As other posters have mentioned, this is advertising more than it sells. It's merely encoding a torrent in a PNG in an obvious way. The idea that it "can't be searched for" is true only on the assumption that search engines will index on content of a page. Obviously a popular hid.im format will attract search engine specialization.
This is not steganography, it's merely an obscure variant of the .torrent file format.
I believe the claim that hidim is steganography comes from the title of hackernews link. The site itself claims to represent torrents as .png, but not to disguise them.
The claim that this will frustrate search engines is true, in the sense that no one is looking for this format at the moment; obfuscating with an awkward format is a short term dodge.
It seems to me that the likelihood of a real search engine adding special image analysis on crawl, just for this, is vanishingly small.
Not to mention you can also insert these PNGs into other images, too - like sig images, as the page suggests.
People can pick away at it all they want, but the fact remains that it's a huge innovation in distributing torrents without running the risk of coming up in search when Interested Parties google the torrent name. And it works great now for this purpose.
Nothing on this earth is guaranteed to work forever, so that's hardly a damning flaw.
Exactly right. You could just rename a .torrent to .png and you'd essentially have the same thing. Granted, said png wouldn't be viewable, but neither are truly "hidden in plain site" which is what I think of when I hear "hiding data in an image file." To me, that evokes the idea of still having a viewable photograph that doesn't let on that it's hiding data within.
This is not steganography, it's merely an obscure variant of the .torrent file format.