Slashdot Mirror
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*
--
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
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..
It's all just an elaborate plot to get your fingerprints off the letters /sarcasm
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!
--
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.
If the encryptor was using a one time pad any solution would be correct for one possible key.
The problem with having the FBI convert the original note to an ASCII text-only file is that a lot of the potential information would be lost. The positioning of the characters could be just as important (or even more so) than the characters themselves. Also, the characters vary - he had two distinct ways of writing the letter 'E' for example - one looked like the upper-case text that I've just typed, one looked more like the Euro currency symbol.
They'd have been much better served providing a decent high-resolution scan of the notes, rather than the crappy images that actually got linked everywhere - 1200x1200 dpi minimum.
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.
What little we know about the guy (and I bet the FBI knows a lot more about him, so this is essentially also just a guess) tells us that he has been doing it since he was a kid, and while it's likely that he refined his cypher, it's unlikely that he changed its foundation and basic functionality. Hence I do assume it's a letter replacement cypher, most likely with a rotating key.
Don't forget that he has to be able to do it in his head. This pretty much rules out almost all math based approaches, hire some linguists.
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.
They'd have been much better served providing a decent high-resolution scan of the notes, rather than the crappy images that actually got linked everywhere - 1200x1200 dpi minimum.
If they were concerned about bandwidth, they could have distributed the images via bittorrent....
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
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.
Envelope moisteners were standard office equipment for, like, forever. Little 2oz bottle with a felt or foam nib.
is successful.