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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."
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.
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!"
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
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!!!
Slashdot reporting on a typo? Oh the delicious irony! :)