This isn't the first time The Sims appeared on prime time. Drew Carey is a very big (hyuk, hyuk) fan of the game; in return for having plugged the game on the show, he is slated to appear in a Sims expansion pack.
If Blizzard really wants to protect its valuable names, it ought to start by suing Dairy Queen. Those heartless bastards are mixing toppings into ice cream and calling the result a Blizzard!
Better yet, why doesn't the software company just change its name to 'Generic Ice Cream Treat Entertainment'? Then we might take their complaint, if not seriously, then at least at something closer to its actual value.
In case their server 'fall down go boom', here's the text of the announcement:
Cipher Solved, But Mystery Remains
Williams
College Professor Shawn Rosenheim announced yesterday that the Edgar
Allan Poe Cryptographic Challenge contest has a winner.
After over 150 years, Gil Broza of Toronto has solved the second of
two mysterious ciphers left by Poe for future readers.
Poe
was fascinated by cryptography, which he often treated in his journalism
and fiction. His most famous
story - "The Gold-Bug" - centers on the solution to a cipher,
which turns out to be a map to hidden pirate treasure, and he concealed
anagrams and hidden messages in many of his poems.
In 1839 Poe even conducted his own cryptographic challenge. Writing
in Alexander's Weekly Messenger, Poe challenged his readers to submit
their cryptographs to him, asserting that he would solve them all.
A year later Poe wrote an article for Graham's
Magazine entitled "A Few Words on Secret Writing". In it,
he offered to give a free subscription to the magazine to anyone
who would send him a cipher he could not crack.
Poe
ended the contest six months later, claiming to have solved all of the 100
legitimate ciphers sent to him, and complaining that cracking ciphers
consumed time he should have spent writing fiction - a luxury Poe could
ill afford. He concluded by
publishing two ciphers ostensibly sent in by "Mr. W. B. Tyler,"
praising their author as "a gentleman whose abilities we highly
respect" and challenging readers to solve them.
There
the ciphers remained,
apparently forgotten, until 1985, when Professor Louis Renza of Dartmouth
College suggested that Tyler was actually a double for Poe himself.
Renza sees Poe's fiction "as containing not readily apparent
anagrams as well as thinly disguised allegories of his process of
composing his tales -- often the very tale one is reading." He felt
Poe's cryptography articles shared this approach. In addition, a search of
the major city directories of the time failed to locate a W. B. Tyler.
That absence was, Renza admits, "thin evidence, to be sure, but
enough for me to venture my guess."
Renza's
theory was later elaborated by Rosenheim in his book The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the
Internet (Johns Hopkins, 1997). In
it, Rosenheim musters considerable circumstantial evidence which points to
the likelihood that the ciphers were placed in the magazine by Poe as a
final challenge to his readers. Tyler's
letter to Poe, Rosenheim notes, sounds exactly like Poe's prose, and it
praises Poe extravagantly. Tyler
also claims that cryptography gives him "a history of my mental
existence, to which I may turn, and in imagination, retrace former
pleasures, and again live through by-gone scenes--secure in the
conviction that the magic scroll has a tale for my eyes alone.
Who has not longed for such a confidante?"
(Secret Writing, December, 1841)
The
appeal of the "magic scroll" has to do with the preservation of the
past, fixed by its encoding. Cryptography
provides Tyler and Poe with a way to preserve the self (as writing) from
the destructions of time.Tyler's
"who has not longed for such a confidante?" also echoes "The Murders
in the Rue Morgue," where the narrator "confides" to Dupin that his
company seems "a treasure beyond price."
And Tyler's claim that the cryptograph will not "betray its
mission, even if intercepted...or if stolen from its violated
depository" (SW, 141), directly recalls the violated crypts and tombs of
"Ligeia," "Ulalume," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and
other Poe texts. Poe is even known to have written to himself, publishing
several anonymous reviews of his own writing, and acknowledging in
Graham's Magazine that some readers harbored a suspicion that his
amazing decryptions were the result of "our writing ciphers to
ourselves."
