Slashdot Mirror
WW2 Pigeon Code Decrypted By Canadian?
Albanach writes "At the start of November Slashdot reported the discovery of a code, thought to be from the Second World War, found attached to the leg of a pigeon skeleton located in an English chimney. Now a Canadian by the name of Gord Young claims to have deciphered the message in less than 20 minutes. He believes that the message is comprised mostly of acronyms."
Not hard to "crack" a code if you have access to the relevant code book
It was not a "code book" in any traditional sense of the term, at least in a crypto context — the message, according to this solution, was simply heavily-abbreviated plaintext.
It seems that "txtspk" actually originated from pigeon messaging :)
Yep, "it's a bunch of acronyms", i.e. a bunch of random letters, is suspicious. Unless they line up with known shorthand, it's probably not actually decrrypted.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I don't believe this is a correct "interpretation" of the message, as it is too generic. Nothing contained in the message is of any use whatsoever. "Hit Jerry’s right or reserve battery here", "Troops, panzers, batteries, engineers, here", "Counter measures against panzers not working", "Go over field notes", "Found headquarters infantry right here"
What good is any of that? Where is "here"? There would have to be precise coordinates or grid numbers to indicate exactly what is where.
The other question is where would the pigeon be delivering this message to? All the way back to some headquarters in Britain is where. In that case the context of the message is even less useful, especially considering there would be a several hour delay before the message could be delivered all the way from France to Britain.
More information on these sites, includes the various "decoded" phrases.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/12/16/world-war-2-pigeon-code-cracked_n_2311364.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2248818/Hit-Jerrys-panzers--code-dead-wartime-pigeon-cracked.html
Better known as 318230.
I don't know about WWI/WWII acronyms but it seems unlikely that they were all exactly five letters long and had letter frequency like this (look at all those Qs, Xs, and Zs). I do know that ciphertext is usually written in groups of five letters to provide spacing without giving clues about the spacing of the plaintext. Also, there is a bit of stuff in the middle of the page below the ciphertext (cropped out of most photos), which if I remember right was used for metadata about what code was used.
This sounds like a case of someone looking at random stuff and trying a bit too hard to make sense of it.
This message, if accurate, should be easily verifiable. This part of the message is particularly telling; "Counter Measures [against] Panzers Not Working". It should be a small matter to look at some archives for D-Day's "K" sector at 3:26 on the 27th of June '44 and see if any other dispatches mention any particular counter measures against the German armor in the area failed.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
They do that even today. The level of encryption is determined by the value of the Information. The value of the information is determined by how long the information is useful. For example positions and orders may be not be useful after a day so no need to use encryption that takes longer to break then a day.
Remember this is WW2 and encryption was really difficult. Either you could compute the cypher by hand and you had a high chance of error or you carried a heavy machine around that did the encryption. If you where a scout deep in enemy territory, having a bulky encryption machine is not very helpful.