Slashdot Mirror
Secret Codes Protect Ancient Torahs
An anonymous reader writes "A story on Wired News reports the problems Jewish synagogues have protecting their Torahs from theft. The Torah scrolls, containing the five books of Moses, are hand lettered over the course of a year, are often hundreds of years old, and can sell for $50,000 or more. But Judaic law "dictates that not one character can be added to the 304,805 letters of the Torah's text", which makes them untraceable and easily sold on the black market. Rabbinic authorities have recently approved two computer-based systems to make the scrolls traceable: one takes a digital fingerprint of a Torah, a second makes microperforations in the parchment that yield a unique identifier."
It doesn't solve the problem of theft. If one is stolen, it might take years to recover it, if at all. Once it is recoevered, it isn't in pristine condition anymore. More attention should be focused on solving the problem itself than making it easier to apprehend the criminals.
Braille MD5 sums. No doubt this idea was the Holy Grail of cryptography.
But, a character is a character, whether it is holes punched in paper or pen and ink. I think this is cheating.
Or perhaps this is just religious dogma getting in the way of the greatest idea in secruity codes since Leonidas scrapped off the wax.
If you consider the text of the Torah to be the body of a message being transmitted, then would not an included digital fingerprint or series of microperforations be additional data included in a header (in this case, for authentication purposes)? I know that a digital fingerprint or a series of microperforations are not precisely the same thing as adding more Hebrew characters to the body text of the Torah; but is it not conceptually possible to represent the pattern of data included in the fingerprint or the perforations within the same Unicode scheme as Hebrew characters are represented? Thus in effect would these unique authentication identifiers actually transgress the rule against adding more characters?
Max Cohen would be ashamed.
"Is putting some kind of ownership label on the inside cover really 'adding to the text'?"
There are huge, hand-written scrolls. There's no inside cover, and, no, you can't buy them at the bookstore. They cost 50 grand new, for crying out loud!
-DMZ
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Who would pay $50,000 for a stolen Torah? Surely somebody that would place that much value on a book would actually have read the book and be attempting to follow the laws therein, especially the one about "Thou shalt not steal" -- or encourage others to steal! I can't beleive people could buy this without the provence of them documented, and then claim they just didn't know it was stolen.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
"And the educated have always had more sex, money, power and influence."
I'm quite certain the uneducated have more sex. Those in the ruling classes always have more societal structures in place, that are aimed at *preventing* sex.
The money, power and influence parts, I won't argue with. But peasants definitely have more sex.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Except that a) not all Rabbis will recognize that ruling (in Judaism, there is no pope or other central organizing figure - there are organizations, heirarchies, but in the end none of them is TRULY authoritative, although I've been hearing about a sanhedrin, and if that was established, then it would be pretty authoritative), and b) not all Jews will recognize what those Rabbis rule. In Judaism, you're SUPPOSED to question authority, and not just swallow it down. It'll be awhile (give it a few hundred years) for it to be either globally accepted or rejected. Halachah changes SLOWLY..
. Define sqrt(x) as something really evil like (x / rand()), and bury it deep. Watch your coworkers go nuts.
Further, 'character' is pretty specific to alphabetic writing. I wonder if a Chinese idiograph or Egyptian hieroglyph count as a 'character'?
You don't get around religious doctrine on a technicality... you don't say to god "well you didn't say no hieroglyphs!" Besides these are rules these people willingly abide by, and their intent is to abide by the spirit of them. What is the point of following a religion if you just tear it to shreds because it isn't written in legalise?
$50,000 or more is for a Torah that is used every day. A truly ancient e.g. more than 5 or 6 hundred years old scroll or a Torah from eastern Europe before 1800 would literally be priceless. Pick a large number, double it, add 4 zeros, double it again.
Theft is not a huge problem but it is a problem because scrolls are so expensive and some shuls simply can't afford them. So they look for one of questionable provenance. Also scrolls do wear out and have to be buried and replaced eventually.
As an observant Jew, I'd be a little bit skeptical about reading from one...
OK, so I'm entirely too Scando-Anglo in my heritage (considering the topic), and specifically not religious... so this will seem, well, cheeky (at best).
How does any modification to the physical nature of the book/scroll, other than a change that actually alters the words therein, change the message? Meaning, Shakespeare is still Shakespeare whether in paperback, parchement, or HTML. Aren't the (apparently never changing) 300k-some characters in the Torah, well, the same every time? I understand that handling a carefully loved artifact can help put on into an introspective mood, but surely one with invisible changes (microscopic holes) isn't damaging to your spirituality - isn't content king, as it were?
Now, all that being said, how about high-res digital images of a few of the pages? If they're hand made, no two are exactly the same, and matching a high-contrast calligraphic image against a database would surely be no harder than matching digitized finger prints, right?
Anyway, I guess I'm just scratching my head about the "unfit for use" part. Surely the things Moses said and did, for example, aren't any different if the very same words telling the story are on a piece of paper with microscopic holes you can't even see? And, aren't whatever cultural and contemporary spiritual lessons one is supposed to glean from reading those words what really matter? I'd always thougth that "observant Jews" (as you put it) would be more about the message than the medium. But then, I suppose this is really a larger-scale, lukewarm semi-rant about orthodoxy and dogma in general - no need to pick on any particular flavor, but I saw your comment and thus you win my rant-prize for the evening.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
From what I've read, the scrolls are made from animal skins. Couldn't you just start a DNA bank of the skins? That would eliminate the adding character issue.
Actually,Xmas is wiccan.Look up yule.The catholics stole it when they were converting pagans and added a christ element.I had to write this as my sister is a wiccan and hates when people think it's a christian holiday. I think all religion is for scaring peasants,Personally. And thanks for getting rid of the craptcha.As someone who has trouble seeing those things,I thank You.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
how about two? :)
I know you meant that as a joke, but I really have to wonder how the use of "microperforated parchment" counts as magically less of a violation of the rule than your own suggestion.
If you take it literally, then your own suggestion would work just fine. If you interpret it to mean "don't add any more information", the suggested fix violates the rule just as much. If we allow something in between the two, it seems silly to need to resort to microperformations - Why not a plain ol' watermark (with no characters in it, of course, just a low-contrast picture)?
And if we want to resort to high-tech, since apparently god doesn't object to the use of science to circumvent his rules - They make these things out of dead animals. Animals come right from the factory with a unique ID already encoded into every single cell in their bodies...