"Right, asking was pointless."
Xia Xu realized this too and felt rather helpless.
After all that running in circles, they seemed to be back where they started.
Finding Pan Long's father's blog was certainly a gain, but their only clue still seemed to be the photograph.
"Could it be some kind of steganography?"
As they fell into thought again, He Qing suddenly offered a suggestion.
Steganography, as its name suggested, was a way of writing hidden information, concealing one piece of information within something else.
Unlike encrypted communications or cryptography, steganography did not merely keep a third party from knowing the content of a conversation. It went further, concealing the very fact that communication was taking place.
"Hang on. Let me check."
Prompted by this, Meng Bochao downloaded the image from the blog page.
First, he tried the simplest methods, changing the photograph to a TXT text format or an archive format such as RAR to see whether such format conversions had been used to hide any content or files.
When that yielded nothing, he went on to try more complex methods, while everyone quietly waited for his results.
"It does look like LSB steganography might have been used. Zero occurs far too frequently in the least significant bits of the RGB values."
After a while, Meng Bochao spoke up excitedly.
"What does that mean?"
The tongue-twisting jargon left Pan Long utterly confused. As the person most concerned about this matter, he hurried to ask.
"LSB is a steganographic method. It stands for least significant bit.
"Normally, photographs consist of pixels, and pixels are recorded using three values, R, G, and B, corresponding to the red, green, and blue color channels. Like the three primary colors, RGB values can form any color.
"RGB values are represented by numbers from 0