Risque Cryptography

4 NEW PRINTS IN THE HE STORE! 

Coffee Is LifeThere Are Four LightsSuch Darmok and the remaining (25 or so) signed and numbered Daddy/Daughter Digital Drawing Time Posters have just been added to the HijiNKS ENSUE Store.

The regular prints are available in 8.5×11″ for $9.95 and 11×17″ for $17.95. The Daddy/Daughter prints are marked down from $35 to $15 while they last!

WE FOUND MORE LIL’ WIL WHEATON PLUSHIES!!!

There are about 40 left. GO HERE and get yours. 

UPDATE 4/13/15: I’m over my con crud, done with my taxes and working on the comic backlog. Thank you for your patience. 

COMMENTERS: What were your best hiding spots (physical or digital)? Were they ever discovered? I had a hollowed out book when I was a teenager that I used to hide condoms in. I still have the book, though it’s decidedly less full of clandestine prophylactics these days. Maybe I can use it to hide leftover Cadbury Eggs from my kid.

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76 Comments

  1. Unmarked video tapes hidden among other unmarked video tapes. I was the only one who could tell them apart.

  2. I had a neatly organized bookshelf up high. It had larger study books and stuff, so nobody noticed that a few bibles weren't aligned to the wall precisely. That was useful for hiding stuff. Not porn, though.. that was usually hidden in the drawers of my bed, amongst game rules and other nerdy creations that nobody wanted to look at anyway – hidden in plain sight. I don't think that was ever discovered.. one thing that was discovered was a piece of erotica that was still under the paste-button and it ended up in a document my mother was working on. Oops.

    • Many years ago, I would watch only the short clips I could find online. But I never realized that the clips, in the process of being watched, had been downloaded to the family computer. So late one night my mother and stepfather were going through the computer and trying to clean out unneeded files, and found a whole list of them, and called me out of my room to ask me about them. I managed to convince them that they had been attached, hidden virus-style, to music I had been downloading from the peer-to-peer file sharing programs of the time. They even called my grandfather to confirm the possibility with him, as he knew a fair bit about computers at the time (before Alzheimer's set in) and thankfully he told them it was theoretically possible.

      I was a hell of a lot more careful from then on.

  3. My wife is under five feet, so if I put something on top of a bookshelf at the back she never EVER thinks to look up there. Enjoying it until my kids get taller.

  4. I always his presents for my wife behind her dresser. She's too short to look over it and would never think to move it to look behind it so it's actually quite perfect for large stuff. For anything small, there's a table in a forgotten corner of our house, layered with dust and unpaid bills from two years ago. The table cloth works perfect.

  5. Digitally, for adult material or secret materials, this is what I did when I was younger:
    -Go into My Documents
    -Create a folder with a name that will make it appear first alphabetically, such as "Alpha (Technical Word)"
    -Copy the contents of some program's folders, deleting anything conspicuously named, such as the actual executable files, which bear the name of the program you stole it from, and anything particularly large (no sense wasting hard drive space). The more assets the program has, the better. This creates a large series of folders and subfolders, full of incredibly boring material, which no one will really look through, after a first glance.
    -While arranged alphabetically, keep clicking the topmost folder, until you get to the deepest folder level.
    -Create another folder there. Name it with a string of numbers. Put all spurrious materials in this folder. Rename all files that you create or save, with some sort of non-English system, so that no one finds them in searches.

    This resulted in an incredibly well hidden folder that was incredibly simple to access.

    Physical:
    -Turn 18.
    -Buy a large red trunk with a lock and padlock.
    -Lock the crap out of it, tell everyone to **** off. XD People are actually a lot less pushy about it than one would expect, as long as you reassure them that the contents are not illegal or drug related, and are just things of a personal nature. Reasonable parents included. Mine mostly had nudes I had drawn, which I didn't want to expose my younger siblings to.

    PS- I really want whatever Josh is having on my "cheat day".

  6. Hidden folder named "backupdoc" in my documents folder. Also, having my own computer helped.

    Well, less "my own computer", and more "everyone else was afraid of the cyber-spirits in the evil shaman-box, so the computer was mine and kept in my room and I was the sole user".

