Fermilab Calls For Code Crackers

atrocious cowpat passes along a call for help from symmetry magazine, the joint publication of Fermilab and SLAC, noting: "Could be just plain gibberish, it could be something like those wonderfully weird letters to the Mount Wilson observatory, or it could be a message from aliens who just happened to have gotten their hands (tentacles/exoskeleton) on a fax machine." "A little over a year ago, the Fermilab Office of Public Affairs received a curious letter in code (4.4-MB image here). It has been sitting in our files all that time and we haven't had much of a chance to look into breaking the code, nor are we particularly expert at this!"

Comments

Clearly..

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Dr. Emma Russells formula for cold fusion.

Re:Clearly..

[sammyF70]

Though I seriously can't believe she missed her error in the 2nd part. Too bad, she was really doing well until that.

Re:Clearly..

[Anonymous Coward]

To me, it looks like a pen and paper version of the green lantern version of asteroids...

Re:Clearly..

[Anonymous Coward]

The message reads "I should have used ROT13"

Re:Clearly..

[CrazedWalrus]

I think it's Digital Fortress.

Fortunately, the Slashdot Hive Mind has a safety shutdown when the story rolls off the front page.

Re:Clearly..

[Anonymous Coward]

it's... 42!!!!!!

Re:Clearly..

[IdleTime]

I can tell you exactly what it is.
The first section is written in morse, the second is the DVD key, the first or the third are source code to decrypt a DVD.

Well obviously...

[clonan]

The Roswel aliens that were stranded on earth brainwashed some NEC employees who planted the code in all fax machines to send the fax to fermilabs who then posts it on the internet (which would be invented in 40 years) and thereby transmitted to mars...

Makes perfect sense!

Re:Well obviously...

[ralphdaugherty]

      I think I saw this on Smallville. Wasn't it an SOS from Krypton?

I'm not positive about my translation

[Eevee]

But it seems he's from Nigeria and wants help tranferring money out of the country.

Re:I'm not positive about my translation

[Anonymous Coward]

And he wants you to "Drink More Ovaltine"

Re:I'm not positive about my translation

[Hinhule]

Really?
I got an "ASCII" version of goatse :-/

Re:I'm not positive about my translation

[spazdor]

me too! And apparently we suxor?

Re:I'm not positive about my translation

[sveard]

But why do they call it Ovaltine? The mug is round. The jar is round. They should call it round tine.

Re:I'm not positive about my translation

[fishbowl]

>But why do they call it Ovaltine?

Because it is made from eggs.

Re:I'm not positive about my translation

[EnOne]

All ovals are ellipses. A circle is an ellipse where the two foci have a length of zero as measured from the center point. Since a circle is round. So round is also oval.

Re:I'm not positive about my translation

[Anonymous Coward]

All ovals are ellipses... Incorrect. All ellipses are ovals, but not the other way around (sic).

So a round is an oval but an oval is not a round.

Re:I'm not positive about my translation

[realthing02]

Sorry ellipses = oval guys, the correct answer is:

That's gold Jerry! Gold!

Re:I'm not positive about my translation

[somersault]

Shouldn't they call it Ovarietine then?

Re:I'm not positive about my translation

[drachenstern]

I thought ellipses were ...

Well, obvious stuff:

[morgan_greywolf]

Three "stanzas" maybe.

Starting with the "middle" stanza, that appears to be some sort of "key" perhaps. Each of the different symbols correspond to a different hexadecimal digit.

In the first stanza, each grouping of lines has 1, 2 or 3 lines.

In the last stanza, each group of lines is only 1 or 2 lines.

Maybe the last stanza is binary?

And maybe the first stanza is base 3?

Anyone else care to wager a guess?

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[MMC Monster]

Anyone care to host a mirror?

(Really. Direct linking to a 4MB .pjg from the front page of /. for a code. That website never had a chance.)

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[spydum]

Agreed, first grouping is probably base-3, 2nd is key with the index being hex, and 3rd grouping is base-2.. and if I convert it out.. it ends up drawing an image of the goatse.cx guy... damnit!

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[morgan_greywolf]

Mirror here. I think Google's servers can probably handle the traffic. ;)

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[ledow]

Looks like you're wrong. I couldn't get anything at all from that link

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Neon Spiral Injector]

The A is also missing from the hex "key".

Below the hex area are three symbols, the last two match the F and C of the hex key. But the 'S' isn't see anywhere else on the page.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Anonymous Coward]

The middle stanza is unlikely to be a key as it has many signs repeated. F, D, 6, 3, 9 etc.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Keith Gabryelski]

Seems like 4 areas.

The first (hashes) looks trinary is some way -- gut feel

The second (two sets of two lines) looks like base-16 (notice that 1 is not represented, there -- is that significant).

The third (three sybols) two are represented by the second area, the first is not -- maybe that is a translation.

The fourth looks binary.

working on it.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[debatem1]

Notice the offsets on the first stanza. The absence of a character is strongly denoted, probably contributing to either a vertical or linear understanding of the text, or to an alternate base.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[azzuth]

That's funny, when i converted it and then etch it onto a vinyl i got Rick Roll'd

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[mhall119]

I don't think it's necessarily a key. If it were just a substitution key, they wouldn't need to repeat characters. Maybe it's a message in both glyphs and hex, like a Rosetta stone?

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[ArchangelUriel]

Second Mirror (just in case)

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[moderatorrater]

Another possibility: a blank represents a 0, a mark indicates a 1, giving us binary. This fits better with the hex in the middle of the page, since three binary go into one hex. The symbols don't make any sense, however, so if that's a key, then it's going to just translate it into another code.

If I weren't at work, I would try translating the hash marks into their hex equivalent, storing that, then translating the hex to the symbols that were given and storing that separately. The symbols may mean something to someone other than me (some of them look hebrew, but some of them definitely aren't; perhaps astrology symbols or something else?), or it may be that the key in the middle is a red herring and that the hex itself codes for something (ascii being the most likely generally, although a quick glance seems to indicate that some of them would code for non-display characters).

Most likely a hoax all things considered. A (accidentally?) clever hoax, considering the hex in the middle and the many interpretations of the vertical lines, but most likely a hoax nonetheless.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Dachannien]

I'm thinking the last stanza is also base 3, with digits then represented in unary, but with || indicating a division between the base 3 digits.

So || | | || is "2" with a separation marker on each end.

This would put an anomaly at the end of the second line which could be interpreted as the || being broken across the two lines (so the second line would end with 3 and the third line would start with 3).

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Rhalin]

I was thinking Rosetta as well. The fact that the first and last sections share the same number of lines might indicate that they contain the same data described in different ways. Since all the sections vary in width, it seems that line count / number is somehow important, or a clue.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Dachannien]

Unfortunately, it becomes nearly impossible to determine whether there are any spots with multiple blank spots in a row because the columns become too sloppy toward the right half.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Sechr Nibw]

The only problem with that is twice in the last chunk the sequence "1 1 1 1" appears, not counting possible removal of line breaks

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[azzuth]

Anyone else notice there are 8 digits if we break it into binary verticaly? such as from top to bottom left to right the first being 10100111 and alternatively bottom to top (as if the page were rotated 90 degrees clockwise) 11100101...

The Binary can then be converted to Hex and then perhaps deciphered...

Working on it atm..

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Fantome]

My transcription of the first block:
32323333 1112132
33323132 212331
21113311 32312233
33321212 3213113
31133331 3331111
21133332 3232211
23231333 1121231
33231312

My transcription of the second block:
11121211 21212121 21121212 12111212 1121
11211211 21211121 21121112 12112111 21111
11112121 21121121 21112121 21211121 11211
21112121 12112111 21112111 21112111 21112
11121121 11211121 21121112 12221112 1211
12121121 11211121 11211211 12121211 12111
21121121 11211211 12112111 21211211 1212
11212121 1

Any see errors in this (parts were hard to read).

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Reece400]

Both numbers beginning with one, and if you convert the ticks to binary nibbles, then to hex as done by dcornewell futher down the thread the result is: E 6 7 3 3 9 C E 7 2 4 9 9 3 9 8 which contains neither 1 or A. I'm stuck now trying to decide which is the key, and which is the code, as there are multiples of some symbols as well.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[baffled]

You're thinking waaay too deep.

Turn the page 90 degrees clockwise.

It says 'Hi'

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Unending]

ugh this thing is so poorly done it's really hard to read also if the "aliens" know hex then they could just write a message this is obviously a hoax or a recruitment thing

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[spion666]

Damn... :)

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[morgan_greywolf]

Try it now. I clicked the submit button on the post before the image finished uploading...seems I underestimated the time it would take to upload.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

Can someoen please put this to music? it's killing me, I like to think that the |||'s are longer notes, and the |'s are shorter. Maybe backwards though too.

I just have a weird feeling about it.

Then I just got another Idea that's too good!

It's the intro to statistical analysis. Imagine (P.S. I have no effing Idea what the center part is) that this is a guy counting something. Maybe something like how many buffalo show up to the lake at a given day day one, he sees 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 1 1, 1, 2, 1, 3, 2,

Mom, Dad, baby.

Dad dies, and now he only sees 2 at the lake.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[debatem1]

...into alien-ese, of course. Not sure what we're supposed to do once its transliterated, since this is clearly supposed to be Rosetta-esque, but since the second 'stanza' provides a hex table, we get symbols at least.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Michael Skinner]

I agree with you but it appears the the vertical alignment is skewed to the right a little bit. Based on my observation I start out with. 1110 0110 0111 0011

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[eric31415927]

We have a Rosetta Stone here with the same message repeated a number of times Top - trinary Bottom - binary (longer, less efficient than trinary) MiddleBottom - three English characters translated as UFO MiddleTop - a hint at how to read MiddleBottom (identifying an F)

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[funaho]

The world's first rickroll-by-fax?

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Bob9113]

Two quick observations:

The frequency of 3's in the first stanza is disproportionately high.

The pattern '1,1,1,2,1' appears several times in the third stanza.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Nethemas the Great]

The middle section which you refer to as a "key" reminds me of ASCII drawing characters. I just finished up finals today--and running on near zero sleep--so perhaps I'm simply seeing things but perhaps it's a coding for some sort of schematic.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[mr_mischief]

It's either all 8-digit or starts with 7 bits and switches to 8. Both hash mark sections do so.

I rotated it a bit past 90 degrees to get the rows to line up horizontally, but it's still too sloppy to be sure which hash marks go with which rows that way.