Spurred
to action by Rosenheim's work, in 1992 Professor Terence Whalen solved
the first of Tyler's cryptographs -- a monoalphabetic substitution cipher.
Decrypted, it read:
The
soul secure in her existence smiles at the drawn dagger and defies its
point. The stars shall fade away, the sun himself grow dim with age and
nature sink in years, but thou shall flourish in immortal youth, unhurt
amid the war of elements, the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds.
At
first Whalen believed he had uncovered an original Poe text, even though a
number of features, such as the heavy use of alliteration, were unlike
Poe. As it turns out,
the lines come from the 1713 play Cato,
by the English essayist Joseph Addison. But that does not rule out Poe as
the originator of the cryptograph, who may have selected Addison's text
because its themes of apocalyptic collapse and the soul's immortality
were also central to his own poetry and prose, which often treat ciphers
as a kind of vault or crypt protected from time
Whalen's
solution did not answer the question of who created the cipher. Hoping to
discover the answer, Rosenheim established a $2500 prize, supported by
Williams College, for the solution of the second cipher.
As he explains, "The contest was an avenue of last resort.
Because the second cipher uses six separate alphabets to encode its
text, it's several orders of magnitude harder than the first.
I tried to solve it myself and failed.
I also sent it to various cryptographers, from the editor of The
Cryptogram magazine to professionals at Bell Labs, but no one was able
to help me."
So
things would probably have remained, except that in 1998, Jim Moore, a
software designer specializing in encryption, heard of the contest and
offered to build a website to promote it (a site hosted through Bokler
Software Corporation --
www.bokler.com). In
the next two years, Rosenheim and Moore fielded hundreds of inquiries from
would-be sleuths in America, Europe, and South America. Most wrote once
and were never heard of again. Then,
in July, Gil Broza, a software engineer living in Toronto, submitted what
turned out to be the correct decryption. Tyler's cryptograph proved to be
a polyalphabetic substitution cipher using several different symbols for
each English letter. The number of different symbols is greater as the
plaintext letter is more frequent in English text, for instance 'z' is
encrypted by two symbols and 'e' by 14. Given
the brevity of the cipher, this meant that there was almost no information
about letter frequencies, which cryptographers count as their most potent
tool for decryption.In
addition, Broza's solution revealed that the original cipher had over
two dozen mistakes introduced by the typesetters or the encipherer.
Many of these were trivial(such
as "warb" for "warm," "shaye" for "share," "langomr"
for "langour"), but even after Broza corrected obvious errors, the
final plaintext is sometimes garbled:
It
was early spring, warm and sultry glowed the afternoon.
The very breezes seemed to share the delicious langour of universal
nature, are laden the various and mingled perfumes of the rose and the -essaerne
(?), the woodbine and its wildflower.
They slowly wafted their fragrant offering to the open window where
sat the lovers. The ardent
sun shoot fell upon her blushing face and its gentle beauty was more like
the creation of romance or the fair inspiration of a dream than the actual
reality on earth. Tenderly
her lover gazed upon her as the clusterous ringlets were edged (?) by
amorous and sportive zephyrs and when he perceived (?) the rude intrusion
of the sunlight he sprang to draw the curtain but softly she stayed him.
"No, no, dear Charles," she softly said, "much rather
you'ld I have a little sun than no air at all."
So who composed the ciphers? Rosenheim
believes it was still probably Poe. "The
text is clearly not by Poe, but from some unidentified novel or story of
the period. But like the
first cipher text, its themes (enclosure, the dangers of exposure,
immortality) are absolutely typical of Poe's writing.
Plus there's the case of Poe's misleading comments about the
ciphers." In 1842 Poe wrote
to a Mr. Bolton, who was attempting to solve Tyler's ciphers "It is
unnecessary to trouble yourself with the cipher printed in our Dec. number
- it is insoluble for the reason that it is merely type in pi or
something near it. Being
absent from the office for a short time, I did not see a proof, and the
compositors have made a complete medley.
