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Judge Creates Own Da Vinci Code
xmedar writes "The BBC is reporting that the judge who presided over the recent Da Vinci Code plagiarism case used steganography to embed his own code in the judgment using italic text in random places throughout the text. The full text of the code reads 'smithcodeJaeiextostpsacgreamqwfkadpmqz' if you want to have a go at cracking it." From the article: "Although he would not be drawn on his code and its meaning, Mr Justice Smith said he would probably confirm it if someone cracked it, which was 'not a difficult thing to do'. In March, he presided over a High Court case brought by authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, who claimed Dan Brown plagiarized their own historical book for The Da Vinci Code."
Which only turns it into "nrvrkgbfgcfnpternzdjsxnqczdm"
;)
I checked double, triple and even quadruple ROT13, too! No luck!!
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Anybody who puts that kind of stuff in their formal documents is clearly too cool to be a judge. Anybody know where you can find info on what the italicized letters are?
Offtopic: For those unsure about whether Dan Brown is a fool or a genius, I offer a quote from Digital Fortress: You cannot make this stuff up
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
What if they are markers and the character count between italics is the true code (for example)? He said it isn't difficult so the italics might suffice, but still...
The first boldface italicized letters actually spell out "Smithy code"; you can see the 'y' in section A.1.3 of the ruling (PDF).
More
I'm sorry, but a Judge should not be playing games in a judgement. If I were the plantiff or prosecutor, I'd be pissed the he might not be taking the case seriously.
The plaintiff's premise for suing was "Dan Brown wrote about the same stuff we wrote about" followed by their lawyer's logic of "Dan Brown is rich" and "this pays better than the lottery". They deserve not to be taken seriously.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
in which case you'd probably be taking yourself much too seriously
Maybe, if you were the plaintiff, you would take a hint as to how serious he felt your case was?
- Sig files: contemptibly familiar the second time around.
This isn't unheard of in the legal world. I don't have any references at hand, but my brother-in-law (who is presently in law school) has shown me several creative decisions like this: a judge who included hundreds of movie titles in his decision, decisions in rhyming verse, etc.
Yes, but funding doesn't always help you in the legal process. What we need is smarter people who can read betwen the lines and check out what is really being said. Why don't people realise that lack of intelligence is what the problem is actually about>
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
This court case was in the UK...
Read my blog posts on usability.
Um .. just to let you know .. it wasn't a US court.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
There are plenty of examples of both hacks and decent writers being successful. As successful -- maybe there you have a point -- but the question was whether he's a genius or a dork, and the "dork" clicker on my geiger counter just went off a ton during that excerpt.
John Grisham is putridly bad in terms of the legal setting he sets his pop schlock in, whereas Scott Turow is pretty danged good and gets his stuff close to plausible. Turow's novels are far superior to Grisham's as a result -- but Grisham's dumbed-down idiocy does get cranked out faster and make somewhat more money, that's true. John Lecarre, especially early on, was writing his espionage thrillers based on personal experience in British Intelligence; Ian Fleming was writing pop nonsense. They've both had their commercial successes. James Bond is an easier franchise to cash in on in those Hollywood movies you talk about -- but give me "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" any day.
The question was whether Dan Brown should be taken seriously. Looks like he's a trash pop fiction writer to me, that being the parent poster's point. There are much better examples of what he does. If you want the whole grand-conspiracy-across-history thing, Umberto Eco turned it inside out in Foucault's Pendulum in the 1980s, and Eco's about 700 times the novelist Dan Brown is...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Surely, it is about more than funding, but I don't think you can say its a just matter of intelligence, primarily.
I'd reckon it falls somewhere in the middle; that its mostly a management issue.
I'm suprised nobody seems to notice that they both are linked to the same publisher, the book has been in existence for 3 years already, so why now?, and suprise, suprise, the film is about to come out. What better than a pointless media frenzy and "cool judge" to get everyone talking about it? So transparent...
A telephone is ringing in the darkness -- a tinny, unfamiliar ring. I fumble for the bedside lamp and turn it on. Squinting at my surroundings I see a plush Renaissance bedroom with exquisite Louis IX furniture, hand-frescoed walls, and a mahogany four-poster bed with a person in it, who is me, Dan Brown, the master storyteller and a bestselling author whose talent for dialogue and depth of characterization exceed even Tom Clancy at his finest. The jacquard bathrobe hanging on the bedpost bears the monogram: HOTEL RITZ PARIS.
... It's really difficult to read. How I wish someone would write a dumbed-down version!
Where the hell am I?
