If you need to send a message to someone, but don’t want your enemies to intercept it, you could try steganography. An archived Web page on TextFiles.com calls it “the ancient art of hiding information in some otherwise inconspicuous information,” like a secret message hidden in a painting or sewn into a rug, or instructions written in invisible ink on a holiday card. This TextFiles.com page shows you one way to conceal electronic messages in .wav files, using a program called “S-tools.” Dating from 1994, the document is pretty ancient itself, by the standards of Web chronology.

In the modern age, some observers believe terrorists have used steganographic techniques to embed their communications in graphics files, like eBay photos or pornography. The 40 or so Web sites I checked seemed split down the middle between “this is so far-fetched it’s not worth my time” and “this is happening right now—we’ve got to do something!” The FBI in 2004 said no images studied on eBay or Usenet had hidden data.

For all I know, this post could be riddled with steganography. All I can say for sure is that if it is, I didn’t put it there. I have no freakin’ idea how to do stuff like that.