It has not even a remote resemblance to the MS." (http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/gm41sw03.htm).& nbsp;
But
as Broza's solutions shows, the cipher is not hash, but English prose.
The second cipher's many errors, the judges agreed, stem from the
difficulties of distinguishing between the different typestyles and their
inversions and reversals. William
Lenhart, Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at Williams
College, tested a range of alternative solutions, hoping to improve on the
spelling and grammar of the plaintext, but found only trivial
misidentifications by Broza.
In
the end, as Jeffery Kurz writes, "If the text turns out to be by Poe, it
would fit into his grand scheme of speaking from the dead and be the final
message from one of the greatest authors in American literature, a writer
obsessed with the macabre and the transcendent power of words" (March 8,
2000, Salon.com).
And
if not? That, Rosenheim
suggests, may be an equally interesting prospect.
"One of the central themes of The
Cryptographic Imagination is the difficulty of knowing who speaks in a
written text. However much we
like to fancy ourselves unique individuals, writing is a slippery,
transpersonal medium. Think
about the continuing arguments about whether Shakespeare was a
middle-class boy from Stratford, or Francis Bacon.
Better yet, think about the difficulty even serious scholars have
in identifying the provenance of newly discovered poems - often, they
simply can't tell if they're
by Shakespeare - arguably the greatest and most distinctive English
dramatist - or not."
Thus,
Rosenheim insists, there is something mysterious even in the decrypted
cipher - not only because we do not know who enciphered it, but because
it reminds us of the uncanny and
limited immortality writing sometimes affords.
As Poe wrote in his obituary for Margaret Fuller, "The soul is a
cypher, in the sense of a cryptograph; and the shorter a cryptograph is,
the more difficult there is in its comprehension."
Or as Poe put it, in "Shadow -- A Parable":
Ye who read are still among the living; but I
who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows.
For indeed strange things shall happen, and secret things be known, and
many centuries shall pass away, ere these memorials be seen of men. And,
when seen, there will be some to disbelieve, and some to doubt, and yet a
few who will find much to ponder upon in the characters here graven with a
stylus of iron.
How the cypher was
broken
By
Gil Broza
Note:
see the pdf file for additional details
The
first task at hand was to determine the language and encryption method.
The cypher solved by Whalen being in English, and either presumed author
(Poe or Tyler) being an English speaker provided good grounds for assuming
the cypher was in English. Further corroboration for that was provided by
the distribution of word lengths, which quite resembles modern English but
is even more likely older English. Assuming that the running text was
indeed broken down at word boundaries - that is, its separation to letter
sequences was not intended to mislead cryptanalysis- the repetition of
several words, even with minor modifications, led me to believe the method
was that of simple polyalphabetic substitution. Repetitions may also occur
when using methods such as Vigenère, but the fact that the distances
between repetitions had no common denominator ruled these methods out.
Letter frequencies, the almost total absence of patterns, and Tyler's
bragging about the cypher's resilience (which was obviously to be taken
with a grain of salt, judging from the already solved cypher) all
contributed to the impression that he simply tried to obliterate letter
frequency by using numerous substitutions for frequent letters. This
indeed turned out to be the case: he used more than 14 different letters
for 'e' but only two for 'z'.
The
fact that several cypher-words were repeated with changes in their
characters' orientation or size (e.g. 'DNB', 'JCP') made me
think that character inversion was just a smokescreen, but pursuing this
direction proved futile. The same happened when I tried breaking the
cypher with its words reversed, following the Whalen cypher precedent. The
more I worked on it, the more my belief grew stronger that even though the
cypher may well be simple polyalphabetic substitution, its author
obviously took pains to do a good job on it, taking care to spread the use
of each cypher-letter uniformly throughout the text. In fact, I am sure
that had Tyler not used character inversion "to make assurance doubly
sure" - thus employing only half as many cypher-letters - the cypher
would have been broken by now. Substituting some repetitive short cypher-words
for likely English words (such as 'the', 'and', 'not') yielded
nothing, as the low letter frequency and lack of patterns would not allow
me to validate these substitutions.