I noticed it's outside the ASCII realm by quite a bit, so I tried HTML entities (forward and backward), but I don't see anything useful there yet either. I'm sure as hell not ready to try running it as code.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Gromius]

well it was obvious that the symmetry would be broken from the fact that the file is massive

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[StuartFreeman]

In the middle section we're missing 2 possible hex values 1 and A (10). Below the symbols marked with hex digits there's a new symbol that looks like 's', I would posit that it probably represents one of the missing values. It is followed by the symbols for F (15) and C (12) which unlike the other symbols in the section are not marked with their hex values.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Sechr Nibw]

Err, disregard my first comment, you already covered that. The issue with taken lines as broken though, is that if you do that with one, how do you know others aren't supposed to be taken that way too?

If you take all of them as broken, and include the spaces that *might* be there on lines 2,4,7,8, then you end up with two sets of |||. Periods maybe? Some other delimiter?

Trying what you suggested with chunks of ||| being line breaks, you end up with:
3 1 2 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 3 1 2 3 2 2 1
1 2 3 1 2 3 3 3 1 1 2 2 1 3 1 1 1 3 3 2 3 1 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3
2 2 3 3 1 2 3 1 3 1 1 1 2 3 3 3 2 3 1 1 3 3 2 2 3 2 3 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 1 1 2

Don't know where this is headed, but could be a breakthrough for someone else! (clearly a slow day at work)

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

But try to decode the area starting on the 4th line down, 5 "1"s in from the left... the vertical alignment becomes unclear. It looks like there are two spaces in a row in that area but then those columns kind of drift together onto a single 1. Plus there's no way to tell if there's a space at the end or how many.

If this is written left to right, top to bottom then I'm kinda thinking that if the spaces are meaningful then only "inside" spaces are meaningful and there's never more than one in a row.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Anonymous Coward]

The 3rd set appears to be morse code, since binary appears to translate as gibberish.. 1 hash for short, 2 for long, and you get the word "eureka" or . ..- .-. . -.- .- at the start of that section. Without proper spacing between the | and || it's proving time consuming to break down but maybe that will help someone else out too.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[AoT]

All of the symbols I recognize are mathematical or logical notation. i is imaginary numbers, the character under it could be an empty set or a zero. B is a minus sign. 6 is the negation sign. in logical notation. 7 is the greek letter phi, used for a number of things, most importantly the golden ration. D looks familiar but I can't place it right now, same with 4.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[goodmanj]

Trinary/hex/binary Rosetta Stone seems likely on the face of it....

However, if Section 1 is trinary, its information content is equal to 180 bits (113 symbols times log2(3) bits per symbol). The second section, in hex, has 96 bits, and the third, if in binary, has 266 bits. Unless one symbol set has a huge amount of redundancy, they're not the same length.

----------

A casual glance at the "binary" third section suggests it's unlikely to be any sort of ASCII-like binary substitution cipher, and possibly not a binary-encoded language of any kind. A "1" can be followed by either another "1" or a "2" (equal probability), but you never see "22" except for one string of "222" on line 5.

This pattern is way too regular to represent a binary encoding of any large symbol-set like an alphabet.

-----------------

Section 2 is absolutely a hexadecimal code: the symbols are a simple substitution for the hex characters below them. The symbols look a little bit like the "pigpen" cipher, but only vaguely.

I can't find any correspondence between the hexadecimal numbers in section 3 and the "trinary" in section 1.

Current best guess: this is a joke, with no actual information content.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[morgan_greywolf]

*sigh*

Slashdotted. It was up for about at least a couple hours though.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[sconeu]

This fits better with the hex in the middle of the page, since three binary go into one hex.

No, 3 binary bits make up one *OCTAL* digit. 4 bits make up a hex digit.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[PIBM]

I was searching out on how to obtain 114 characters, in case it was blocks of 3. I used the following and got those results

323 233 331 112 132 WQXAG
333 231 322 123 312 ZOVES
111 331 132 312 233 XGSQ
333 212 123 213 113 ZJEKB
311 333 313 331 111 RZTX
211 333 323 232 211 IZWPI
232 313 213 112 123 PTKAE
133 231 312 HOS

I had the 27 possible rotations but slashdot filters won't let me paste them :\ Neither in upper case, and now I fail the awful long string of letters :(

Have fun with that fast ruby hack

def print_and_rotate(str, cnt = 27)
    print "#{str.downcase}\n"

    res = str.clone
    (0..res.size-1).each do |i|
        if res[i] == " "[0]
            res[i] = "A"
        elsif res[i] == "Z"[0]
            res[i] = " "
        else
            res[i] += 1
        end
    end
    print_and_rotate(res, cnt - 1) if cnt > 0
end

print_and_rotate("WQXAGZOVES XGSQZJEKBRZTX IZWPIPTKAEHOS")

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Anonmyous Coward]

I don't think the 2nd stanza is a key because there are repeated symbols. F/Triangle, for example, is both the first and 7th symbol on the first line. It's more like the symbols on top are something in code and someone has written the translations for them below each symbol.

What's a bit strange is the S Triangle three-line-thing between the 2nd and 3rd stanzas. The 2nd two translate to "F C" if you use the 2nd stanza as a key, but there isn't any translation for the S. Of course, maybe the S is an S, and then it's SFC.

I've got it! The thing between the 2nd and 3rd stanzas is a signature. It's a message from the SFC

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[morgan_greywolf]

Oooh. MOD PARENT UP!!!! He seems to be on to something here. Maybe the first stanza encodes the breaks somehow?

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Monte]

I reminds me roughly of a code I came up with when I was a kid, which was actually based on Morse code. You'd write the plaintext out in Morse, and create one series of numbers representing the # of dots&dashes in each letter, then a second series of numbers counted consecutive dots and dashes. So Slashdot would be

Morse: Filter doesn't like :(
Code1: 34234331
Code2: 41317124 ...and you could throw random numbers above 4 in the first line as noise. Simple enough you could do it on paper (assuming you already knew morse). I forget how I designated whether the first thing was a dot or a dash.

I can't help wondering if it's something along these lines.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[b4dc0d3r]

Took me a while, and I'll explain the encoding later, but here it is:

"Drink your Ovaltine"

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[thestuckmud]

It doesn't look like morse code to me. First because the glyphs on the left side are not aligned, but more because I can't find likely patterns of English language words. In particular, the trigram "the" occurs only once, which, although possible, is less than I would expect. If it helps, here is a list of words matching the Morse code interpretation of the third ("binary") portion of the message, arranged in sets preceding and following each gap: - eureka scent skit scar eer skin vain vex i - intern ice ear it in i i - arent altar end are a i - trente kicked kink kike trek kite kick cent keen cart kit ted kin car ten it a - rectal aint reck exec rent aft a eer in - ticked nectar ticket necked tint tick teen neck tear turn tic tee tea tin net a - intent earn ink ear it in i ear ten - entente arctic ark arc art a tee ice ted end are i - tent tart tar ten skit tea kit vex net it a - entente ark arc art a teen kite keen skin vain tin kin in - tented ketene tent tart tar ten arent scent aint tint trek rent cent aft a - eked art a trente intern scar kike tear tic ear car ten - tenter tent tara talc tend talk tar ten eureka tent kink cart ink art a - arent altar end are a altar exec earn turn tar ten - centare trente cental carted kink kike trek kite kick cent keen cart kit ted kin car ten intent tent tart reck tick neck kick ark art a - rental retard aint reck exec rent aft a entente tar arc ten - turtle tinkle tint tick teen neck tear turn tic tee tea tin net ticket tent tart ark art a - intents intent intend earn ink ear it in i entente nectar tar arc ten - entente ark arc art a ticked tented rectal ketene necked kicked eked tend tee ted end are i - tented ketene kendal tent tart tar ten tara tea kit net it a - entree arnica ardent eked arts art a tenter teen kite keen tin kin in - tentie tenner talent tents tent tend tale tar ten arent aint tint trek rent cent talk aft a - etas area ale end are a trente arctic talc kike tear tic ear car ten - tenured treece tenure curled cults tasted cured taste curl cued cult cite task tree cure true cue ted ten tent kink cart ink art a - reenter reeker reared rind reek rear rite eden lent rice lend real rue air ask let as a altar exec earn turn tar ten - detainer detainee darlene dentine decreet decreed neared detain dentin decree detre dent dare near nice den tee nit tie tv intent tent tart reck tick neck kick ark art a - screened stainer staffed screed screen staff scene skit skid eer skin vain vex i entente tar arc ten - intine iced earl ice ear it in i centare tented rental ketene cental carted retard intend eked tend tee ted end are i - enterer arenite arlene end are a intents turtle tinkle tentie entree tents etas arts tale tree ale tie as i - tenets tedded keener cavite caster travel trail creed kits cede kite cave keen cast kit ted kin kid ten area nit let tv it a - austere retired austin retied ravine raster retire ravel rets rave aide rail red aid a tenner taste eer rite eden cite true rue den cue air in - tineau teruel teener nave tide teen nets nail tell tee tea tin net ardent talent reek dent task lent ask a - ferreted ferrari ferret easter eave fuel feet feed east fine felt its ere ell fee fix fit id its us it in i rear near ear ten - lain avid aver aire ruin rite eden reed laid rue led rid air let as a treece tenure kendal detre tasted rind cued dare rice lend cure nice real tee ice ted end are i - nineteen draftee drafts tilter drafts draft deter drain tired tied tilt tire nine need til nix den tee nit tie tv arnica skit cult tea kit vex net it a - vitite eer vine eel i reenter reeker detain dentin teen kite keen skin vain tin kin in - faints fret fete fain ere fed err id it in i tenured dentine reared neared intine cured scene skid iced curl earl ere tee red kid aid id i - exited exerts raft exit afar rain red aid a detainee tenets decree cults rets kits cede tide nets aide its fee tie its us as i - titular tufts terete teeter teen tee tea tin net decreet feet east cast nit fit let tv it a - fete fend elks fare ere elk err far id it in i detainer stainer enterer ar

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[mr_mischief]

Baudot is 5 bits.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Bozzio]

D is part of a Metroid. The rest was probably eaten by 7 (Because, remember, 7 8 9!!)

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[BrainInAJar]

I got a piece of spam that read exactly like that!

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[NeutronCowboy]

I think that's an interesting approach. Statistically speaking, if | and || would be two different symbols, the chance that one of them would never appear consecutively would be zero. As such, I agree that the || is probably a demarcation. Furthermore, the last character at the end of each line of the last stanza is probably also a demarcation, drawn before actual code series was written out. The reason I say that is because the last characters are the only ones that are actually beneath each other - the slanting comes from a right-handed writer slanting the page as they write. This in turn means that the places were 4 | are next to each other would actually be 3 | plus one | that signals end of line.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[FelixGordon]

This pattern is way too regular to represent a binary encoding of any large symbol-set like an alphabet. Could be compressed according to frequency of symbols. But that would assume we could dig a dictionary out of the rest of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding

The dots

[personalo]

My question is: Are the tiny dots in the background a dirty fax or photocopier artifact or are they, in fact, the code.

