Slashdot Mirror
Typo Found in Kryptos CIA Sculpture
SimuAndy writes "Elonka Dunin, game developer at
Simutronics and author/editor of the
new book, 'The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms', reports that what everyone had thought was the answer to part 2 of the CIA's encrypted
Kryptos sculpture, wasn't. Sculptor Sanborn announced this week that everyone had gotten it wrong, because of a mistake on the art piece.
For more info, check out the
Wired story, or the
Kryptos Group announcement."
Sevfg cfbg
I'll probably be modded down for this...
I doubt it, the CIA is *NEVER* wrong. ...wait...
"Crime fighters fight crime. Fire fighters fight fire. What do freedom fighters fight?" -George Carlin
No wonder I couldn't figure it out! Gimme a second... Okay...
Be sure to drink your Ovaltine
Aw man!
The problematic part is at the end of part 2: "... forty-four seconds west. ID by rows." On April 19th, sculptor Sanborn contacted one of the Kryptos Group moderators to say, "No, that last part is wrong." He also indicated that there was a missing character on the sculpture, probably something that would have resulted in a plaintext "X" before that section. He said that he had thought that with the missing character, the section in question would have come out to be an unintelligible scramble. Instead, he was astounded to see that by sheer chance, the resulting random text had turned out to be apparently intelligible English, "ID BY ROWS", although that was not what was intended.
what are the odds of that?
Above is ROT-13 (rotate 13 places) for the text Frist psot.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
It's wrong because the sculpture encodes four puzzles. The solutions to the first three parts are required to solve the fourth part.
Less is more.
The DMCA was designed to protect weak algorithms. If an algorithm is secure you don't need a law to stop people cracking it.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
This reminds me of another interesting public puzzle, the "Publius Enigma", which was/is a puzzle connected with Pink Floyd's 1994 album The Division Bell and some anonymous postings made to the newsgroup alt.music.pink-floyd coinciding with their 1994 tour of the same name.
Numerous, interesting sites are out there, and people have been trying to solve the thing for over 12 years.
Quite interesting, especially if you like the music and want to add a "new dimension".
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Also, it is rumored that Douglas Adams had something to do with the puzzle, since he was friends with the band and actually came up with the name for the album.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Really? I was under the impression that Asia Carrera was the most desirable geek chick ever... incredibly hot porn star who builds her own computers, makes her own UT maps/mods/models, is a Linux geek and will wipe the floor with anyone here in a UT2004 deathmatch... personally, I do not need to know any more b/c I do not think that combination can be beat.
-Squirrelmaster out
Except that in the US all creative works are copyrighted by default. I think that the hidden text in the Kryptos statue would qualify, as it's "protected" by the cryptography. I know that the DMCA wasn't written with this situation in mind, and I don't think it's right, but a twisted attorney could spin it that way. Bad laws are often like that.
That's pre 7-11 thinking....
It's not a "typo". According the wired article, Sanborn decided to leave out a single charater (an "x" serving as a "period") for asthetic reasons and this led to a faulty decryption of one phrase of the message.
In an unrelated story Sculptor Sanborn went missing last night...
"But this one goes to 11!"
http://kryptos.arcticus.com/
Please, don't everybody click on it at once, it's only a P100 webserver on DSL. Use a cache if it dies:
http://kryptos.arcticus.com.nyud.net:8090/
-- There is no truth. There is only Perception. To Percieve is to Exist.
The Wired article says that the first three parts of the puzzle contain clues to solve the fourth and final part. So, while they decrypted the message correctly, the mistake that was made has prevented them from figuring out how to decrpt the entire message correctly. So, yeah, it was the artist's mistake, but it was an incorrect decryption because it doesn't provide any meaningful clues about the fourth part of the puzzle.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
The CIA has followed up the public announcement that there is a typo in the encrypted message by asking people to stop sending them their old hi-fi speakers for recycling since the decrypted message does *NOT* read "all your bose are belong to us".
AT&ROFLMAO
Heh, it just goes to show how obsessed some geeks get. I loved this last part:
"I've been drinking Mountain Dew and eating Easter Jelly Bellies to sharpen my mind," he says.
He says the new information was the equivalent of throwing a steak into shark-infested water. "There's going to be a frenzy of action around this for months because it's the first real bit of data we've been able to get. We don't know what it means. But it's very exciting."
Yeah, sharpening his mind with Jelly Bellies and going into a frenzy because someone added an 'x' to a cyphertext... nope, no dorkyness here...
That location is at CIA headquarters, about 150 yards south of the actual sculpture. So.. was that the original intended spot for the sculpture, and it was moved, or is there something hidden that close (in layer two?) that would help solve the next section?
Only time will tell.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
The location 38.9518N, 77.1456W It is in the CIA Complex located in Northern Fairfax County Virginia. Right by the Langley Fork Park and Near the GW Park along the Potomac.
Out in the CIA yard
As if nobody can use Google anymore...
greg, REMEMBER ED CURRY!!!
The reason they went wandering around was to try and make sense of this piece of section two:If the text was actually supposed to say "... forty-four seconds west. x Layer Two". then that should change their interpretation of whatever they saw on the CIA grounds.
Someone much nerdier than I analyzed the coordinates, but all this was done under the previous understanding of what Section 2 said.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Although my involvement with the Kryptos project has lessened due to time constraints (Its not World of Warcraft if thats what you were thinking!), this is actually right up my alley.
I created a 3d replica of the statue in 3d studio max (It should still be available in the yahoo group file section) and this talk of layer 2 talk may imply the folding of the statue. Elonka mentioned this to me a few days ago, but I didn't realize it was this important of an update.
Installing 3d studio max now, there goes my sleep for the next month O.O
Slashdot reporting on a typo? Oh the delicious irony! :)
.. when I was taking Operating Systems II, and our first homework questions was to decrypt the encrypted assignment once we wrote a public-private de/encryption program, using the public & private keys we were given. Shortly after I got my program written & debugged, I figured out that the teacher had used/given out a wrong number (!), meaning the assignment couldn't be decoded, so I told my buddy who was also in the same class with me before the weekend so he didn't have to waste his time as well.
;-)
The following week in class the teacher announces the correct public & private keys, and most of the class flipped out since they had spent the time trying to figure out why their program wasn't decoding the encrypted assignment. (I guess those students never used a test case to verify that their program _actually_ was working correctly!?)
I guess it pays to pay attention to the expected data.
Hey! I put those co-ordinates into Google Earth, and it crashed! Damn CIA spooks will do anything to protect their secrets...
You must think in Russian.
Cryptographers of the world, untie!
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.