The cobwebs in my head blow away, like candles in the wind. Oh, that's right, I am in my New England bedroom recovering from a trip to the world renowned city of Paris, where I attended a lecture given by world renowned Harvard religious symbologist Robert Langdon, who gave me an idea for a novel about religious symbology. On my bedside table I see Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum
Hello?
I pick up the phone. "Monsieur?", says the voice. "Sir, an important man is here to see you, s'il vous plait?" I wish Juanita would stop putting on a French accent. "A very important man," she pressed. That could only be my friend, Sir Leigh Teabing, the Royal Historian and Ambassador-Plenipotentiary to the Exchequer. He was awarded a knightency by Queen Elizabeth the II for his amazing volume on the House of Percy, in which he revealed for the first time the ninth earl's involvement in a Rosicrucian-Illuminati-Masonic conspiracy to do, er, something or other.
"Good evening, old fruit!," he exclaimed as he shimmered in, his monocle popping out. "I say, how the devil are you, old bean? Lawks-a-mercy, had a spot of bother getting up the apples and pears, don't you know! Good lord, is that settee kosher or wot? Must 'ave a knees-up round the old Joanna, eh!" (Did I not already tell you my research skills are second to none?: I based this dialogue on The Code of the Woosters, a useful compendium of contemporary slang). His manservant, Rémy Legaludec, stood by, menacingly. I don't trust him. Rémy, I mean, not Sir Teabing, who is as straight as a piece of string.
But who was the femme fatale (fatal woman) accompanying him? She looked familiar, like a beautiful Jacques Saunière, world renowned curator of the Louvre (the Louvre), the world renowned art museum in Paris. "Ah, 'alo, 'alo, monsieur (Mister), my name is Sophie Neveu," she said in flawless English, "I studied at the Royal Holloway." There is a sadness about her, as if she were about to find out her grandfather had been shot by a psychotic albino assassin working for Opus Dei -- hey, it happens -- but on the outside she smiles enigmatically, like Amon L'Isa.
Sophie took off her glasses, the ones that made her look like the renowned French government cryptographer she was. "My God," I said, "you're beautiful." "Thank you," she said, tossing her mane of thick burgundy hair playfully. Her playfulness disguised the haunting memory of witnessing her beloved grandfather participating in a bizarre sex ritual, but I wasn't to know that, though I thought I'd mention it now to keep the narrative tension at fever pitch. See, that's what good writing is all about.
Sir Teabing was also a sight for sore eyes. I wanted to pick his brains about an idea I'd had for a new bestselling book. "Sir Teabing," I said to the Royal British Knight of the Realm, "I'd like to pick your brains about an idea I've had for a new bestselling book."
"O, Jubilate!," Sir Teabing said. "Fire away!, as we used to say on the hunting-fields of Eton College, the world renowned school for the British upper-crust."
"From my researches at the Institute of Historical Review, and with the help of world renowned scholar David Irving, I've discovered the existence of a secret cabal -- known as 'Jews' -- which controls the destiny of the world through its factotum, an entity called 'Israel' that worship
d-r-i-n-k-m-o-r-e-o-v-a-l-t-i-n-e !
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Can we get this guy on the US Supreme Court? It's gotten way too stuffy for my test. Mr Justice Peter Smith might just bring some much-needed humanity to court deliberations.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Although, speaking of severe, horrific,ubiquitous legal forums, it remains to be seen which of the two well funded legal teams has enough capital to really win this case through successful legal obfuscation.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
From another article
, e,a,m,q,w,f,k,a,d,p,m,q,z.
Mr Justice Smith confirmed Mr Tench's suspicions when he said the pattern was "something more than a typo". The judge, who is 53 and lists some of his hobbies as reading military history and the sinking of the Titanic, said that paragraph 52 of his judgment would give readers a clue to the puzzle.
That paragraph reads: "I have set out at some length what in my opinion is an overall analysis of HBHG [The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail]. I have done that and will do the same further in this judgment in respect of DVC [The Da Vinci Code] because that is essential in my view to deciding this case."The paragraph ended: "The key to solving the conundrum posed by this judgment is in reading HBHG and DVC."
In Mr Justice Smith's coded judgment, the first nine digits obviously spell Smith Code:
s,m,i,t,h,c,o,d,e,J,a,e,i,e,x,t,o,s,t,p,s,a,c,g,r
Beyond that is anyone's guess.
The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
Is it just a subsbitution ciper with the letters "smithcode" being the first ones?
Get your own free personal location tracker
To grab single italicized letters from the document.
As far as I can see the letter list is:
smithycodeJaeiextostgpsacgreamqwfkadpmqzviMi
i'm pretty sure it has something to do with those numbers in Lost...