Re:The dots

[symes]

My question is: Are the tiny dots in the background a dirty fax or photocopier artifact or are they, in fact, the code. Good point - as Sherlock Holmes noted, the best place to hide something is often right in front of the person who is trying to find it... I often hide my car keys from myself in this way.

Re:The dots

[rcrodgers]

On a similar note, I was wondering about the defomations in many of the lines. Anyone that's used a good ball point pen (and some crappy ones too) has left unintended marks on the paper while writing or drawing. But, it is entirely possible that they were deliberate to expand the code's dictionary/key. If they were deliberate, then the code maker thinks her/himself doubly clever for such a subtlety, because it would be easily overlooked. Perhaps that's another clue.

Re:The dots

[Eponymous Bastard]

Good point. The E's in the middle, for example, all have a dot in the top left of their icon. The sixes, on the other hand, don't

Google recruiting?

[spydum]

Perhaps Google is targeting Fermilab scientists for hiring.. Don't they have a history of using strange riddles and puzzles for hiring purposes?

Re:Google recruiting?

[BigJClark]

EA posted billboards all over Vancouver, BC awhile, that had char *msg[] = { "10", "43", "14" } (not real values) and essentially it was the ascii decimal equivilant of "Now Hiring".

I thought that was pretty trick.

Re:Google recruiting?

[snaFu07]

Picture here: http://images.fastcompany.com/blog/121503billboard.jpg

Re:Google recruiting?

[Culture20]

In my experience, Google HR has a habit of sending me rather straightforward requests to come interview, and I keep telling them I like where I live, and I like being able to touch my servers.

Re:Google recruiting?

[2names]

If you MD5 the whole thing and divide by the binary representation of the date they found it, it comes out as:

J O H N T I T O R

Hmmm...

[Omicron32]

4.4MB image link on the front page of Slashdot? I sense a great disturbance in the force...

Re:Hmmm...

[mapkinase]

Well, right now I do not sense no nothing except "Loading..."

Re:Hmmm...

[Sechr Nibw]

For the price of 100 gold, I will identify this cryptic item.

Interesting...

[wile_e_wonka]

Very odd indeed! I received this cryptic message (which it seems I've seen before):

Error!
Could not connect to remote server

You tried to access the address http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/fnalcodeletter.jpg, which is currently unavailable. Please make sure that the Web address (URL) is correctly spelled and punctuated, then try reloading the page.

Re:WTF slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

I clicked on this article and a popup advertisement came up. What the hell?? Means you started Internet Explorer instead of your usual browser. WTF were you thinking?

Mathamatically speaking....

[hengdi]

There are 113 symbols, each of which is either 1, 2 or 3 strokes. So it is essentially a 113 digit base 3 number.

This limits the amount of information that the message is trying to pass.

For example, using base 26 - all the letters - means we could convey the same information in ??? digits.

Oh damn it. I'm too drunk and Google ain't working for me. Perhaps someone could give a value for ???

But I'm betting it won't be very many digits. I.e. this message is very short.

Re:Mathamatically speaking....

[whitneyw]

Considering that the ticks are vertically aligned, I would consider the interstitial spaces important parts of the message. Also note that the top block contains no more than three ticks consecutively, while the bottom block contains no more than two. Neither contain consecutive spaces, and both appear to start with a tick (not a space).

Part of it bears a striking resemblance to UPC code for "8200019288".

Re:Mathamatically speaking....

[hengdi]

When ... drunk ... must .. remember .. to ... scroll down ... linked images

Must ... not ... loose ... geek ... credentials ....

Re:Mathamatically speaking....

[mr_mischief]

Jose Cuervo Especial, 750 ml, 12-pack case.

Mystery solved!

Damn, Google has us spoiled.

Re:Mathamatically speaking....

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

The interstices would not represent zeroes, unless the message just happened to have no more than 1 zero in a row. Hence | represents 0, || represents 1, and ||| represents 2, or some rotation of that.

By the way, this is apparently some kind of "unary" notation, though what zero it is remains to be seen. Similarly, the bottom set, having no more than two | in a row, might be another unary notation of something in a base 2.

As for the little dots, some, like the symbol for E, are repeated, so it's safe to assume they're part of the symbol. Others, like 6, are repeated without the dots, so it's probably a stray mark. Still others, like 5, 0, and 8 are not repeated, so we can't tell for sure whether the odd marks are stray or part of the symbol.

It's also possible they are an additional notation applied to the base symbol, giving it a slightly different meaning, or adding more info.

Re:Mathamatically speaking....

[Cyclopedian]

Pi in base 3? I'm not good with numbers so I'm just throwing that out here. Also, we shouldn't assume that it should be read from left to right. Perhaps its read right to left, or up to down or down to up. Also, perhaps its not supposed to be 2 dimensional, but rather 3 dimensional. What would happen if you took the top portion of the image, place it on 3 planes X, Y, Z and "shine" a light through those in such a way they intersect each other. Just throwing it out there.

Re:Mathamatically speaking....

[SpeedBump0619]

I'm not certain your statements are entirely correct. I attempted to create a binary pattern to start with and there are some ambiguities in the coding positions. For instance, on the left hand side of both code blocks some of the "first" ticks don't align with other first ticks. There are also some places in the code where the vertical alignment is ambiguous. If there cannot be consecutive spaces and there *can* be spaces in the first and last columns then I'd read the first block as:

Line 1) 11101101110110111011101110111010101011010111011 (47 digits)
Line 2) 01110111011101101110101110110110101101110111010
Line 3) 11010101011101110101011101101110101101101110111
Line 4) 0111011101110110101101011011101101011101010111
Line 5) 0111010101110111011101110101110111011101010101
Line 6) 1101010111011101110111011011101101110110110101
Line 7) 1101110110111010111011101110101011010110111010
Line 8) 1110111011011101011101011 (25/26 digits)

Consecutive spaces allow the coding to always hit 47 characters, but dramatically increases the complexity of the problem. I'm wondering if the whole code is continuous, meaning that the last tick on line 5 and the first two ticks on line 6 are actually one code three ticks wide (also 6-7). The spaces in the first and last columns of the first two lines seem to imply this...

Re:Mathamatically speaking....

[pgn674]

Actually, the math is easy, if you say 27 characters instead: 26 letters and a space.

If you take the string of symbols and group them into groups of 3, each group has 27 possibilities (3^3=27). I count 114 symbols, which gives us exactly 38 groups, or 38 characters:

323 233 331 112 132 333 231 322 123 312 111 331 132 312 233 333 212 123 213 113 311 333 313 331 111 211 333 323 232 211 232 313 331 121 221 133 231 312

If you do a direct mapping of 111=A, 112=B, ..., 332=Z, 333=(space), you get

XRYBH PWFTAYHTR KFLCS UYAJ XQJQUYDMIPT

Well, that's as far as I can get. Anyone else have any ideas?

Re:Mathamatically speaking....

[itsme]

did you notice there is a little dot 7 spaces separated from the last tick?

then assuming each line is 47 bits. ... lines 4,5,6 are a bit unclear bits 5 and 6 from the right end.

then you get 361 bits, which fit in a 19x19 square.
not sure if that gets us anywhere, but it looks nice.

Re:Mathamatically speaking....

[mhall119]

I've been trying to find instances of prime numbers or multiples of primes, to determine a spacing/grouping range.

If there were 49 digits per line (2 of your "0"s are actually "00"s), that would be a logical breaking point if you are using 7 bits per character (ASCII?), because 49 is the multiple of 2 prime numbers (in this case, both 7), there would be no other way to include a whole number of groups with n>1 on a 49 character line.

Unfortunately, the scratch marks don't align easily into a grid, even though it looks like they should, probably due to them being written by hand without a guide.

Re:Mathamatically speaking....

[LiquidFire_HK]

I typed out the third part, with | representing a 0 and || representing 1. I then split it up into octets, but they turned out not to be a multiple of 8, so this is very likely a wrong interpretation. Unless I made a mistake in typing it, which is entirely possible, especially considering certain ||s could have been two |s and vice versa. However, it may be of note that there are 4 identical octets around the middle, and they appear several additional times. Another thing I noticed while typing it is that there aren't any sequences of "11" (two or more ||), so || might be a separator or something else.

00010100
10101010
10010101
01000101
00100010
01001010
00101001
00010100
10001000
00000101
01001001
01000101
01010001
00010010
00101001
00100010
00100010
00100010
00100010
01000100
01010010
00101001
00010100
01010010
00100010
00100100
01010100
01000100
10010001
00100010
01000101
00100010
1

Re:Mathamatically speaking....

[StuartFreeman]

Frequency counts:
A: 2    _: 4    C: 1    B: 1
D: 1    F: 2    I: 1    H: 2
K: 1    J: 2    M: 1    L: 1
Q: 2    P: 2    S: 1    R: 2
U: 2    T: 3    W: 1    Y: 4
X: 2

Re:Mathamatically speaking....

[Anonym1ty]

we shouldn't assume that it should be read from left to right

It does appear to be written from left to right.

Re:Mathamatically speaking....

[NeutronCowboy]

Spacing definitely seems to play a part. The last character of each line in the last stanza lines up with all of the other last characters. The first characters of each line in the last stanza seem to obey some sort of whitespace rule, as they all line up with either whitespace or another character in a line above or below.

I'm getting more and more convinced that this is some sort of fixed width code, where a character is defined by the presence and absence of strokes within a fixed space. At this point, the problem becomes a lot more difficult, because now we have to figure out what the size of a word is, if there are boundaries and what those are. All in all, this is becoming quite interesting.

Re:Mathamatically speaking....

[MortimerV]

Look at the last stanza, fifth line down, about 10 hash groupings from the right. Lining up the marks with the row above and below, it looks like 2 2 2.

Re:Mathamatically speaking....

[pgn674]

Right. I tried sending my result through a CryptoQuip solver, and it got nothing. Tried it with "Y" and "_" switched, and still nothing.

Re:Mathamatically speaking....

[thc4k]

http://www.google.de/search?q=log(3**113)%2Flog(2) 179 bit or 38 letters ... google works great ;p

Re:Mathamatically speaking....

