What: In the newsgroups, you can often find strange/cryptic texts,
posted to any of the 2600.* or warez.* groups.  It often involves
names that I perceive to be from the middle-east.  It's plain English,
and in correct-ish sentence structure.

Example: http://groups.google.com/groups?num=100&hl=en&lr=lang_en&q=Tariq+Geoffrey+poultice&btnG=Google+Search

Text Example: "Where will you love the lower humble jars before Fahd
does?  They are covering to the ladder now, won't fill tapes later. 
Will you excuse at the desert, if Rudy monthly orders the twig? 
Said's pen arrives without our lentil after we burn against it.  Who
did Waleed kick the lemon over the cold orange?  She can believe
younger printers within the elder smart room, whilst Sayed freely
solves them too.  Almost no clouds cruelly improve the closed cafe."

What I would like: I don't need to translate the existing stuff,
frankly I could care less what these people are saying.  However, I
would like to know how I could do it (encode) myself, as well as
seeing if I could change any of the nouns (i.e. not Said, but Jeff) to
something that is a lot more American.

The program, an FAQ, or a URL that could tell me everything I would
like to know would be appreciated...

A search for "news.admin.net-abuse.email" brings up the NANAE FAQ
pages.
The following FAQ question, "3.1.4 What's with all these nonsense
posts and reposts?" explains where they believe the nonsense posts
come from:
Understanding news.admin.net-abuse.email
http://www.spamfaq.net/terminology.shtml#newsgroup_attacks

And at the "Old hipcrime FAQ",  we learn a little more about the
entity "HipCrime":

HipCrime Information Center
http://member.newsguy.com/~rchason/

The "Sporgeries FAQ" explains the use of steganography in creating
these nonsense posts. Steganography is the embedding of (secret?)
information within apparently benign text or images. In the case of
Usenet newsgroups, its use is primarily to create messages which will
pass spambots and other content filters, which allows someone intent
on destroying the usefulness of Usenet news to spam large amounts of
text with small amounts of effort (especially since the use of
steganography outputs a much larger amount of  text than it received
as input).

Sporgeries FAQ
http://bernie.cncfamily.com/sporg.htm

The following site has a demonstration of text steganography, and has
a text steganography program available. That program allows you to set
up your own word list for the program to draw from in building its
fake-english texts.

Demo: Steganography with Texto
http://ip-service.com/cgi-bin/stego.pl

---

Request for Answer Clarification by yespinky-ga on 29 Apr 2002 02:08 PDT

Thanks for the information... Steganography is not a word they taught
in any of my schooling for some silly reason.

Digging in deeper, (4 hours of research) has shown me nothing more of
what I was after.

I'm not sure of the program these people use, or where to find it.

Might there be any clues in the newsgroups?  Any FAQ's or otherwise? 
You seem to be pretty knowledgeable about this stuff... I'm wondering
what smartass is inputting middle-eastern names into the wordlist. 
And, what program uses a wordlist that contains a Name section (I
could only find verbs, adjectives, adverbs, places, and things, not
NAMES)...

---

Clarification of Answer by jaq-ga on 29 Apr 2002 21:33 PDT

The program used is very likely based on “texto”, from the link I gave
above
( http://ip-service.com/cgi-bin/stego.pl ), or some similar program. 

There are quite a few similar programs; I had hoped that the pointer
for you for steganography would help you find one that would work on
your system and output the sort of text you might like. “Nicetext”,
for example, simulates various writing styles, and can by default
create its output in the style of Shakespeare, Aesop’s Fables, and
“The Wizard of Oz.” Here is a site with a large list of steganography
software, with links to programs for DOS, Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX
systems:

Steganography Software
http://members.tripod.com/steganography/stego/software.html

Nicetext System Home Page
http://www.ctgi.net/nicetext/

As the FAQ for news.admin.net-abuse.email
http://www.spamfaq.net/terminology.shtml#newsgroup_attacks

says, it’s not known exactly who “HipCrime” is, but for the most part
these postings are attributed to him or them. There are many who would
very much like to know “what smartass” is doing this.

The information really helped.

yespinky, I would suggest also looking into the following URL:

http://www.cotse.com/tools/stega.htm

it is a listing of steganography software, including some (NICETEXT,
Invisible Secrets 2.1, Snow, Steganos, StegParty, TextHide, wbStego)
that act upon text files (usually, searching for 'steganography' will
dig up programs that hide information in image files, not text)

looking for "textual steganography" (
://www.google.com/search?q=%22textual+steganography%22 ) doesn't
dig up much, but it could still be of some interest to you (I hope).

Good luck!