user would have to traverse in order to obtain the final message. Not even the members of the group could get to the real message until the rest of the puzzle was unraveled.

The only information his team would receive was a string of num- bers. Nine digits in random order that would provide the right mind the key to the hidden information.There was no chance that someone would accidentally stumble across the information. Even if someone happened to capture the information as it traversed the Internet, it would look like Hiding the Message

some random string of numbers. No other associated data would be sent. But the next step for Salah was to create nine text files with one key word each.

Salah logged into his Windows box and brought up the Notepad application. Notepad was easy to use and created very simple text files with no extra format information. A lot of data was contained in binary document formats, like Microsoft Word, that could dramatically increase the size of your text file. Salah understood that, as more information was hidden in a file, the chance of detection would increase as well. Notepad would create a text document containing the information he needed to communicate without adding unnecessary bytes of superfluous binary data to the file that would inherently threaten to compromise his plan. He wanted the information to be out on the Internet, but he did not intend to make it easy to find.

The application popped up on his desktop with an empty document. He began typing the first word that would be hidden in the first image in his sequence. Nine text documents were created and saved into a folder on his desktop, each containing a single word. Every time he needed to update the web site with new information for the group as a whole, he would have to recreate new text files for insertion into the 10 new images. But the time it would take to do this was worth the fact that the message would remain hidden from view.

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When all nine files were created and saved to a folder on his desktop, Salah opened the JPHS ( JP Hide and Seek) software.This would serve as his tool of choice for creating the hidden information on his web site. There were some bright men in the group who easily could have learned to use a more difficult tool, but Salah understood that there were also some others that wavered right on the edge of understanding the entire process. He had what Allah had given him to work with, and he would not turn away someone willing to put his or her life on the line for this project. Pushing a more difficult tool on the group at this stage could have unexpected and possibly unpleasant results in the short term. Plus, the tool was freely available on a number of web sites, including the Stego Archive at www.stegoarchive.com, making it very easy for the team members to download on their own.The other positive aspect about using this particular tool was that it could be used under the Windows operating system. Not everyone on the team had experience with Linux, so it made sense to stick with the Windows-based tools.

The first dialogue to pop up was a disclaimer written by the author of the tool. Salah found it slightly humorous that a disclaimer was written into an application like JPHS. It seemed obvious what the use of the application was intended to be when it was created. He clicked the button at the bottom of the dialogue, indicating that he agreed not to try to pass the work off as his own or to export it to dangerous lands.

Salah was immediately met with the main JPHS window.

Salah looked at the open JPHS window on his desktop and noted the four distinct sections in the window.The program was written to be easy to use.The first section gave information about the JPEG image that was loaded under JPHS.This was the carrier file.The second section gave information about the file being hidden, also known as the payload.The third section would give the user information about the file once it was saved back to the disk.The last section, section four, would provide a status on the process of hiding information. He took note that the pro- gram showed that no image file had been opened yet, which was the first step in hiding information under JPHS.

He needed to open a JPEG image file. JP Hide and Seek works the same way whether you’re hiding data or pulling hidden data back out of the image.The image has to be opened first. Salah clicked on the Open Jpeg option on the menu bar at the top. JPHS brought up a file directory dialog so that Salah could pick the carrier file from his hard drive. He chose the first image in his Amsterdam directory and clicked Open. 90 Chapter 8 • Creating the Code

Salah could see that the image was indeed loaded and ready for him to hide his data. He clicked the Hide option on the menu bar at the top of the window and was immediately prompted with a file selection window to pick the file he wanted to hide. Salah navigated to the direc- tory containing the nine text files and chose the one that would be hidden in this image and clicked Open.The software prompted him for a pass phrase that would be used to hide the text file in this image.

Without this pass phrase, no one would be able to pull the text file back out of the image. Salah entered the pass phrase twice, as prompted by the software. Clicking OK, he watched as the software returned to the main window.

Once Salah had clicked OK, the program brought up another file directory dialog box, prompting Salah to pick the payload file. Salah navi- gated to the first of the text files he had just created with Window

Notepad and clicked Open on the dialog box.The ease of using these free tools always amazed Salah.Their creators built these applications and posted them for public access. Some of the best tools for this type of work never required a payment from the user.

Salah looked at the screen and smiled to himself. He had to admit that there were still bugs in the software that caused him to occasionally grunt in irritation. Sometimes the application would just hang, doing nothing at all. At other times, the entire operating system would freeze up, requiring the user to cold boot the computer. Still, the software was free to use and was powerful enough to do what Salah needed. He easily could live with a few known bugs. Besides, the software didn’t crash that

often when you really sat and thought about it. 92 Chapter 8 • Creating the Code

Salah smiled at himself as he considered again how easy it was to hide information like this.The mechanism itself was simple enough, but the plan behind the technology would make the planning a success. He intentionally had chosen a simple process with a complex plan.The plan would cover for the ease of the technical side of the project. When the file was selected, the software returned to the main window again, waiting for Salah’s next command. Looking at the bottom of the JPHS window, Salah noted to himself that the image and the payload file had been selected, but the jpeg image had not yet been saved to a new file on the disk. He clicked on the Save jpeg asoption to save the image with a new filename. A new window popped up, prompting Salah for a direc- tory and a new filename for the new image.

With the first file complete, Salah began work on the next eight images.The work took only about an hour before his web site was com- plete. When he had uploaded the site, he checked his work and then shut down the computer. Now it was time to clean this mess of a desk and get out of the apartment for a while for a well-deserved break.

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Chapter 9: Over the Edge

In document El cómic en la Orden de Predicadores: un caso particular de traducción (página 36-40)