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I goofed this one myself. I mis-entered some of the data on one of the two patterns. By chance, it made the pattern be a length of 5 x (some 2-digit prime). The other one also happened to be 5 x (some other 2-digit prime). This immediately suggested a series of 5 digit numbers, one base 2, the other base 3. It turned into gobbledey-gook when ASCII-ified, for obvious reasons as we now know (as were all offsets 0..255, etc.)

"Rats!"

It's a trap!

[Mortiss]

Crackers do not fall for this trap. It is an obvious attempt to spread the Snow Crash!

Strange...

[BlueStrat]

It seems to be some sort of construction/zoning notice. Something about a hyperspace-bypass being put in...

Cheers!

Strat

Re:Strange...

[gardyloo]

You KNOW that wouldn't be sent so blatantly, though. Remember to "Beware of The Leopard".

Okay, let's do this!

[The Insane One]

Just let me get a pencil and some paper.

"All your base are belo"

Oh crap.

I've seen this before

[Crash McBang]

The translation comes out as:

My name is Kosh Naranek.

I am writing this brief letter to bring to your attention a business offer which we believe you might find attractive.
Mrs Maria Garibaldi; wife of one a wealthy Martian executive (Late Mr. Michael Garibaldi) seeks a business assistance from a reliable and reputable businessman to invest and manage funds to the tune of 15 Million Credits...

Re:I've seen this before

[geekgirlandrea]

Best ... comment ... ever. :)

Oh, that's.....

[stox]

where I left my score sheet.

Thanks!

Source?

[aleph42]

Any hint on the source, or at least why they consider it important?

Not to be harsh, but if I send some random code letter to some lab, I guess (hope) it won't make the news, even on slashdot.

Re:Source?

[esocid]

My plan finally worked. One long year of waiting has paid off. It's just nonsense I made up to get some people to try and crack it.
Cheers.

You have been...

[kiehlster]

... Rickrolled. It's plain obvious that it's YouTube's internal encoded email describing the next year's April Fools joke.

It says "Welcome to the Slashdot effect."

[Rob T Firefly]

Anyone manage to mirror the image before it went boom?

Re:It says "Welcome to the Slashdot effect."

[Anonymous Coward]

Try this link:

http://filebin.ca/skpzc/fnalcodeletter.jpg

Re:It says "Welcome to the Slashdot effect."

[Z00L00K]

I have a copy, I converted it to a PNG, and I also have the JPG if you really think it helps, but you will have to change the suffix yourself!

It's a book labeled "How to Cook Humans"

[neo-mkrey]

All your body are belong to us...

Re:It's a book labeled "How to Cook Humans"

[filmguru]

I believe you mistranslated the title. It's "To Serve Man."

Re:It's a book labeled "How to Cook Humans"

[bugnuts]

No, no, there's some dust on it.

The real title is "How to Cook For Humans"

*sigh of relief*

Re:It's a book labeled "How to Cook Humans"

[megaditto]

To serve Mankind

[Gustatus Similis Pullus]

Re:It's a book labeled "How to Cook Humans"

[djchristensen]

Try "To Serve Mankind".

Re:It's a book labeled "How to Cook Humans"

[atrocious cowpat]

No, no, there's some dust on it.
The real title is "How to Cook For Humans"

Hang on... there's still a little dust on this.. [blows]... ok, now it reads... *Gasp*: "How to cook forty Humans"

Back to you, bugnuts. :)

It's a resumé

[jolyonr]

(or a CV for those of us in the Old World) - it's probably some bright wag who thinks he'll get noticed by sending his resume as a code.

I sense a crowd-source solution finder

[psyopper]

Seems more like a crowdsourced solution finder to me. Fermilab probably couldn't figure out some super-secret sequence of genes or something. They posted an analogous problem publicly and watch what people come up with, then apply it to the real problem secretly. Good time and labor saver, that is!

Lossy...

[fitten]

Unfortunately, since the image is stored in a lossy encoding, all the information is either lost or has changed to mean something slightly different ;)

Also, some of those dots are significant, for sure.

Mirrored Copy

[LaptopZZ]

I mirrored it on my server as well as made a scaled down version which is just as readable as the original (unless you're making a poster).

http://www.pixabug.com/aliens/fnalcodeletter.jpg

http://www.pixabug.com/aliens/fnalcodeletter_sanesize.jpg

Happy Cracking

Re:Mirrored Copy

[Zabu]

Readable Base-3 stroke count of first stanza
323233331112132
33323132212331
2111331132312233
333212123213113
311333313331111
211333323232211
232313331121231
33231312

Re:Mirrored Copy

[Zabu]

Readable stroke count of last stanza
111212112121212121121212121112121121
1121121121211121211211121211211121111
11112121211[2|11]1121211121212121112111211
2111212112112111211121112111211121112
111211211121112121121112122211121211
1212112111211121112112111212121112111
211211211121121112112111212112111212
112121211

Re:Mirrored Copy

[Starlet Monroe]

First stanza converted from ternary to binary to hex:

bf e2 34 8f ba 05 c4 7b 69 ab cd 81 34 02 f9 44 36 fe 20 16 13 f9 01

Re:Mirrored Copy

[An ominous Cow art]

This leads me to believe that the Temples of Syrinx are somehow involved.

Picture Link

[DrWily]

I will take the Google smiting http://picasaweb.google.com/lenny.volk/Random/photo#5200999829729452946 I don't know if Picasa fiddles with the file so you can't see exactly what I downloaded but I hope that helps.

Might be deliberate ...

[Fallen Andy]

Rather than running around a particle accelerator, see who can send their web server to china first... Andy

Ob. futurama...

[bsDaemon]

Is it printed on recycled toilet paper? the kind used in the sewers, perhaps?

RTFA

[bugs2squash]

I tried...

Looks like a Kerberos howto

First row of first stanza

[dcornewell]

I'm thinking simple binary with a space for zero? Depending on if there is a space between nibbles... 1110 1100 1110 1100 1100 1110 1110 1110 0111 0111 1001 0110 1000 1110 0110 E C E C C E E E 7 7 9 6 8 E 6 1110 0110 0111 0011 0011 1001 1100 1110 0111 0010 0100 1001 1001 0011 1001 1 (000?) E 6 7 3 3 9 C E 7 2 4 9 9 3 9 8?

Re:First row of first stanza

[Rhalin]

Interesting, all those hex digits correspond to things we're given in the center section. Also notice that everything in the center section is a valid hex digit? There are a few missing, namely A and 1, which gives a clue that the S in the 3 "letter" code could be either of those.

Re:First row of first stanza

[Reece400]

Or, as A & 1 do are not used they were simply omitted?

Re:First row of first stanza

[Reece400]

Hmm, 1 & 10.. that is an interesting pair not to be used, I wonder if there is a reason not to use numbers beginning with a 1?

Re:First row of first stanza

[Panaflex]

The second, forth and fifth lines are offset to the right... perhaps a leading zero?

Re:First row of first stanza

[bugs2squash]

I hope you're not contemplating reading the instructions - they'll revoke your /. id...

I've managed to decipher the final section...

[DirtySouthAfrican]

It reads "Use only Genuine Interocitor Parts". Seems gibberish to me.

No problem reading it.

[Aaron_Pike]

I've got it: "The connection has timed out The server at www.symmetrymagazine.org is taking too long to respond."

Kewl! I'm a l33t Cyph3RPu|\|k!

Myst - Riven

[aarenz]

This is the code from the final puzzel in Myst episode called Riven. Not really, but it looks quite similar in function. Someone who was able to master that game without a guide book would be able to figure this one out in a flash.

I'll go ahead and do this

[esocid]

Since 4.4Mb is obviously going to get slashdotted. I've got a copy at fileshack and at filebox. Reduced to 47Kb of course.

Re:I'll go ahead and do this

[esocid]

One more time. Fileshack and filebox. That's what the preview button is for.

So

[Shivetya]

this is how to beat Guitar Hero IV on hard?

other than being a freak or having a pet spider to help you out?

Re:WTF slashdot?

[Ultra64]

Nope, was using firefox. I'm just surprised that slashdot would have popups.

Their lucky day!

[Thelasko]

Google Translate just added 10 new languages.

Messaage is from someone called...

[s0litaire]

Zenu and apparently He does not forget, He does not forgive...

Re:Messaage is from someone called...

[s0litaire]

No it's from Xenu's big brother..:P

I've seen this before....

[Anonymous Coward]

It's obviously Woodstock. He's telling Snoopy about encryption.

Re:I've seen this before....

[spazdor]

Haha.

I don't have any mod points right now but nevertheless I declare the above comment to be the winner of this thread.

I think it says...

[Uncle Focker]

'PC Load Letter'? What the fuck does that mean?

the strokes are music (?)

[Ralph Spoilsport]

To me, the strokes look like a clapping pattern. I sat and clapped it out at my desk here, and if done at a fairly brisk pace, the top section is an interesting and often asymmetric rhythm.

Parts of it clap out to sound like "apocalypse in 9/8, (co-starring the delicious talents of Gabble Ratchet)" by Genesis from Foxtrot

But the whole thing is scattered enough that it comes out like more of a one handed improv or approximation of Steve Reich's "Clapping Music".

The bottom section is less rhythmically active, but sounds more "even", kind of "rock and roll" ish.

The middle part is a dull cipher, similar to Nugsoth.

That's all I've got.

RS

Re:the strokes are music (?)

[wertarbyte]

Vote Saxon!

Re:the strokes are music (?)

[mbourgon]

Maybe it's not Apocalypse in 9/8, but the part from Marillion's Grendel?

Re:the strokes are music (?)

[Seraphim_72]

I had sort of wondered the same thing. The only thing I have to add is I wonder if the line position has anything to do with it - imagine printing an empty scale on op of each line. I suppose it is not drawn well enough to tell really,

Shift

[azzuth]

perhaps the S is a signal to shift by FC?

Re:Shift

[Sechr Nibw]

Could be...a really badly written 5? Could be....blue green algae bloom?

Re:Shift

[qualidafial]

The S is a broadcast flag intended to forbid unauthorized reproduction. You are all in violation and will be fined infinity billion dollars.

Re:Shift

[mhall119]

No, the stroke is completely different from the stroke used for 5 in the Hex section.

B E S...

[mcmonkey]

U R E T O D R I N K Y O U R O V A L T I N E

--
"Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!"

Everyone's a critic.

Context?

[Z00L00K]

To be able to decrypt a message it is usually necessary to know the context to where it belongs. Without context it's hard.

And is it really a message, it can be other things too:

1. A data sampling done by hand with two samplings, the first has three alternatives the second has two. The code in the middle is just thrown in for good measure by a joker.
2. It's someone's way to compose music. The first part is for a simple instrument with three tones, the last part is another instrument with two alternatives (bongo drums?). The middle part is just markers used to remind the performers about what to sing.
3. Someone's idea of a prank to pull.