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
That's fhqwhgads' brother.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
smithcodeJaeiextostpsacgreamqwfkadpmqz
Reverse the first part to get 'codesmith' and take away the word 'a' & 'exists' from the next few letters
This leaves you with 'Jaeotpcgream' which you will use later.
Take letters on the keyboard next to 'qwfkadpmqz' to get 'asriseonas' which is then combined with 'Jaeotpcgream' to form 'jaeotpcgreamasriseonas'
You take out the words 'to raise a scam' then throw away the rest of the letters.
These words are then rearranged to form the sentence:
'A codesmith exists to raise a scam.'
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I take it you have never been to court or that your DUI was tried by Chief Justice Data.
I have seen judges belittle all categories of person in the courtroom including; Witnesses, accused, spectators, Attorneys and bailiffs. Even Lower court Judges, Legislators and the law are fair game.
I know a Judge who wrote a book of courtroom humor. Justice Carl Harrison of the Jamaican Court of Appeal. If anyone can find a reference for this book, post a link.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Well, using "SMITHCODE" as the key to a Vigenere cipher, I managed to get a partial decryption:
ISALQRAPPXGSJZPQNIYKXRTBBJMH
As you can plainly see, the first three words are: "Is All Crap"
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
S o this is what al l these judges do in their free time. It was my impression th a t they sh oul d be more intrested in the case, n o t working on secre t codes.
Bryan
i dont think that smith(y)code is a key, clue or anything else... i think of it more of an intro. this "puzzle" its a code by justice smith. i beleive that smith code is simply stating that "here is a code from smith" an intro so to speak
Here's a few more:
And yeah, they're pretty bad.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Of course, there are good arguments against levity in court proceedings, but I can say that these cases have made the lives of countless law students at least slightly more pleasant.
A particular favorite is the wrongful appropriation case of Zim v. Western Publishing Co., 573 F.2d 1318 (5th Cir. 1978), which begins -- for no particular reason that I can discern -- in a mock King James style:
My guess is some law clerk won fifty bucks for getting Irving Loeb Goldberg (a great judge and perhaps even a great jurist) to do this.-Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
This is the UK. We can tell the difference between bias and humour over here.
I don't know if this is useful or helpful, but I noticed that the character sequence past smith(y)code has the same number of characters from the phrase to abbreviate both books:
Jaeiextostpsacgreamqwfkadpmqz
HolyBloodHolyGrai lDaVinciCode
Prove it.
There were tons of italicized spaces.
Just thought you wanted to know (something useful)...
I checked the PDF, and the actual characters (with their paragraphs) are:
1:s, 2:m, 3:ithy, 4:c, 5:o, 6:d, 7:e, 8:Ja, 9:e, 11:ie, 13:x, 14:t, 16:os, 18:t, 19:g, 20:p, 21:s, 23:a, 25:cgr, 26:e, 27:a, 29:m, 30:w, 31:f, 34:k, 35:a, 37:d, 38:p, 40:m, 42:q, 43:z and I didn't bother reading to the end.
which makes smithycodeJaeiextostgpsacgreamwfkadpmqz
Maybe "smithycode" is just an identifier and J is some kind of key; that leaves the letters "a" and "z" with 26 letters in between...
I'll bet the NSA already analyzed the code .. just call them and ask for the decryption for i(NO CARRIER)
= Grow a brain...
The judge's hidden string and the titles of the books have the same length.
smithycodeJaeiextostgpsacgreamqwfkadpmqzvTheHolyBloodandtheHolyGrailTheDaVinciCode
Anybody here who can make something out of it?
My other post is a First.
"Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."
YOur high school class is a class on communication style and what is "good style." The confusion comes from an older age when social class was seen as synonymous with a certain form of communication style.
The whole argument over something like Ebonics occurs because we are not really honest with ourselves over what we are trying to teach-- this is not about learning prescriptive language rules in the same sense that you have them with, say, Perl, but rather a way of learning some accepted stylistics that are considered helpful in earning respect as a writer and speaker. We ought not to lose sight of the difference.
To someone in linguistics, areas like Ebonics are actually quite fascinating. For example "I be going to the store" in Black American English does *not* translate exactly into any phrase in Contemporary Standard American English. Indeed the tense is closer to the imperfect tense in Spanish than to any CSAE tense. But people have a problem teaching this sort of thing in high school because they confuse the issues of language study and communications style.
The rules of natural language are descriptive, rather than prescriptive. In essence, use defines language. Philologists, for example, can use their study of how language has changed to effectively date wording in documents (for example, we know that the Codex Regius is probably a transcription of poetry that was composed at least a few hundred years earlier).
But these areas of language study are extraordinarily technical. As someone who is not making my living in those fields, I can never be more than an informed consumer of these ideas.
