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FBI Overwhelmed With 'Solutions' To Encrypted Note
An anonymous reader writes "Recently the FBI asked for the public's help in solving the encryption in a note linked to a man's murder. Well, they got so much 'help' it has overwhelmed the agency's phone and email systems. Dan Olson, chief of the FBI's Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU), urged potential code-breakers to send their tips via mail rather than sending emails or flooding phone lines. 'We don't have the bandwidth to handle the emails we're getting,' Olson told FoxNews.com on Thursday. 'We're getting a bunch [of responses].' Suggested solutions range from a list of the dead man's medication schedule to instructions from a computer repair technician: 'He is speaking to a computer tech on how to fix his computer,' one message read."
to be slashdotted.
Sig? Heil
"Told us it was something to do with drinking Ovaltine. I don't really get it."
How is it easier to handle snail mail than it is e-mail? How does one grep snail mail for starters?
CS-
... where every crackpot has a "theory" and all the others have it wrong. Where we're all being poisoned by chemtrails, where we never landed on the Moon, and where, if you have the tinfoil adjusted just so, you can stop the alien greys from tracking you and giving you anal probes in your sleep.
And where every fruitcake has an answer to the Voynich Manuscript, so a couple of pages or two of code should be "easy"
*hysterical Vincent Price laughter here*
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BMO
This being FoxNews, it's debatable whether there is actually any Dan Olson who works on the FBI. If there is, it's hard to know what he really told FoxNews. Assuming the report is accurate, is interesting that "a bunch of responses" is "flooding the FBI's bandwidth".
Or were most something like, "It was Professor Plum! In the conservatory! With the lead pipe!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
My girlfriend is about 5’7”, weighs around 130 and has brown hair and brown eyes. She is white and while she’s not fat, she is a tiny bit overweight. She has a huge round butt which is very soft.
My first experience with it was in the forest on a walk, she let me kneel behind her and put my nose in her jeans-clad butt to sniff it for a few seconds. She got nervous stopped.
Later, she farted on the couch- It was a small rip, and she stood up so that I could sniff it. It had hardly any smell to it, and she looked embarrassed. Later still, she stopped on the stairs with me behind her and let me put my nose between her cheeks again. I felt her pushing to try and fart, and I felt a tiny bubble, but it didn’t stink. At night, she sat on my face in jeans and rubbed her butthole over my nose. I could smell a fart, but I didn’t hear it. I also followed her outside when she told me she had to fart and knelt behind her and buried my face in her jeans. She let out a five-second silent fart, and I sniffed- It was weak, but still very eggy.
The next day she woke me up and sat on my face for about 5 seconds in her pajamas, which where pink and very soft, letting my nose press up against her butthole and her cheeks spread over my face. I sniffed, and it smelled slightly like rotten eggs. Later she told me that she had farted just before she sat down. Later in the morning she told me she had to fart and lifted up her butt off the couch. I knelt down and put my nose under her raised cheek, which wasn’t high enough for me to get my nose to the source. I heard a long rumble and I sniffed, and It smelled earthy and eggy. She did another quiet one that I sniffed like that for about 30 seconds. She went to the bathroom and let me smell the air afterwards. It smelled eggy and poopy, and I stayed until the smell dissipated, which took about 10 minutes.
The next day, we went to a store for nerdy things like DnD and other such stuff. While there, I heard her rip a quiet fart. I stayed in the area and the terrible eggy scent wafted up to me, and lasted about 30 seconds. She was embarrassed to fart in public. She did another in a jewelry store, but it was silent. It stunk just as bad, and I think the person working smelled it.
Later, she decided to play some video games, and while she was playing I would sniff her butt every now and again. She said she had to fart, so I picked up a stuffed cow and she sat on it and let it rip quietly. I sniffed it, and it was eggy and trapped in the fabric. she said “Does it smell good?” I offered her the cow, and she sniffed it and made a face of disgust. Once when I was sniffing, she ripped a very stinky fart that smelled like rotten eggs and onions- It was a two parter that went Bluurp bruuuunt- and I sniffed it from her jeans. I told her how stinky they were and she laughed. Then I felt her clench her cheeks, and a quiet but very bubbly fart came out and she said “I did another one!”
When we were in the car, she would fart on my hand and then let me sniff it. Once after Italian food, she rolled up the window and ripped a loud raspy one. The whole car filled up with an eggy smell, and she said “Don’t look at me after I fart!”.