Re:Context?

[utopianfiat]

Well, at the very least the first and last parts are base-three and the middle part is hex. You see there's nothing higher than a triplet in the first and last parts? Then in the middle, we know the symbols are mapped to hex values straight up. You could actually take the entire number, concatenate it, and convert it into ascii if you wanted to.

NOTE: it looks like you have two conveniently unmapped symbols in the middle bit, A and 1- which could be mapped to S or that little squiggly bit. Tricky, eh?

Re:Context?

[goodmanj]

Re 1), we can rule out any sort of random sampling of "1's" and "2's" for section three. "2" occurs frequently, but you almost never see two "2's" in a row.

3) seems likely.

Re:Context?

[Garridan]

All this reminds me of my algebra prof's (apparently) favorite poem: "One-one was a racehorse, and One-two was one too. One-one won one race, and One-two won one too."

Score two points for the sender

[memnoch37]

Obligatory http://xkcd.com/356/

I've got it.

[Guano_Jim]

be... sure... to... drink... your... OVALTINE?

A crummy commercial?

Re:I've got it.

[knight24k]

Lucky for you, I got this....

Oh freddled gruntbuggly,
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits
On a lurgid bee.
Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes
And hooptiously drangle me
With crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon,
See if I don't!

My large intestine attempted to throttle my brain at this point...

The raw numbers

[Iamthecheese]

323233331112132 33323132212331 2111331132312233 333212123213112 311333313331111 211333323232211 232313331121231 33231312 That looks kind of like music to me 111212112121212121121212121112121121 1121121121211121211211121211211121111 1111212121121121211121212121112111211 2111212112112111211121112111211121112 11211211121112121121112122211121211 121211211121112112112111212121112111 211211211121121112112111212112111212 112121211 And that looks like binary

Re:The raw numbers

[Iamthecheese]

If I change the 1s to 0 and the 2s to 1, I get some interesting bits.
"J)IEQ)"""$curren;\QHquot;$)T

Re:The raw numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Well this is obviously the handiwork of a drunk perl coder trying to be minimalistic.

Re:The raw numbers

[Goaway]

No, Slashdot is just broken. It doesn't get you exactly that. There's no "curren" or "quot" in it.

Re:The raw numbers

[faragon]

I think that you have a transcription error at line #4:

323233331112132 33323132212331 2111331132312233 333212123213112 311333313331111 211333323232211 232313331121231 33231312
323233331112132 33323132212331 2111331132312233 333212123213113 311333313331111 211333323232211 232313331121231 33231312

Missing Voynich Page

[Ailicec]

Its a missing tear out page at the back of the Voynich Manuscript that says: "For more great titles from this publisher, send a self addressed stamped envelope to..."

Re:Not Cheere..

[arthurpaliden]

But rather, "So long and thanks for all the fish".

I can't be serious!

[sveard]

I've found the following HEX message hidden in the image using Irfanview: http://www.svenarduwie.be/Public/Clipboard01.jpg
Also, I've got Rain Man on the case. The code will be cracked in minutes!

Coral cache

[irae]

Here's coral cache version, works for me fine. Link provided by slashdotter, firefox plugin.

I'm pretty sure it's for my broken office light

[SomeoneGotMyNick]

It's a tempo guide for the person who's messing with the fluorescent ceiling light in the corner of my office. I swear the light is flickering to the same cadence as the tick marks on the page.

different

[pravuil]

the bottom is pretty much binary. already tried to decode it and it comes up with gibberish. the mid section looks as though it comes from charmap. might try from hexadecimal from there. top consists of base-3 for sure. too lazy to actually type the combination but it looks like the combination between all three sections might decode it. doubtful but if all else fails... whoever did this had a lot of time on their hands.

DNA sequence?

[fahrbot-bot]

1. Four DNA characters: A, C, G, T
2. Four character sequences: |, ||, |||, (space)
3. Determine character mapping.
4. ...
5. Velociraptor.

Re:DNA sequence?

[AdamWeeden]

You've been reading too much xkcd.

Re:DNA sequence?

[Vanye1]

Step 4 is obviously "insert toad DNA".

Re:DNA sequence?

[PPH]

5. Velociraptor. 5. Sil?

Re:DNA sequence?

[flibuste]

1. Four DNA characters: A, C, G, T
2. Four character sequences: |, ||, |||, (space)
3. Determine character mapping.
4. ????
5. Velociraptor.
6. PROFIT!!!

There, fixed it for ya

Re:DNA sequence?

[buanzo]

You forgot...

6. Profit!

Looks Like Piano Keys

[saintory]

Sound is in octaves, right? So do-re-mi-...-do is a byte. And the top and bottom sections look like piano keys. Use this image as a reference. Wasn't there a base7 checksum in FAX-heavy days?

I'm pretty sure that's a stargate address...

[DangerTenor]

Seriously though, what the frack are these symbols? I think most of them fit into extended ascii, but not D and 4 (at a minimum, i'm basing this on knowledge from 20 years ago...)

What I translate is ...

[Zader]

All these worlds are yours except Europa ... attempt no landings there ...

Re:What I translate is ...

[3dr]

Ah, nice quote!

Some observations

[AganLex]

Three points:
1.) The top may be some sort of binary, with spaces counting as 1s, 0s, or flips.
2.) The middle part uses numbers between 0x00 and 0x0F. Coincidence? Maybe.
3.) Although the bottom appears similar to the top it might actually be a different type of cipher. It never has 2 double-I's in a row. Therefore the double-I may be a delimeter.

Re:Some observations

[FullCircle]

2.) Not exactly, where is 0x01?
3.) Taken together, there are 16 lines of "binary", 8 at the top, 8 at the bottom.

4.) Some hex digits are repeated, with 0x01 omitted.
5.) There are stray 3 symbols, one of which "S", does not appear in the lines above.
6.) I've seen several people say that the lines all start with a 1, but that doesn't seem to be correct. The columns are all aligned, so it would seem that some lines start with a blank (assumed to be 0) and some end with a 0.

Re:Some observations

[Ai Olor-Wile]

Combining #4 and #5, I would propose that the "S" is 0x01.

Text version

[Starlet Monroe]

I've posted a transcribed text version of the document on my journal here. (Sorry I couldn't post it directly here, but there's too much repetition for it to make it past the lameness filter, which is itself lame.) http://slashdot.org/~Starlet+Monroe/journal/202986

Re:WTF slashdot?

[C-Shalom]

Nope, was using firefox. I'm just surprised that slashdot would have popups. Same here. Popup address is: amch.questionmarket.com...
Logo is Safecount.net and says "Take a Survey" and it claims to be for research purposes only.

Get your tinfoil hats ready

interesting idea...

[erbbysam]

As more and more people try and solve this do the odds go up that this is just an extremely complex rickroll?

4th stanza

[puddles]

If I take the 4th stanza as mark/space with the mark=1 and space=2 I get

AB5AB5AD6B56B5AD56B56AB56AD6AB5AB55AD5AAD5555AD6AD5AD56B5AD56AB56AB5\
AB56AB55AAD56AB55AB56AB55AD5AAD6DAAD6AB5AB55AAD5AB55AD6AB55AB56AB56A\
B56AB5AB55AD5AD6A

Does that resemble anything to anyone?

Re:4th stanza

[puddles]

Shoot, I meant to say "mark = number of 1 bits" and "space = 0"

Re:4th stanza

[morgan_greywolf]

What a coincidence! That happens to be the combination to my luggage!

Sorry, had to do it. :-D

Its not a code

[ardor]

its just my handwriting.

It's the code that the Illinois Tollway was useing

[Joe The Dragon]

It's the code that the Illinois Tollway was useing be for they hit a big back log and went to a new system.

Vertical Alignment

[Michael Skinner]

I see a pattern where the lack of a tick mark represents a 0.
If you then take into account the vertical alignment (which appears to be slightly skewed to the right) and reintroduce the zeros the first section appears to start out as...
1110 0110 0111 0011

Sorry but I do not have time to continue reintroducing the zeros to see what the final results are.

ah... it's so clear now...

[clawsonb]

Based on the hash marks at the top and bottom, it is clear that aliens have simply sent us a conversion table from Bianary (on the bottom) to the much less well known Trianary at the top.

Obvious...

[Em Adespoton]

It's not in code... it's Navajo for "If you can read this, you're hired!"

Digitized

[panthro]

323233331112132
33323132212331
2111331132312233
333212123213113
311333313331111
211333323232211
232313331121231
33231312

f0be58f2fd63
6c79d2e493e6

S f c

111212112121212121121212121112121121
1121121121211121211211121211211121111
1111212121121121211121212121112111211
2111212112112111211121112111211121112
111211211121112121121112122211121211
1212112111211121112112111212121112111
211211211121121112112111212112111212
112121211

Re:Digitized

[el_gato_borracho]

I independently transcribed the same as you, so I confirm the same digits. Also, assuming the first blob is ternary (I=0, II=1, III=2), the second is hex, and the last is binary, I get the following numbers in decimal:
ternary = 720113244210716512990341782103795379056660114385796527
hexadecimal = 74506518313470710988407084006
binary = 4785997412726154595979555835418260996622867313584208882680343839351760783444564
Of course, this assumes also that these are supposed to be read left-to-right, top-to-bottom, and that the most significant digits come first. Can anyone else confirm these values?

Re:Digitized

[Tronster]

I didn't even get that the middle portion (part 2 of 4) was hex until you posted that... thank you.

My analysis...

All the symbols have a hex # below them in part 2 and I bet those are reused in part 3. That would mean the last symbol in part 3 (which you wrote as "c") would have a hex equivalent of either "1" or "A" as neither of them are listed above.

Additionally I cannot help but think the three symbols (part 3) spell "key". If true it would mean either the key is above or below the words... I'd first guess below. That it even spells key is a complete leap though.

Re:Digitized

[inkey string]

I put some preliminary analysis on my blog here.

Unless I'm mistaken, I confirm the same digits as you and el_gato

Re:Digitized

[Tronster]

Correction... I meant the first letter part 3 "S" would either be "1" or "A".

Re:Digitized

[neural.disruption]

I've confirmed that translation. I found that Sfc rather strange, maybe it is an acronym for something? Can only remember of starfleet command and space filling curve. Also it appears to be structured in some way(the lines start in different positions).

Re:Digitized

[kaoshin]

This is actually a message from technical support in India. The SFC stands for system file checker and the other marks are not binary, but rather slashes to indicate fragmentation of the file system. The hex numbers are just fatal exception error codes.

