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Comment by JoachimSchipper | Hacker News Reader

The ciphertext is "essentially random"; the amount of ciphertext (per second) isn't.

Encryption will keep your wife from reading your letters, but if you send a hundred letters a month to the new girl at work she might still get suspicious. Encryption does not promise to prevent that.

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The essential difference is that this is a stream, not discrete messages. Yes, I know that at the IP or UDP level a stream consists of discrete datagrams, but this is not how users think of streaming media.

It's like a developer arguing that a project was completed exactly to spec, when the spec isn't what the client wanted, and the dev didn't make any real effort to understand what the client wanted.

You could always trade latency for security by batching more of the stream and encrypting larger blocks.

unless you use steganography to hide the existence of communication itself (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography ).

Steganography doesn't hide existence of communication, it hides/obscures existence of messages in it. Important distinction.

Steganography hides the existence of covert communication. The message is hidden in an innocuous looking host (say a picture or video that noone would get suspicious about). So in that sense, the existence of actual communication is not known to a third party. I did a PhD theses on this topic :)

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