    • My mom is the same way with computer terror. I used to get near daily phone calls with something like "It says it needs to do an update, click to proceed! WHAT DO I DOOOOO?!?!?!?"

      • "Computer terror." Heh. Reminds me of a story:
        For several years, in the late '90s-early-'00s, I had a co-worker who was an older woman (50ish, or about the age I am now) with a youngish son (pre-teen). She and her husband bought a computer and left it boxed up in the corner for over a year before setting it up because they were afraid of Bad People on the Internet somehow getting to their kid.
        Eventually, they did finally set it up and get net access, and within a few months their son was their computer guru.
        My mother finally got online in 2008, when she was 70, and took to it like a duck to water, spending a large chunk of the last five years of her life researching the family history and putting together a family tree at Ancestry.com that is a truly remarkable piece of work.

        • My near-70 mother also took to the net quickly. She has her sewing forums, her flute forums, plant identification/care forums, home repair resources, etc. …meanwhile I have 10001 ways to waste time.

          She was disappointed when she learned that the reason my brother and I solved her computer problems so quickly was we had already encountered them and gone through the "spend 3 days figuring out what the issue is" already. She had just thought we were brilliant.

  7. .workspace/.garbage/.hack the gibson

    " Yeah, Garbage, okay, give me Garbage." Great Movie. Too bad they knew squat about actual tech. 😉

    • Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but I bet you felt pretty stupid when we all started programming with GIANT keyboards made of unlabeled, back lit arcade buttons spaced 3 inches apart.

  8. With the assistance of my high school computers teacher we hid the executables for unreal tournament and quake 3 arena in the font folders. We would place the link there, and then edit the image of the link to match the others.

    • Some teachers really do want to make a difference.

      I fondly remember my high school physics teacher, who made his own educational videos. He was a researcher with Whirlpool before teaching, so you knew the man knew his stuff. He could be dull as all hell, but sometimes, he could blow your mind.

      • Our HS physics teacher showed us how to write programs and save notes on our graphing calculators. With a broad *wink wink nudge nudge* that we could use any notes we put in our calculators on tests.

    • A dude in my English clash changed all the default windows settings to recordings of himself. So if you maximized a window, it would be I'm going "MAGGITY MAGGITY MAX-I-MIIIIZE!" Then we all convinced the English teacher this was a one time only option and to get them back to normal we'd have to format the hard drive and reinstall windows.

      The best was the default error beep. "YOU DONE SCREWWWWWED UP!"

      • I had a friend that would sit in the front row and go into private browsing to research projects or play btd

  9. Next door to the house I grew up in, there was a loose board that led to a crawlspa…. WAIT!!! You'd LIKE to KNOW where I've hidden the Krugerrands, wouldn't you, Joel!!???! NEVER!!!

    • I used to watch the QVC comic book specials when I was a kid, because the guy that hosted those segments was a legit comic nerd and he would always have on some random comics pro to talk shop. I found it fascinating and even got permission to buy like a 15th reprint of the complete Death Of Superman series from QVC. Anyway, one time a guy called in, older dude, saying he had a loose board in a barn where he grew up and that's where he hid his comics… including Action Comics #1. He remembered as an adult and went back to the farm to see if it (even in shitty shape it's worth a fantastic amount of money). I can't remember if the reason he couldn't get it is the barn was completely gone or the new owners wouldn't let him in. Either way, I was sad for him.

  10. For magazines, I cram them in the gap between my bed and my nightstand.
    For digital material, the external hard drive on my desk. I back up important documents, pictures, videos, music files, in there so I keep them in the event of catastrophic computer failure, and needs replacing.
    And porn. Lots of porn. Just SO MUCH porn! Most of the memory space in the external HDD is dedicated to the porn I downloaded through programs like Kazaa and LimeWire, until they were shut down.

  11. I love the look of absolute horror / terror on your face when confronted with Josh's Cupcake Coffee from Hell.

  12. Oh gosh, now I feel like I have to add my boyfriend (now husband) and my hiding spot for condoms when we were in high school: in the "secret" compartment of a massive lego Star Destroyer. I'm embarrassed yet kind of proud. No one ever found them though!

