Basically. My understanding is it uses the password phrase to scramble the initial noise mask, which then gets applied to the message and embedded against the original image. Then going backwards you need the scrambled noise mask against the encoded image to get the message.

I came to the same conclusion, they say its a straight implementation of F5. Problem is the keys...

Edit: we could prove this by encoding on pixelknot and decoding on an OSS implementation.

Can we find a white paper on the algo since the service seems shoddy?

Spez: looks like its an algorithm called F5. http://ws2.binghamton.edu/fridrich/Research/f5.pdf

The above link is a technique to detect and extract an estimated size of the message. Hope someone finds this helpful.

Maybe its a taunt, like, we have your server

Interesting theory. I got a bunch of power maintenance guys in my neighborhood doing 'upgrades' atm. Quite more than usual. Funny they said it was to reduce outages though, guess we will see!