Analysis!

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

It's Caveman analysis.

Someone is counting the number of something. Day one, it was 3. Day 2, 2. on day 4, 2 show up. Probably animals at a watering hole. Then one of them dies... or maybe the hunter kills it.

Then he starts analysis again, to see how long it takes for a 3rd to show again.

Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster recipe

[mcecil]

Is it my imagination, or does this look suspiciously like a combination of the Kryptonian symbols from Smallville and the Ancients's script from Stargate?

Actually it's a video

[Diddlbiker]

It's using advanced alien technology that contains an encrypted video. I managed to extract the message and I have posted it on youtube.

Re:Actually it's a video

[wintywashere]

I am Captain Obvious. Yes it's a rick-roll.

Text version (second try)

[Starlet Monroe]

Text version second try:

###

III II III II III III III III I I I II I III II
  III III III II III I III II II I II III III I
II I I I III III I I III II III I II II III III
  III III III II I II I II III II I III I I III
  III I I III III III III I III III III I I I I
II I I III III III III II III II III II II I I
II III II III I III III III I I II I II III I
II III II III I III I II

"D i - L O T D ^ D 8 R >"
  F 0 B E 5 8 F 2 F D 6 3

"R Y P H 8 ^ L % H > L R"
  6 C 7 9 D 2 E 4 9 3 E 6

                  "S D Y"

I I I II I II I I II I II I II I II I II I I II I II I II I II I I I II I II I I II I
  I I II I I II I I II I II I I I II I II I I II I I I II I II I I II I I I II I I I I
I I I I II I II I II I I II I I II I II I I I II I II I II I II I I I II I I I II I I
  II I I I II I II I I II I I II I I I II I I I II I I I II I I I II I I I II I I I II
  I I I II I I II I I I II I I I II I II I I II I I I II I II I I II I I I II I II I I
I II I II I I II I I I II I I I II I I I II I I II I I I II I II I II I I I II I I I
II I I II I I II I I I II I I II I I I II I I II I I I II I II I I II I I I II I II
I I II I II I II I I

###

Center section: Quotes indicate symbols (see key below) rather than recognizable alphanumeric.

Bottom section: "II?" indicates that it may be a single line or a double line; it seems likely that it's a single line since there are no other places where a double line follows a double line.

D = isoceles right triangle, its hypotenuse vertical and the 90d point extending left.
i = the letter i
- = a dash
L = two lines like a backwards L with a long leg and a spine on the right side of the leg; there is a small dot opposite the spine at the top.
O = a circle with two small dashes extruding from its top and bottom on the right side
T = A skinny "T" with a dot at the bottom right
^ = a small angle, draw high with respect to the other characters (like the round part of a P, but angled)
8 = a vertical figure-eight with a small circle inscribed in the lower portion
R = two lines like the top right corner of a rectangle, drawn high with respect to the other characters, the vertical leg shorter than the horizontal leg, with a dot opposite the corner of the figure
> = an acute angle, its mouth facing up and left
Y = a small upside-down "T", its legs slightly canted down
P = a circle with a vertical, serifed line drawn through it (an uppercase phi)
H = two parallel vertical lines, offset vertically from one another
% = three small circles arranged in a triangle with a vertical line to their right
S = a symbol that looks exactly like a lowercase S

Its nothing

[Yakasha]

Looks to me like nothing more than the written ramblings of a stuttering solipsist.

Its from Dave Bowman ...

[KJSwartz]

... Telling us to play nice.

But since the next T-2 encounter isn't due for two years, it's probably the last and greatest prank from Arthur C Clarke.

BUT just in case, I for one welcome our fax machine using Overlords.

The decoded message

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember to drink your Ovaltine!

Location of information

[croux]

Maybe information is not located in the groups of bars but in the spaces betwen the bars.

Tad more to add

[azzuth]

the assumption in other posts is that the spaces are singular. It seem to me that it can't be true, if you count the | marks and the spaces as singular you get:
47
46
46
46
46
46
46
25 not counting final space.
Tried to give | || representation of the bits, but /. demands fewer junk characters...

This leads me to believe there is a double space in there, and with the crooked lining up of the |'s it is hard to tell exactly where... but i believe it is in the bottom most 5-6 lines.

Binary Hex Dec
1 11100101 E5 229
2 11111111 FF 255
3 10011011 9B 155
4 01111110 7E 126
5 11000001 C1 193
6 11111111 FF 255
7 10001010 8A 138
8 01111111 7F 127
9 11100001 E1 225
10 10111111 BF 191
11 01011110 5E 94
12 11111111 FF 255
13 11100001 E1 225
14 10111110 BE 190
15 01011111 5F 95
16 10110101 B5 181
17 01101011 6B 107
18 11110110 F6 246
19 11011011 DB 219
20 10111101 BD 189
21 01100011 63 99
22 11111100 FC 252
23 01010111 57 87
24 10111111 BF 191
25 11101011 EB 235
26 01110100 74 116
27 01001111 4F 79
28 00111011 3B 59
29 01111101 7D 125
30 00010110 16 22
31 01101111 6F 111
32 00111000 38 56
33 01110111 77 119
34 01011000 56 88
35 00100111 27 39
36 01111110 7E 126

This is where i lose my confidence on lining up the bits.. But in total there should be 48 rows... Oh, and I don't believe i mentioned this is the first stanza from the top of the page. Hope something from this helps,
Cheers

Re:Tad more to add

[azzuth]

11101101110110111011101110111010101011010111011
01110111011101101110101110110110101101110111010
11010101011101110101011101101110101101101110111
01110111011101101011010110111011010111010101110
01110101011101110111011101011101110111010101010
11010101110111011101110110111011011101101101010
11011101101110101110111011101010110101101110100
11101110110111010111010110000000000000000000000


Assuming the spaces = one 0 here is the block of binary for the top stanza

Re:Tad more to add

[morgan_greywolf]

Note that only a few of those numbers translate into ASCII/ISO-8859 letters.

Assuming slashdot keeps the chars:

1 Ïf
  2  (non-ASCII whitespace)
  3 ¢
  4 ~
  5 â"´
  6  (non-ASCII whitespace)
  7 è
  8 âOE‚
  9 ÃY
10 â"
11 ^
12  (non-ASCII whitespace)
13 ÃY
14 â•›
15 _
16 â•¡
17 k
18 ÷
19 â-ˆ
20 â•oe
21 c
22 â¿
23 W
24 â"
25 δ
26 t
27 O
28 ;
29 }
30 â-¬
32 8
33 w
34 X
35 '
36 ê

There. That might be easier with the ecode params, to show which are ascii letters and which aren't. I think only 2-3 actually correspond to accented letters, but I guess that would depend on encoding.

Type of code

[No2Gates]

It's morse code from some drunken ham radio operator.
  It's just a bunch of S, E, and I's

The stuff in the middle is just gobbledeegook.

Real problem solvers comment here

[Jhan]

(trying to move the interesting stuff to the top) The top and bottom part of the code code the same data. The little indentation at the beginning of the line is important and means that the previous line continues. The indentation in the bottom bottom part is of, perhaps because of writing conditions. The top part consists of five trinary numbers of lengths 29, 46, 14, 14, 8 digits. The bottom part consists of five binary numbers of lengths 75, 110, 37, 36, 8 digits. My best transcription, probably with errors:

char trinary[8][40]={
"323233331112132", // 15
"33323132212331", // 14 29
"2111331132312233", // 16
"333212123213113", // 15
"311333313331111", // 15 46
"211333323232211", // 14 14
"232313331121231", // 14 14
"33231312"}; // 8 8
char binary[8][40]={
"111010110101010101101010101110101101", // 36
"1101101101011101011011101011011101111", // 37 75
"1111010101101101011101010101110111011", // 37
"0111010110110111011101110111011101110", // 37
"111011011101110101101110100011101011", // 36 110
// Should have been more clearly to the left?
"1010110111011101110110111010101110111", // 37 37
// Should have been two steps to the left?
"011011011101101110110111010110111010", // 36
"110101011"};

Re:Real problem solvers comment here

[bodan]

Not a critique as such and only vaguely on topic: Does anyone else find it interesting that parent found it natural to represent ternary using 1-2-3 and binary using 0-1?

That was actually my first instinct too when I was "reading" the thing...

Re:Real problem solvers comment here

[KingPin27]

Where's Dr. Epps and his FBI brother when you need 'em. However -- perhaps taking a look at the first and last stanzas and looking at transformations. Theres an article on ternary transforms here.. http://www.washingtonart.net/whealton/ternary.html/

Re:Real problem solvers comment here

[JustHelpingOut]

For the top segment, the rows 1-3 appear to have 47 cells, but rows 4-7 appear to have 46 cells.

If you compare column 41 in rows 3 and 4, the grid appears to fall apart.

Re:Real problem solvers comment here

[pseudorand]

Section 2 does look like a translation of something, probably from the top (cypher or foreign language) into the bottom (hex). It's not just a key because of the repeats and because it's not in order. Since we see latin characters, the 2nd section was obviously written by someone from our culture. But why would (s)he use hash marks instead of 1/2 1/2/3 for the other sections unless (s)he was just copying something written by others exactly.

I also don't think the sections are the same message because even if you treat 1 and 3 as one long tertiary/binary number, you get something in the billions. Each line of section 2 is in the trillions by itself (and gives me an overflow if treated as 1 hex line.)

Section 1 is 2,299,824,724 in decimal and 0x89148A54 in hex.

Section 2:
    Line 1: 264,703,011,126,627
    Line 2: 119,270,485,038,054

Section 3 is 3,385,982,383 in decimal and 0xC9D1FDAF in hex.

Re:Real problem solvers comment here

[ThreeGigs]

The first and last parts *DO NOT* look like terniary and binary to me.

Instead, they look like an RLL encoded pattern, similar to what you'd see on a hard drive. Maybe NRZI.

In fact, the first looks surprisingly like (1,3) MFM RLL.
Also reminds me of the old Apple Floppy drive "between any two ones there can only be a maximum of one zero" data writing rule.

Re:Real problem solvers comment here

[wirelessbuzzers]

We've mostly solved it further down the thread. The top section is in ternary (with 0 replaced by |||), 000-space, 001->a, 002->b, etc. It's strangely wrapped: the spaces and non-spaces at the beginnings and ends of lines count. It says "FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE".

The second part we haven't deciphered yet. It's possible that we'd need a Fermilab insider for this.

The third part is RLL. Once you decode the RLL (number of | between consecutive ||), you get the same code as part one, which says "EMPLOYEE NUMBER BASSE SIXTEEN", or so I've been told. This suggests that at least one part of the puzzle requires help from Fermilab people.

