Heh, looks kinda funny to see "standard DRM". While standard is all about being open, fair and compatible with others, DRM makes me think more about hiding in the dark, afraid of the light, keeping ones dirty secrets and trying to suppress the breathing of others. Doesn't come together.
plenty of hardware exist that do not work out of the box and automagically under Windows
You are right. However, no matter how it works on Windows or any other OS, we should make it run as smoothly as possible on Linux. Both to facilitate switches for others and to enjoy an easy setup ourselves, of course.
I just ran the Ubuntu live CD which didn't want to give me a higher screen resolution than 1024 by 768 and didn't get the network running.:-( Such things really need to be resolved, because even if _I_, in discussion with others, would be able to resolve all problems, my grandparents surely wouldn't.
By transferring the power from the Diesel Engine to an electric transmission, modern locomotives are able to smoothly apply power curves of well over 300KW without any of the slippage or rough starts associated with the Steam Engine.
My friends actually built a vehicle doing that for a parade at our university in Stockholm, Sweden. I filmed them riding it. That way they could put it in reverse without a mechanical mess. You see, it works by contracting and extending the wire between the head and the tail, and at the same time applying brakes at the proper places. Similar to the real animal!:-)
I, for one, start a business of selling a new drug that is suppossed to protect you against being struck by a lightning.
Well, there is a difference, I would say. The "states" of bird flu and lightning strikes cannot be described by only one number (the current death rate). What I meant is that a contagious disease can experience an explosive increase if the conditions are the right ones. I suppose this could happen if the number of infected people in an area exceeds a certain number (similar to how a fission chain reaction becomes self sustaining when the amount of fuel exceeds the critical mass). A lightning, on the other hand, wont strike you anymore just because other people around you just got struck.
OK, you have a point. You could disregard the input completely, and output, say, zero, every time. I guess that would make for high precision and it sure is about the fastest you could ever do.
Interesting thing, they often run only on systems (Windows) that are closed and you have to buy a license for. And if the system is too old, I don't know if you could even buy it. This suddenly sticks out more than usual, when it comes to archiving historical documents for the good of the general public.
Then the spam program will use Natural Language Processing techniques to send spam messages to the victim's contacts that look a lot like messages that the user has previously sent.
Do they make money on that? (1. Re-send mail 2. ??? 3. Profit!)?
It seems like that SMITHYCODE should be used somehow, as a key or something...
Hmm, you have a point. Mabye he reasoned that we would first se if the picked-out letters formed a message as they stand, and if they didn't, perhaps lose interest and not pursue the solution unless he hinted in this way that there really was something to crack. I dunno.
Where else is there a 'J', 'i', 'x', 'o'.. in the cypher, I only see one each, so why are they being counted as 'credable'?
They aren't very credible, but more than those that don't appear a single time in the sensible part of the sentence. The ones you mention gets some credit for being there without breaking everything. For example, they seem more correct as they stand, than they would if "j" and "x" were to switch translations with eachother and give us "Rn eveiy way stands men".
Of course, without having tried all possibilities, I can't even know that a single one is correct.
Do we have any estimation of how probable such a phrase is to appear by chance? A good way to get one is to determine if there are other possible solutions. Is it possible to get more solutions from that cracker?
Btw, Every Way Stands Men yields no results at Google. I mean, it could have been something famous.;-)
Now, if it's a substitution cipher, any ciphertext letter must of course translate into the same cleartext letter every time. But, among the gibberish, there are cipherletters that don't occur anywhere else in the ciphertext. We have therefore no reason to believe the program's output on those positions. The translation of cipheretters that _do_ occur in other parts, on the other hand, gets credibility from the fact that they seem to work there (but remember, that they aren't _necessarily_ correct). Picking out the cleartext letters in the gibberish part which don't occur elsewhere, we get:
Ja eiext ost gpsacg rea mq wfkadpmqzv In every way stands men of n tof
So we have the ciphertext letters "wfkdzv" left to translate into cleartext that doesn't include any letters from the rest of the cleartext. Note, however, that the so far revealed message isn't necessarily correct! Some of the letters, such as the "J", translating into "I", has "low credibility" since it occurs only once and thus is less probable to break the sentence if incorrect. That is, we would perhaps not notice if it's incorrect.
Supposing that the version given above doesn't contain any erroneously tranlated letters, the ones left are "bcghjklpquxz". Quite many, but only one vowel. Can we complete the message with that? Remember that changing some of the other letters could be necessary.
Well, here's what I've come up with, using the code breaker posted previously:
So that means it _was_ a substitution cipher after all, because that's what that program handles, isn't it? In that case, it wasn't too easy to figure it out by statistics (I tried a little by hand), due to the small amount of data. More importantly, it might be difficult to figure out the last letters at all, since the statistic data for some letters are almost nonexistant. The mentioned program mabye uses brute force and compares the result with a word list. That would of course be a way around the frequency analysis, but it didn't take you all the way, you say?
I saw that all the paragraphs are numbered and figured that there had to be some relevance to that. I don't think skipped paragraphs can just be spaces, though:
Could it be that paragraphs usually are numbered in this kind of text? I dunno, and I don't want to ruin you good ideas here.. Just another viewpoint.
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Heh, looks kinda funny to see "standard DRM". While standard is all about being open, fair and compatible with others, DRM makes me think more about hiding in the dark, afraid of the light, keeping ones dirty secrets and trying to suppress the breathing of others. Doesn't come together.
I just ran the Ubuntu live CD which didn't want to give me a higher screen resolution than 1024 by 768 and didn't get the network running. :-( Such things really need to be resolved, because even if _I_, in discussion with others, would be able to resolve all problems, my grandparents surely wouldn't.
...will enable you to see it. Hope it works in the so called reality too..
Interesting thing, they often run only on systems (Windows) that are closed and you have to buy a license for. And if the system is too old, I don't know if you could even buy it. This suddenly sticks out more than usual, when it comes to archiving historical documents for the good of the general public.
Of course, without having tried all possibilities, I can't even know that a single one is correct.
Btw, Every Way Stands Men yields no results at Google. I mean, it could have been something famous.
Now, if it's a substitution cipher, any ciphertext letter must of course translate into the same cleartext letter every time. But, among the gibberish, there are cipherletters that don't occur anywhere else in the ciphertext. We have therefore no reason to believe the program's output on those positions. The translation of cipheretters that _do_ occur in other parts, on the other hand, gets credibility from the fact that they seem to work there (but remember, that they aren't _necessarily_ correct). Picking out the cleartext letters in the gibberish part which don't occur elsewhere, we get:So we have the ciphertext letters "wfkdzv" left to translate into cleartext that doesn't include any letters from the rest of the cleartext. Note, however, that the so far revealed message isn't necessarily correct! Some of the letters, such as the "J", translating into "I", has "low credibility" since it occurs only once and thus is less probable to break the sentence if incorrect. That is, we would perhaps not notice if it's incorrect.
Supposing that the version given above doesn't contain any erroneously tranlated letters, the ones left are "bcghjklpquxz". Quite many, but only one vowel. Can we complete the message with that? Remember that changing some of the other letters could be necessary.
Post your findings!