  13. Oh, and don't forget, these days, you can have a high capacity flash drive that looks like a lego, and make a little lego sculpture, and put that brick on top. Got that one out of this one British TV show. I forget the name, but that is pretty clever! Among other toy-looking USB drives.

  14. In plain sight!

    ~/Media/pictures/porn
    ~/Media/video/porn

    I mean, I'm an adult so I'm allowed. 😉 However, I do have an encrypted drive for stuff from people I know.

  15. I really didn't do a lot of saving. Internet was reliable and fast enough for me. If I ever did grab something I didn't want found it just went into the deepest folders of some music project files. I was the only one to ever use the program and you'd only view those folders from the program's browser anyways, so if the file extension didn't match, it didn't display.

  16. Back when I was younger I had a bunch of 3 inch floppies that I had labeled as "Lemmings copy" because Lemmings came on like 15 floppies or something like that, only some of them had adult material on them, and only non sequential floppies above disk 7 or so. eventually I upgraded away from floppies and on to CDs, where I labeled the CDs as various hardcore metal albums, now that I am older I realize my parents wouldn't care if I had porn, lots of wasted effort trying to be sneaky.

  17. I had a 1939 Dumont oscilloscope (like this one: http://www.hgsitebuilder.com/files/writeable/uplo… It was huge, and probably weighed close to thirty pounds. The entire chassis slid out form the front, like a drawer, and inside, next to the CRT, was enough room for a bottle of vodka and…other things. (Yay! Future addiction issues!) Plus, it still worked, and I had it hooked up to my stereo. No porn there, though. I had a Hefty bag full of magazines that I rescued from a storm drain – still don't know why they what they were doing down there, my best guesses are 1) Christian guilt attack or 2) Mom/wife found the stash and disposed of it. I hid the bag in an under construction house behind mine. Later, I moved it to a tree stump in the woods next to the development. One day I went to get it and the entire forest was gone. They'd razed it to make more houses, and mulched my porn in the process.

  18. hidden in my "other sites" folder in my Firefox Bookmarks is the "hidden" folder. Thankfully, my parents only ever look at my history, because I'm aware of how obvious that seems.

    My parents had two different sets of rules for porn. My mother's were "Don't look at porn. It'll mess up our network." so I've always had to hide stuff from her. My dad, who is much cooler about it, said, "don't pay for porn, don't show your brother, and always watch the files you download."

  19. When I was young I found a neat trick thay probably doesn't work anymore. I created a directory using command.com giving it a name of the character that appears when you hold down alt and hit 255 on the number pad (it appears as a blank). You could then go into this folder from the command prompt, type "start .", and it would pop up in explorer as a normal folder and you could move or copy things to it. Now here's the brilliant bit: If you tried to open this directory any other way than from the command prompt, windows would call it an invalid directory and you wouldn't be able to see what was in it or do anything with it. Basically, to anyone but me it looked like filesystem corruption.

  20. True story, back in the day I think I was looking at RealPlayer (a real old version) on the computer my Dad owned at the time, and there was a URL bar you could pop video links into. One day, while checking the drop down list, I found a whole bunch of odd links, and no clue if they came from my dad or the sons of his fiancee at the time. All I knew was that they were porn clips. So I took advantage and would watch them, and all I had to do to find new ones was to change numbers in the URLs slightly. I remember going through a lot of trouble to make sure that the list looked exactly the same once I was done, down to the order of the clips, as if the person originally responsible was going to know something had changed. And occasionally I'd come back to find new URLs I hadn't tried yet.

    As for me, I didn't try downloading and keeping porn until I had my own private laptop, and even then I never seemed to keep it long for some reason.

    At this point, on the occasion that I do watch porn, it's always free and streaming, never saved to my computer. But even if I did save anything, I wouldn't try to hide it. 1.) My wife isn't great with computers and wouldn't likely be able to find it anyway, and 2.) My wife flat out admits to me when she watches porn when I'm not around, so I wouldn't feel that guilty about it.

  21. Bookmarked in a folder system labeled “Stories” -> “Smut” on my browser, then sub-folders by genre on my browser. No point in downloading them when I have internet, and hey I’m an adult on a password-locked personal computer. No shame.

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