For a good "introduction" to this field of philology and linguistics (and in particular the subfield of poetics), I would recommend "How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics" by Calvert Watkins (Oxford 1995). However, it is not exactly light reading.
BTW, the above book recommendation is more on-topic than the rest of this post. It is absolutely amazing to me how many codes were apparently presented in works of oral traditions, and how some coded poetic devices were transmitted verbatim across centuries even as languages diverged (we see complex poetic formulas with identical root/morphology structures in differnet branches of the IE poetic traditions, for example, and I would not be surprised if other oral culturo-linguistic groups had similar techniques).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
This type of stuff happens all the time, There was a case where the judge gave the verbal ruling in the form of a rap in a case between two rappers, "Bailey thinks he's entitled to some monetary gain,/ because Eminem used his name in vain./ The lyrics are stories no one would take as fact,/ they're an exaggeration of a childish act./ "It is therefore this court's ultimate position,/ that Eminem is entitled to summary disposition." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3204318.s tm
3 001.shtml said "Before proceeding further, the Court notes that this case involves two extremely likable lawyers, who have together delivered some of the most amateurish pleadings ever to cross the hallowed causeway into Galveston, an effort which leads the Court to surmise but one plausible explanation. Both attorneys have obviously entered into a secret pact -- complete with hats, handshakes and cryptic words -- to draft their pleadings entirely in crayon on the back sides of gravy-stained paper place mats, in the hope that the Court would be so charmed by their child-like efforts that their utter dearth of legal authorities in their briefing would go unnoticed. Whatever actually occurred, the Court is now faced with the daunting task of deciphering their submissions."
And dont forget our favrote Federal Judge, Samuel Kent in Texas who in BRADSHAW v. UNITY MARINE http://www.nationalreview.com/document/document07
Judge Kent wrote in Smith v. Colonial Pen, http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/skent1.html, "...Alas, this Courts kingdom for a for a commercial airport! The Court is unpersuaded by this argument because it is not the Court's concern how the Plaintiff gets here, whether it be by plane, train, automobile, horseback, foot, or on the back of a huge Texas jackrabbit, as long as the Plaintiff is here at the proper date and time" Earlier in the order he talks about the three week long covered wagon trip from Huston to Galveston being free of bandits.
Judge Kent also wrote a great one in Republic of Boliva v. Philip Morris http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/obiwan4.html
"Drink more Ovaltine"
I would like to take the opportunity provided by this nitpicking thread to request that the powers-that-be here at Slashdot kindly provide us with collapsible threads. That way, next time I see a preposition joke (and a good one too, GP) attacked by the grammar impaired, I can safely collapse the thread and relax, knowing I won't miss anything of any substance whatsoever.
Plus, I'm lazy and don't like to scroll.
Thank you.
I saw it on Slashdot, it must be true!
According to the post below, it read's
e s/2006/04/27/can_you_crack_i.html
"Never waste the time of the high court"
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/culturevulture/archiv
---
"Never waste the time of the high court"
I cracked this with http://www.secretcodebreaker.com/scbsolvr.html
The italicised letters in the judgment are: Jaeiextostgpsacgreamqwfkadpmqzv
Entering this into the programme generates: kneverswastlandthenyofminglyouc
which is not a clean crack but enabled me to guess the code.
Dr Daren Kemp
www.Christaquarian.net
Co-Editor of the "Journal of Alternative Spiritualities and New Age Studies" www.asanas.org.uk
Author of "New Age: A Guide" (Edinburgh University Press 2004) and "The Christaquarians?" (Kempress 2003)
Posted by Christaquarian on April 27, 2006 05:16 PM.
Sure, the Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction, but Dan Brown prefaces it with a Fact page that calls the Priory of Sion a real organization founded in 1099. The truth of the matter is that the Prior of Sion was a Hoax, originally started in 1957. (See Priory of Sion for the evidence of this.) He also makes this generic claim: All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.
The book goes on to make laughable errors -- Gospels in the Dead Sea Scrolls!? (There are no gospels or any Christian or New Testament material in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Jesus had thousands of followers in his lifetime? Jesus was of no consequence at all in his lifetime -- an unknown rabbi in an obscure part of the Roman Empire. 5,000,000 witches burned!? No. More like 200,000 and all after 1400, and mostly by local governments. Constantine made Christ A God?! -- Constantine was pro-Arian (the losing side) in that fight. All he cared about was the unity of the church for political purposes, not its doctrine. Mithras was called the "Son of God" and "Light of the World" and was raised after three days!? All wrong. Sunday worship started by Constantine -- again wrong -- history shows it is predominant back int the 2nd century (Constantine is fourth century).
The book is schlock, both as literature, and in its research.