Steganography

Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no-one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity. The word steganography is of Greek origin and means “concealed writing”. The first recorded use of the term was in 1499 by Johannes Trithemius in his Steganographia, a treatise on cryptography and steganography disguised as a book on magic. Generally, messages will appear to be something else: images, articles, shopping lists, or some other covertext and, classically, the hidden message may be in invisible ink between the visible lines of a private letter.

The advantage of steganography, over cryptography alone, is that messages do not attract attention to themselves. Plainly visible encrypted messages - no matter how unbreakable - will arouse suspicion, and may in themselves be incriminating in countries where encryption is illegal. Therefore, whereas cryptography protects the contents of a message, steganography can be said to protect both messages and communicating parties.

Steganography includes the concealment of information within computer files. In digital steganography, electronic communications may include steganographic coding inside of a transport layer, such as a document file, image file, program or protocol. Media files are ideal for steganographic transmission because of their large size. As a simple example, a sender might start with an innocuous image file and adjust the color of every 100th pixel to correspond to a letter in the alphabet, a change so subtle that someone not specifically looking for it is unlikely to notice it.

Source: Wikipedia

Red Herring

In literature, a red herring is a narrative element intended to distract the reader from a more important event in the plot, usually a twist ending. [1]

The idiom originates from a technique of training of young hunting dogs involving “red” herrings. This pungent fish would be dragged along a trail until the puppy learned to follow the scent. Later, when the dog was being trained to follow the faint odor of a fox or a badger, the trainer would drag a red herring (whose strong scent confuses the animal) orthogonally to the animal's trail. The dog would eventually learn to follow the original scent rather than the stronger scent.

This is a red herring, look somewhere else ;-)   Source: Wikipedia

The Mystery

Do not be confused by the red herrings. Search for the hidden message which reveals both coordinates and hint.

Update, December 2009: Wikipedia has edited the article about Red herrings due to recent etymological research, but the cache description above will stay unchanged.