At Phys.Org there’s a press release that talks about how “information” can be “hidden” in plain text. They use some kind of ‘perturbation’ method, which, I suspect is linked to some kind of set of statistics.
Here’s what they say:
Computer scientists at Columbia Engineering have invented FontCode, a new way to embed hidden information in ordinary text by imperceptibly changing, or perturbing, the shapes of fonts in text. FontCode creates font perturbations, using them to encode a message that can later be decoded to recover the message. . . .
“While there are obvious applications for espionage, we think FontCode has even more practical uses for companies wanting to prevent document tampering or protect copyrights, and for retailers and artists wanting to embed QR codes and other metadata without altering the look or layout of a document,” says Changxi Zheng, associate professor of computer science and the paper’s senior author.
Scientists have already found different types of ‘codes’ at work in nuclear and mitochondrial DNA. I suspect that someday soon they will discover something along the lines of FontCode also “embedded” in the ‘ordinary text’ of DNA.
This is an ID prediction. It is based, as is the technique described by the PR, on “information theory,” something that didn’t exist in the 19th Century. This type of ‘coding’ is now ‘hidden’ from us, but, when we know what to look for, will be ‘discovered.’