She gave me a good face-fart in her pajamas- She
Stood in front of me and I twisted so she could sit on my nose. She sat and spread her butt cheeks apart and ripped a silent fart that stunk of eggs. She let go of her bottom and her asscheeks spread over my face, sealing my nose in her stinky fart. It was even more intense when she let her butt spread over my face, it smelled three times as bad. She did another one a few minutes later and it was even longer, and I could feel the heat on my face. At the end, it made a rasp, low-pitched squeak. “Did you hear the squeak?” she asked, as she settled her butt over my face.
She ripped a terrible one on the couch- She was mid sit when she stopped and let out a four-second series of juicy pops and cracks.
That is what it sounds like to me too. Morons are just suggesting possibilities of what it could be rather than actually solving the problem.
That's what happens when you involve the general population of idiots.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
I wondered where it went.
Come on, guys, my handwriting isn't that bad!
Pretty funny to see slashdotters in the previous thread talking about these notes and falling into the typical tv trap. Perhaps this was the real test... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk
but we do have the bandwidth to stick our noses in everyone elses business..
Try this:
INSIST the suggestions come in by email.
Collate them then publish them to the internet and run a galaxy zoo type voting system to cull out the obvious crap.
Instant internet flash mob...
It was just a way to find more people like the guy who wrote the letter...
It's all just an elaborate plot to get your fingerprints off the letters /sarcasm
that's what the elder natives say. they still feel sorry for us. of course using their words (which was almost none needed) the unproven 'eden' was pristine & there were never any shortages of anything & everything was free, & nobody buggered anybody. & here's the rock in an uncomfortable spot: there were very possibly almost 1 billion inhabitants of USa way back then, before we 'got here'? unbelievable? there's plenty of room for misinterpretation here?
Can someone please Wiki this so that there can be some systematic collaboration?
Now publish all the solutions and ask the crowd to winnow the wheat from the chaff too. Jeez! Guys, haven't you heard of recursion at all?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
'We don't have the bandwidth to handle the emails we're getting,' Olson told FoxNews.com on Thursday."
I've warned people for years that email is for PLAIN TEXT! Not some crappy blinky crap.
Now get outta my inbox!
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pass
Management runs FBIT over 15 years 5 major multi-billions of failures in automation of field+HQ offices.
What is easier for many on /. may be near impossible for the FBI.
The FBI field and lab folks are very good, but they don't set policy on what FBIT will do. Many are isolated from collaboration, aggregation... with other FBI peers.
Management is in charge of failure at the strategic level, because strategy is policy and plan without tactical actuality.
IOW: Any idiot can plan from the top down, but only the worker-bees/pack-mules can build from the bottom up. Contractors work for management not the employees. Management needs a committee of IT competent field+HQ offices branch personnel applying upper-level policy/plans and working to build what really needs to work together.
This is a common problem with .com, .gov, .mil... large organizations. What management wants needs should be need to be tailored to fit the field/branch and HQ offices as individual unique and as unified community. You can put a shirt on like pants, but without the belt-loops, it is a king's new cloths incident.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
If that's supposed to be a euphemism for something else then I'm quite sure it's illegal no matter where in the world you are.
The photo copy of the note is good to have.... but they could have also created and made available an ASCII version. Having, apparently, tens of thousands of people have to copy that text to an ASCII version is a tremendous waste of time when multiplied by that many people. Note to network and system administrators, the same holds true for you systems..... saving yourself 5 minutes, but costing several thousand users those 5 minutes, is a good way to put your own employer out of business.
If the encryptor was using a one time pad any solution would be correct for one possible key.
Normalize the results (for formatting: whitespace and punctuation to one space, all lower case, numbers are spelled out, ect) .
Compare the normalized result strings.
Span the analysis over several metrics: Jaccard, Sørensen, Jaro-Winkler similarity metrics. Cosine as well. Maybe MD5 hashs (no, that is dumb).
There is only one correct result. Check the sets of results that are the same (for the same metric) or very similar first.
Am I really the ONLY person who thought of House M.D. Epic Fail (season six) when the initial story made it to slashdot?
It's the episode with the guy who posts all new symptoms on the internet, resulting in the hospital phones, faxes, emails getting overwhelmed by people sending 'their suggestions'...
Never thought of that. Picture this: The women all go shopping, and leave instructions "Make sure the baby gets her bath!" The "baby" is a little to old for me to actualy bathe, but a little to young to be left alone in the tub. So, I spend about half an hour, pacing between bath and kitchen, waiting for all those (lever 2000) 2000 body parts to just kind of soak clean. Finally, "Get me a towel, Grandpa!" The chihuahua gets involved, tugging at the towel, she runs, dog jumps up and licks her wet butt, and for another half hour she runs around and around the house, shrieking, "Lick my butt! Lick my butt!"
So - you're saying that as the "responsible" adult, I could be facing jailtime for that? Wow. That would just suck!