At
this point I began to believe that I should try to use the computer to
break the cypher. Since there were around 140 different cypher-letters,
half of which were obviously difficult to manipulate in ASCII, I employed
a transcription of two characters for every cypher-letter, the first
indicating its orientation and the second its identity and case. There
were some multi-word patterns: groups of non-consecutive cypher-words that
shared several characters. I wrote a program, "Matches", that tried to
match these patterns against wordlists. The output for a multi-word
pattern typically amounted to hundreds or thousands of word groups that
matched the patterns. These lists were mostly useless due to their sheer
size, but they did help in some cases, such as identifying broken
repetitions and ruling out certain substitutions. I also wrote a second
program, "Patterns", to help me identify those multi-word patterns
that shared the most letters, and as such provided enough constraints
against the wordlists. But the more I used the program the more it became
clear that solution did not lie in these programs because the outputs I
got were, for the most part, meaningless. The wordlists I found on the
Internet were either too comprehensive, providing too many far-fetched
words, or too small to reflect common use of the English language (e.g.
missing conjugations). Any good yields turned out to be incorrect
substitutions. Much of this work I had to revisit once I found that not
only I had several mistakes when transcribing the cypher to a file, the
cypher I had downloaded from the contest's website differed in at least
nine cypher-letters from the one actually published by Poe, a blurred scan
of which was provided on the website of the Poe Society of Baltimore.
Apparently, the contest's website used a tome from the turn of the
century that contained a manually copied version of the cypher.
Not
wanting to believe that the cypher was a hoax, my only conclusion from the
above results was that the cypher simply contained too many errors to
allow successful pattern-matching against lists of correctly spelt words.
I tried another approach with the computer's aid: looking for on-line
texts containing word sequences that had the same lengths of words as some
sequences in the cypher. My primary focus was on the sequence
'XQCMKUYWEKa gs B', or word lengths 11-2-1, which has a rather low
probability of appearing in English texts. I searched the Internet for
texts by Joseph Addison - the author of Whalen's plaintext - and
other poets and writers predating Poe, but found nothing. Fortunately, I
abandoned this search early, since it would have yielded nothing, as the
text I finally deciphered was nowhere to be found on the Internet.
By
now, almost seven weeks after first tackling the cypher, I was on the
brink of giving up. But I decided to give it a final chance before saving
it aside for next year. I determined to try substituting ALL repeating
three-letter words with 'the', 'and', 'not' and follow each
direction, letting my imagination roam freely. As I was certain there were
many errors, I decided not to back down on any approach. I was almost
certain that 'AmL' stood for 'the', since it appears once after a
long word, and once after a long word and a two-letter word, which must be
a preposition. With these three plaintext letters I now had the following
three patterns: '1?2e??', 'e?3' and '132', which seemed
promising enough. "Matches" provided over 3500 word groups, many of
which were likely, but when correlating them with other occurrences of
these characters a specific one caught my attention: 'ardent',
'eye', 'and' (one character in '132' had to be in error
because they contradict, but I tried both.) This was the crux of the
solution: I now had a word that looked like '??ter???n', which had to
be 'afternoon'. I also had two words, 'th??' and '??re', which
seemed plausible parts of words in English. Substituting the remaining
letters in 'afternoon' provided the word 'of' before the second
appearance of 'the', and I was quite certain now that I was on the
right track. Other patterns that now had at least one plaintext letter
could be re-scrutinized; thus I had a sure substitution with 'KJ'
'JERK' = 'no' 'open'. The five-letter word starting with
'ea' had to be 'early' or 'earth'. The penultimate plaintext
letter 'n' in some words indicated 'ing'. All this time I was
trying likely guesses as well as wild ones, since most substitutions had
at least one occurrence that didn't look promising, due to errors. At
several points during the deciphering procedure I was stymied by grave
errors in the cypher, as well as by bad substitutions on my part, the most
amazing of which was that the 'ardent eye' turned out to be an
'ardent sun', with the latter word also misspelt 'zun'...