My uninformed guess is that once we solve the middle section, we'll get someone's name. His or her employee number at Fermilab spells something out in base 16, a coincidence which Frank Shoemaker would call "noise". Another possibility is that the middle section is hex-encoded employee ID numbers, which would mean that we can't solve it.

Re:Real problem solvers comment here

[lemnar]

The string of 3 symbols between the second and third parts may be simply SFC => Shoemaker, F. C. => Shoemaker, Frank C. (F. C. Shoemaker via)

B = Infinity Billion

[azzuth]

I think the symbol for D is equivalent to infinity billion :)

So...

[wattrlz]

How many people are going to start anoni-faxing their own lame codes to Fermilab now that this is causing such a stir?

Have you looked for the lemon juice?

[grikdog]

It's obvious misdirection. The top and bottom are just simple Ogham barcodes. The middle stuff is dust in your eyes. The message is from Google's HR department, aka "Famous Cryptographer's School," to anyone clever enough to detect the steganographic image of Bambi.

Re:WTF slashdot?

[C-Shalom]

No it was just a simple popup of a .gif image that linked to the survey.
I only allowed firefox to open it out of curiosity.

It's a receipt

[Bogtha]

See those three symbols on their own? An S, followed by a triangle, followed by a three-pronged character? Well if you look in the table directly above those three characters, you'll see that the triangle translates to F and the three-pronged character translates to C, giving S.F.C. altogether.

Clearly the Roswell Greys were on their way home from picking up a Spacetucky-Fried Chicken takeaway when they crashed here.

Reminds me of the movie Zodiac

[thomasdn]

This reminds me of the movie Zodiac. It was based on the true story of a serial killer in US that sent code letters (similar to this one) to the press. Actually I just noticed that tomorrow Zodiac the movie was released precisely one year ago. The sender of this letter could be inspired by the movie.

Umm...

[linuxboredom]

Err, if you place a decimal after the first set of tallies, the first block of tallies is approximately equal to e in base 3. (Accurate to approximately 53 decimal places.)

Re:Umm...

[el_gato_borracho]

When I do this, I get
2.62917969668370112624346100389708671301902878544426248026...
not
e = 2.71828182845904523536028747135266249775724709369995957496...

Re:Umm...

[linuxboredom]

Aye, it appears I cannot transcribe tallies properly.

MAC Addresses?

[Lemmeoutada Collecti]

Has anyone noticed that the two symbol/alphanumeric lines break down very nicely into two MAC addresses:

FO-BE-58-F2-FD-63
and
6C-79-D2-E4-93-E6

While the OUI does not match anything in the IEEE listings, with user configurable MAC addresses those are still valid.

Although it is also possible that they encode for some other form of address...

Whenever I write a letter I always include a return address.

indicates...

[azzuth]

maybe the "hi" is intentional to indicate orientation. thus last stanza is actually first?

OMG, it IS!

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

Neva gonna give you up... going to hold you in my arms foreva....

But the code in the middle is actually "Kyle's Mom is a Big Fat Bitch in D-"

Eureka

[KingPin27]

It's a recipe for chocolate chip cookies with that special ingredient.

UPC/EAN

[Knightman]

Almost looks like UPC/EAN bar-codes IMHO.

Cover Page?

[no1home]

I'm pretty sure it's cover page for an alien manual on how to help us. I think the title says To Serve Man.

All your base...

[marcus]

...are belong to us.

Even I can see that.

Obviously, these Fermilab folks don't get to go outside at all.

Troll?

[varn_ix]

Or it doesn't really mean anything and some sick individual is having a great time listening to all this discourse.

Reminds me of modern art.

Critic: "The author seems to expose the inherent vulnerability of the environment and the human psyche."

Author: "Dude, these are some smears I made when I was high."

Re:second symbol in the "hex key"?

[morgan_greywolf]

0
(Look at it on a text console.)

Barcode

[Panaqqa]

I am guessing that both top and bottom might represent some form of barcode encoding. Not sure of the standard, UPC, Code 39, whatever, but that's where I'd start if I were doing a serious crack attempt.

My thoughts

[jalet]

Each set of ticks has 8 lines. When you turn the image 90 degres to the right (works both ways), you could consider ' ' being 0 and '_' being 1 (or the other way around) in a set of bytes, one byte per line. This gives only 4 decoding possibilities for theses 2 sets of ticks.

Of course the final code is probably not as simple as what I say above, but the 8 lines per set thing immediately made me think about this, and by the way this would finely match with all these hexadecimal digits.

Definitely the work of a computer scientist or an IT person, IMHO.

CRACKED!!!!

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

It's the release date for Duke Nukem

writing tendencies and charset

[Anonymous Coward]

while it may not be terribly relevant to the solution, it's worth noting a few oddities about the author's writing style. first of all, the second set of vertical lines is likely to be read right to left. notice how well justified the right side of the message is, while the left side terminates at various locations. we also know he writes the individual clusters from left to right based on the strokes left at the bottom of the bars.

secondly, i assume the author is writing with a felt tip pen and is transcribing this from another source. notice how some bars will have a larger dot at one end or the other. i postulate that the author has set down his pen and is checking another sheet to determine what to write, while his felt pen bleeds a little too much ink onto the paper. this, however, doesn't happen with a ball point pen. perhaps this will be of assistance in determining the order strokes were written in, giving us some insight into the author's intent.

thirdly, notice that the author writes the number 0 with a slash through it, but not the number 7 with a dash through it. i'm not an expert on handwriting identification, but certain groups will often be more keen on the selection of particular stylistic numbers, so this may help us to understand something of the author's background.

finally, note that many of the chars used in the second section are letters from other char sets. the letter i is obvious to the english readers, but less apparent is the instance of one that looks suspiciously like a greek capital phi. also, several bear a striking resemblance to chars that appear in a masonic cypher alphabet. http://www.odr.org/anonymous/fam-code.htm can the other chars be identified as belonging to specific alphabets?

Re:writing tendencies and charset

[Seraphim_72]

Very insightful - but notice an oddity to you second thing - look at the 17th stroke of the 5th line of the fist part. It is positively wedge shaped at the bottom, several others though the piece bear the same mark. For the life of me I cannot fiure out how any wring utensil short of a odd calligraphy pen could ever pull that of - except for a hand sharpened pencil. Also the general grittness of the lines make me think pencil over rough paper.

Sera

Re:writing tendencies and charset

[MortimerV]

It looks like it's sort of an inverted "V" shape. I tried drawing some hashes with a pencil and letting my hand jitter a little bit along the direction of the stroke. A couple times I got a small inverted V at the bottom of a hash.

I noticed that there are some strokes that appear to reverse themselves at the bottom, as though the person drew the line from top to bottom, then let their pen rebound before lifting it fully from the paper. Look at the middle of the fourth line of the third section for a couple examples of this. I don't see any examples of the reverse, an extra line coming from the top of the hash. That implies they drew all the lines from top to bottom.

Re:writing tendencies and charset

[Danny Rathjens]

Some good points. I don't agree about reading from right to left, though. I think he is simply modifying the spacing a little bit to align the right edge - such as you see in a newspaper column or man pages. ( and he did the same with the first stanza, albeit not as accurately. Also note that both stanza's right edges are aligned at an angle.) Also combine with the other plausible theory that he is indenting continuations which exlpains why the left side is not justified.
Furthermore, the size of the strokes decrease from left to right and top to bottom, also indicating the order written.

As for the second stanza, I suspect the few overlapping characters with existing characters are simply the result of someone trying to create random symbols from their mind which already has a few in there. :)

Re:writing tendencies and charset

[ralphdaugherty]

This may be so obvious no one has commented on it, but this appears to me the person used a three hole paper punch on perhaps a copier/laser paper page, and carried it in a notebook. The edges of the holes have stress on them.

      All the straight lines in the markings were done with a guide or stencil of some sort. The markings above the 3 are too well done 45 degrees to be freehand and are almost exactly the same size.

      The first part of binary (if you will) marks line up all eight rows down. However, starting at the tenth column in from the right side, the columns strat slanting from right to left on down. They still neatly line up, but you have to follow the slant down.

      As someone pointed out earlier, the top and bottom marks are both eight rows, and the eight row is shortened in both. The bottom is raggiedier as if he was getting tired by that point, but still looks columnar to me. The gaps are zeros, I think, not gaps between groups of marks.

      I count 57 bits across the top. Many of the gaps are two zeros. When I divvy up the top line into bytes, the ASCII decimal values are:

230 mu
230 mu
115 s
156 British pound sign
228 sigma
147 o circumflex
93 right bracket
extra bit, stop bit perhaps

231 zeta
57 9
156 British pound sign
156 British pound sign
217 right angle (same as the E sign in the hex portion)
51 3
186 norm

      Given the symbol theme with the hex values, this looks like straight binary ASCII to make some kind of symbolic statement (no pun intended :)

  rd

Re:Mathamatically speaking.... think like a crypto

[pbhj]

I'm not a cryptographer.

I don't think you're one either! As others have noted their are a series of dots over the page, these appear to be more than just artefacts (but they could be made in the scanning process, etc.).

Again, the vertical lines are all different. The top and bottom points form what appear to be waves, this may be accidental. Moreover, whilst it appears that a single symbol "|" (must be a *nix admin!!) is used in fact the lines vary quite a bit (just looking at "stanza 1"):

Some lines are written top to bottom, others bottom to top, note the narrowing at the ends as the pen is lifted from the paper slightly. Also some of the | are drawn as hooks, either top or bottom and either right or left from the next character. These "stems" (like in musical notation, see other comment) are not merely consistent with up-down strokes - observe Stanza 1, line 4, group 1, the first 2 characters. At least one of the lines has a "stem" not at the end. Again, these may simply be handwriting artefacts but considering the way the lines were written is a clue, which leads me to ...

A further possibility that the encoding is vertical (note how the lines don't start at the same left margin). Such vertical (like Japanese, BR-TL) encoding being masked by leaving a space that makes it appear like the letter positions of a TL-BR language. In this scheme the first characters would be (BR) 0111101 (TR) ... (BL) 11100101 (TR) and so could simply be a binary scheme.

Hiding the "wrapper" from us, which gives details of the sender, etc., and would probably allow a quicker route in is a bit silly if they genuinely want this decoding.

For example in the middle section (which is hex translation table) the last 3 characters appear to be a signature:

In this "signature" there are 3 chars, the first has no translation "S"/"5", the second and third translate as FC (or 0xFC), so SFC or 0x5FC (light blue!). U+05FC is an undefined character in the Hebrew block. This could be a clue to the language of translation? ... just a first look.

as if...