Come to think of it, I believe that I read some /. stories while she and the dog were getting their exercise. I have my insanity defense, right there.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
First rule: Details of the cyper used. I don't think they care for a quick piss in the wind what it could contain, write down the way you decrypted it, show us the cypher, if you can't do that we don't want to hear from you. Sending us a piss in the wind version of "I think it could be..." will be treated like spamming us.
Betcha that would have lowered the noise by about 99%.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Didn't they think of asking NSA about the encryption?
You shouldn't post this online. Sony is gonna sue :o
That's what the Unabomber did - get the dog to lick the envelopes to seal them. Post offices in arab countries have a little waterpad and sponge for the envelopes. These days, you just get envelopes that just need a waxpaper strip removed.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
We don't have the bandwidth to handle emails, but we do have plenty of labor available to open and analyze mail by hand?
The FBI doesn't have the bandwidth? Should I sign them up for a google account? Who do they think they're kidding? How much of the country's email are they already scanning?
Is this a leftover April Fools Day article?
Shannon's notion of unicity distance is the length of the shortest ciphertext needed to rule out all but one possible decryption. The theoretical estimate of unicity distance depends on the entropy of the key space and the amount of redundancy in the plaintext. In this case, though, the "key" includes the cipher, since it is also unknown, and nothing is really known about the plaintext. Under reasonable assumptions about both, it's likely that the unicity distance (if it could be calculated) is significantly longer than the amount of ciphertext available.
What this means is that it's entirely possible that we could have thousands of distinct, reasonable decryptions, with no way to distinguish which is the right one. In other words, a huge number of those solutions flooding in could be "right", as far as anyone can tell.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The guy writes words, using abbreviations, as well as taking out the vowels. Just read it, its not a cryptic, its english. There is no code. its logic.
It was bad enough that it took the FBI 12 years to decide they needed help. For them to say they lack the bandwidth to process electronic submittal of suggestions is ridiculous. They don't have the capability to run a program to automatically categorize the submittals? Oh well, maybe in another 12 years they can ask the NSA to analyze the submittals and do a frequency analysis of the word patterns. They could also look for the pattern "I did it" or "I killed him," if they don't trust the wisdom of the crowds.
Don't the online people end up being right in diagnosing hium?
Awww isn't that cute, Petey's little sock puppets MEK_LoveBug and the kings jokwers got mod points and you used them all up to mod me down...that's soooo cute! You realize I have more karma that God almighty, yes? or that it will never get rid of my sig which mocks your impotence every single day in every single way, yes? How it must hurt to know that every single day thousands will see that sig and find how how truly pathetic you are Petey, I find that....delightful. Now enjoy some nice copypasta, sprinkled with the broken glass that is your failure...enjoy!...
I would be happy to give you the figures, feel free to check. Comodo AV = 98% hit rate and ZERO infections, Malwarebytes? 97% and ZERO infections. Type both into Youtube and feel free to watch Petey. I have also shown repeatedly, again feel free to choose ANY figures from ANY reputable site you like, you are talking on average 180,000 PER DAY of infected websites PLUS 1.8 million current PLUS 15,000 pieces of malware PLUS anywhere from 35,000 to 50,000 websites revolving from the list. You see the difference between actual solutions and Petey's magical woobie is a little thing known as heuristics, along with a nice word known as sandboxing, neither of which his magical .txt file can do.
But if Petey wasn't completely batshit insane I wouldn't have to explain this, because this is why everyone makes fun of him. it is so obvious it is like someone arguing gravity is actually invisible pants gnomes trying to steal your underwear. It is the classic "default allow" which has NEVER EVER worked. Because if a piece of malware isn't in Petey's magical HOPES file he is royally fucked, and yet again I have shown that it is simply a roll of the dice whether he gets creamed or not, simply because he will always be behind
. So it is all on Petey and his magical HOPES woobie now. He made the extravagant claims, back them up with the math. If he can't? Well then he is full of shit, case closed. Notice how ALL PETEY CAN DO is throw insults and trollbomb? Why is that? I'll tell you why, because math doesn't lie and he just can't show the math He just can't, it would be like trying to mathematically prove PETEY is not an idiot. It just can't be done.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If they have so many problems, does that increase the likelihood that I could get away with murder? In that case, I shall go kill the most annoying person in the world.
Now the FBI know what it means to be SlashDotted :)
I got a few words...
Muh Dick.
Sheeet.
Mo Fo.
Where you be?
What up, dog?
Fuckin' ho.
But even in Ebonics, if the cat couldn't spell...
Envelope moisteners were standard office equipment for, like, forever. Little 2oz bottle with a felt or foam nib.
is successful.