A project for posting steganographic puns to Twitter, in Python.

This is a small project that is built to showcase an implementation I did a while back of LSB image steganography, using Python and PIL. The word "steganography" describes techniques for obscuring a message by concealing it within an innocuous medium, and LSB steganography in particular refers to some process of storing hidden data in the Least Significant Bits of a digital image. Since the least significant bits contribute the least to the color of a pixel, one can replace or mingle them with other information in a way that is not apparent to the eye.

I wanted to show this off with a little enigmatic whimsy, so I decided to write up something to automatically post images to a Twitter account via a cron job, and made a Twitter account @PicturesOfSnow (the Imgur PNGs can be desteganographized from the command line using the lsb_steganography module included in this repo, or by using this cool web-based tool) that hid images of Snow the rapper (made semi-famous by his 1993 single "Informer") inside images of "snow", as defined by whatever Google Image spits out for that search term. Of course because I don't curate what the Google Custom Search Engine returns (and because there's another rapper who goes by the handle "Snow" now) the results aren't always perfect, but I had fun making it, and maybe somebody out there has been waiting for the technology to come along that allows them to make a @PicturesOfKittens that covertly embeds images of puppies inside, with minimal configuration effort.

For more on steganography and a brief description of LSB steganography, which I took my idea for implementation from, there's a nice Wikipedia article about it here.

• conda
• Python 2.7+/3.5+: Only required for Miniconda installs on Linux, OSX, and possibly Windows - see installation details in above link
• A Google Custom Search API key and cx ID (See https://cse.google.com/cse/all) and Custom Search Engine with image search enabled
• A Twitter API key, API secret, access token key and access token secret
• An Imgur client ID and client secret

1. Install the necessary software for your system from the "Requirements" section.
2. Download/clone this repository.
3. Set up the conda environment with the command:
   conda create --name <env> --file <this file>
4. Install the requisite pip packages with:
   pip install -r requirements.txt
5. In the root directory of your repo, create a file called settings.ini. It should be filled out as below, substituting your own API authentication information where indicated:

[GENERAL]
message_search_term = # a search term, e.g. "cute puppies" (without quotes)
veil_search_term = # another search term, e.g. "adorable kittens" (again, without quotes)

[GOOGLE]
API_Key = YOUR_API_KEY_HERE
cx_ID = YOUR_CX_ID_HERE
skip_traversed_result_indices = 1 # Optional flag; if you wish to start from search index 1 with every invocation you can omit this line

[TWITTER]
API_Key = YOUR_API_KEY_HERE
API_Secret = YOUR_API_SECRET_HERE
Access_Token_Key = YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN_HERE
Access_Token_Secret = YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET_HERE

[IMGUR]
Client_ID = YOUR_CLIENT_ID_HERE
Client_Secret = YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET_HERE

6. That's it!

1. Activate your conda environment with
   source activate <env> (or activate <env> on Windows)
2. Post an image to your configured Twitter account by invoking
   ./main.py