[whopub]

4.4MB image link on the front page of Slashdot? I sense a great disturbance in the force... as if the whole world was about to be slashdot...

April fools

[invisiblerhino]

They say they received it a little over a year ago...

Re:I figured it out:

[mr_mischief]

Very nice reference, my fellow Ender fan.

8 Lines = 8 binary bits?

[carterhawk001]

If you rotate the paper sideways, it turns into a 10100101 pattern, going down vertically. I can't sit and transcribe it here, but if anyone has the time, I think looking at this as trinary may be the wrong way to think.

One correction:

[NeutronCowboy]

I don't think that the set of 3 consecutive 2s is correct. If you look closely, the two lines between the start and end 2s are spaced not only more widely than other 2s, but their length and termination stroke is different. The first | is started higher than the second |, stops way earlier, and instead of an upward stroke at the bottom (indicating a continuation towards a second stroke in the same character), just fizzles out towards the right. This is more consistent with two | characters, rather than a single || character. This also keeps in line with the theory that || is a delimitation character, rather than a code character.

FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

[wirelessbuzzers]

The first part is ternary, with 3 substituted for 0. It's somewhat miswrapped, but it appears to say "FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE".

Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

[Starlet Monroe]

I get that I may be missing a joke, but can you validate this at all?

Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true:
remove the linebreaks from the first block, interpret # of lines as trinary digits 0,1,2 (|->0, ||->1, |||->2) and you get

212 122 220 001 021
222 120 211 012 201
000 220 021 201 122
222 101 012 102 002
200 222 202 220 002
002 222 121 211 022
120 222 001 012 022
120 201

Converting to alphabet by 000->a, 001->b, ... , 221->z, 222->' ', we get:

xrybh pwftayhtr kflcs uycc qwip bfipt

Write a script to check possible letter substituions against a dictionary, and you find that the substitution cipher
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
nl  o ki wu   strdec hfa

converts this to "frank shoemaker would call this noise"; maybe a coincidence, but looking likely.

Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

[Danny Rathjens]

mod these folks up:

perl -we'$_="323233331112132333231322123312111331132"
. "312233333212123213113311333313331111211333323232"
. "21123231333112123133231312"; @m{glob "{1,2,3}"x3}=("a".."z"," ");print $m{$_} for m/.../g'
xrybh pwftayhtr kflcs uyaj xqjquydpzu

I'm not getting anywhere with the 3rd stanza, though :) e.g. quadruplets for hex codes?

perl -we'$_="11101011010101010110101010111010110111011011010111"
. "01011011101011011101111" . "11110101011011010111010101011101110110111010110" . "110111011101110111011101110" . "111011011101110101101110100011101011" . "101011011101110111011011101010111011101101" . "1011101101110110111010110111010110101011"; @m{glob "{0,1}"x4}=(0..9,"a".."f");print $m{$_} for m/..../g'
eb556abaddb5d6eb77fab6baaeedd6dddd
ddddbbadd1d75bbbb75776ddbb75bad5

or a two level using triplets and then the first method gave me:
wsanqptssqpuzoewoqubugugu fqpggfqxgcgptxgfoa

Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

[femtobyte]

Last stanza:
consider the || separators between trinary digits |, | |, | | |; decode as for first stanza, gives:
tadcfmtt blaztr zyppt pioqttb ->
"employee number basse sixteen"

thus, the central numbers are probably the employee # of the prank letter writer. Someone at Fermilab could probably check this (maybe Frank Shoemaker?)

I think we've solved it!

Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

[sporkme]

Wow, fantastic work!

Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

[Starlet Monroe]

Ya, I agree. Seems like there's a bit of a pointer there to the 2nd stanza, but what do we do with the two halves of it? "S"+ "FC" = S252, is that a full employee number? Seems short at best.

Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

[wirelessbuzzers]

It's actually simpler than that. Set it as |->1, ||->2, |||->0, and 001->a, 002->b etc, you get the same thing. I think you have to fix some wrapping issues where ||| is wrapped as | ||.

Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

[wirelessbuzzers]

Awesome, did you email them?

Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

[wirelessbuzzers]

Never mind about the wrapping. Anonymous is right: remove the line breaks, but preserve the anomalous spaces at the beginnings and ends of lines.

Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

[Starlet Monroe]

Well, now I can confirm everything you guys did, which sucks, since I was totally on the right track. I just missed the linebreak spaces (or lack thereof sometimes), which made my ternary all go wrong halfway through.

Very nice work. Very very nice.

Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

[Starlet Monroe]

Final cipher I had was:

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
mnlp o k wuy xstrdec hfab

in case anyone wants to repeat the steps like I did.

Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I've emailed them a short description of the decryption. I also tried to post the results to the "discussion" section on the Fermilab page, but it looks like they stopped displaying additional posts early afternoon (probably once they got wind of the Slashdot onrush...). Whoever is reading Symmetry Magazine's email is probably inundated by quite a rush of wild speculation and irrelevant questions, so it may take them a while to find the actual decryption among all the noise. I hope in a couple of days they will be able to post a followup story explaining the backstory behind this --- it looks like an inside joke of some sort that is probably now obvious to the people involved. There is one "Frank Shoemaker" associated with Fermilab that Google can find, a professor from Princeton working on the BooNE neutrino detector. Given that neutrino detection is all about struggling to detect very small, rare signals above background noise , this is a likely candidate for the "noise" comment.

Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

[adel72]

The middle part encodes the number AFC, which is 2812. If you look at the top lines in the midsection, there are no odd numbers that have any round shape. "S" has a round shape, therefore can't be 1, so it's A.

Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

[shird]

Indeed, some work has be done on the code here : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=192426

Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

[shird]

The reason for the name 'Frank Shoemaker' is simply that it contains the letters for the 2nd code of 'employee number base sixteen' - ie the 'noise' helps to determine the subsitution cipher. The full decoding is over here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=192296

Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

[deerhunter]

I'm sure I am not the only one, who did it, but I googled "Frank Shoemaker" and it seems, that he is a real member of Fermilab. Did you send the e-mail to Fermilab?

It's John Titor!

[lawn.ninja]

It's John titor dropping hints on how to positively ID the Higgs Boson, so that we can figure out how to generate enough mass to fuel two microsingularities and start time travelling.

Oh NO!

[Satanboy]

It's a Cookbook!

If you break this up into tuples of 4...

[tlambert]

If you break this up into tuples of 4 and Google it, you get some interesting matches from geomagnetic observatory data.

-- Terry

Racists!

[Oktober Sunset]

You never hear about them calling for code niggers do you?

Solved!

[Anonymous Coward]

Reposting higher up (look in lower posts for more explanation):
Stanza 1 -> "frank shoemaker would call this noise"
Stanza 3 -> "employee number basse 16"
Middle: probably an employee number, Base 16

There is indeed a Frank Shoemaker working at Fermilab on the BooNe experiment; perhaps this is a reference to him?

It's a letter

[Toshi_TNE]

"Dear symmetry magazine,
Sorry for the anal probing.

-The Aliens."

Re:Solved!

[fbjon]

Mod parent up as interesting solution. Relevant thread here.

partial solution

[neonsignal]

Using a base 3 code, let
000=space
001=a
002=b
010=c ...
220=x
221=y
222=z

If |||=0, |=1, ||=2, then the first section can be rewritten as:
020 200 001 112 102 000 201 022 120 012 111 001 102 012 200 000 212 120 210 110 011 000 010 001 211 211 000 202 022 100 201 000 112 120 100 201 012
(errata: the line break at the end of line 6 has broken a symbol in two, and one of the symbols in line five is missing a stroke)
Then the first section can be transcribed as:
"Frank Shoemaker would call this noise".

In the last section, the double bar is a gap between symbols. Again, |||=0, |=1, and ||=2. The last section can be rewritten as:
012 111 121 110 120 221 012 012 000 112 210 111 002 012 200 000 002 001 201 201 012 000 201 100 220 202 012 012 112
(errata: the line break at the end of line 2 has broken a symbol in two, and there is a duplication of a whole triad in line 5)
Then the last section can be transcribed as:
"employee number base sixteen"

Presumably the three symbols before the last section is the employee number of the author (S252 in base 16).

Not sure about the middle section (apart from it acting as a decoder for the employee number).

Since some symbols have been broken over line breaks, I'm guessing that the original codemaker had someone else rewrite it for them, so that their handwriting would not be recognizable.

[disclaimer - this analysis draws from other people's work, I don't claim full credit]

Re:partial solution

[bwa]

Not too shabby, now if you can only get the middle part...

Got it! Eww ...

[aelvin]

It was a link to goat.se.cx. Dammit, I swore I'd never fall for that agin.

Don't be silly...

[pjt33]

If they called it that, macho men wouldn't buy it!

Employee #508 or #2812 sent this letter

[puddles]

The first part of the code reads:

"frank shoemaker would call this noise" (after fixing one line continuation)

"employee number base sixteen" (removing one sequence of ||| || | ||)

The substitution cipher is:

"abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz " ->"mnlp.o.ki.wuy.xstrdec.hfab "

Since the "S" could be one of the two missing hex digits from the Rosetta Stone in the middle: 1, or A, then the employee number is either

1FC = 508

or

AFC = 2812

The complete answer to this puzzle is

[Anonymous Coward]

frank shoemaker would call this noise

26-252

employee number basse sixteen

Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=192426

To Program or not To Program

[RamblerRandy]

All this is giving me a headache. Ok, not really but I sure can't decode that sort of thing. And someone did mention billboards with simply crypted text which was for job openings at the company. Not a good filter as people will talk.

At least I got the code at the bottom of the slashdot page (bunch of letters about a job as .. programming - I won't reveal ) as I can decode a few things (file names, variable names, such like that) but not this dang letter!

I can just imagine the original writer reading all this and laughing is a** off. I think the translations are correct and the names, initials in the middle of the page, etc. will make sense to someone at Fermilab but not really important.

I think it may be a conspiracy to make people spend all their time decoding for almost nothing just for the amusement of the writer. Or maybe even to cause masses of good programmers to bury their time decrypting it and not getting work done for some purpose.

I've been "lazy" reading everyone's attempt to decode just to see what it might be about as I shouldn't spend so much time on such things except to exercise my brain? That's where I got the name and initials, otherwise I haven't done decoding but looking back at the image to see if it rings true. And no, the random dots are not a code as it is a fax and oh I know noise on faxes all too well from a company I worked for that did a product using ICR. The dots would have to be on the original and most all faxes will get noise (if not 100%).

Bring a towel?

[Roskolnikov]

an early form of the number 42?