The
Winner:
Gil Broza was born in 1973 in Israel. He has been
interested in languages and mathematics since early age, and has been
solving cryptograms in crossword magazines since age 13. He holds a B.Sc.
in mathematics and computer sciences and an M.Sc. in computational
linguistics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has been working
as a software engineer in the last seven years. In 1999 he moved with his
wife Ronit to Toronto, Canada.
His personal interest in Poe's writing was first sparked in high
school while studying "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven". It wasn't
until finishing David Kahn's The Codebreakers and looking for cryptographic challenges on the
Internet that he discovered the Poe contest, which had already been
running for two years. This provided the perfect opportunity to engage in
a real, historically valuable cryptanalytic challenge.
The
Judges:
William Lenhart
is chair of the Computer Science Department, and Professor of Computer
Science and Mathematics at Williams College.
The recipient of both Sloan and NSF grants, he has authored or
coauthored numerous papers in Graph Theory, Graph Drawing, Computational
Geometry, and Combinatorial Algorithms.
Steven Rachman
is Associate Professor of English and Director of the American Studies
Program at Michigan State University.
He is the coeditor of The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (Johns Hopkins, 1996), as well
as of a forthcoming study of Herman Melville and illness.
Shawn Rosenheim
teaches literature and film at Williams College, where he also directs the
Center for Technology in the Arts and Humanities.
He is the author of The
Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet
(Johns Hopkins, 1997). He
may be reached at Shawn.Rosenheim@williams.edu.
Webmaster:
James Moore has held a keen interest in mathematics since an
early age, and in its applications to cryptography and security for the
majority of his career. He is a founding partner of Bokler
Software Corp., developers of cryptographic software libraries.
I used Vote Swap 2000 to swap my Nader vote with a Gore Texan while it was still legal. (My understanding: It's still legal to swap votes, but it's not legal for a web site to broker the exchange of votes.)
So I'll vote for Gore in Florida on behalf of my Texan swapmate, and he'll vote for Nader in Texas on my behalf. It's not Single Transferable Vote, but it's the best system available.
You can do this too.
Find a friend you can trust who usually votes against your candidate, and agree among yourselves that you will both vote for your favorite third-party candidates. It's that simple.
If I found out that someone had been using Linux without talking to me about it, I'd ask them if they'd be interested in doing more IT work.
I'd also address why they hadn't felt comfortable talking to me about it. Communication problems can bite you in the ass later on. Mostly, though, I'd be proud, and a little bit scared, to have a fellow geek on board.
According to thomas.loc.gov, the bill in question is H.R. 5364, and the official title is "To amend title 35, United States Code, to provide for improvements in the quality of patents on certain inventions".
I recently alerted my fellow epixtech/Dynix customers to the HP-UX ftpd vulnerability. Not only did epixtech not tell anyone about it until I sounded the alarm, they'd rather extort $200 per server to install a new *binary* than patch it proactively and get a reputation as a security-conscious vendor.
Public libraries, unfortunately, are too often dependent on fiercely proprietary-minded vendors for their daily operations.
Incidentally, the "go get MySQL, you dumbass" posters are missing an important point: libraries use the MARC data standard for catalog records, and SQL doesn't cope well with the kind of tricks MARC can do.
3M says that "Fluorinert FC-77 liquid, a perfluorocarbon (PFC), has a high global warming potential and a long atmospheric lifetime. As such, its use should be carefully managed to minimize emissions."
So it not only cost these guys NZD 1000, but it also contributes significantly to global warming. Right on, guys! Well done! At this rate, most of New Zealand will be underwater in a few more years. Now that's what I call a problem that solves itself.
Here, have some more. Let's see if we can get that 286 to play Diablo 2.
As others have already noted, the Library of Congress and other libraries offer a free Z39.50 service. If you'd like to build your own interface, try the Perl Z39.50 module.
We're all familiar with the way a robots.txt file can tell well-behaved robots and web spiders whether or not they are welcome.
How about a mungers.txt standard for exclusion of web-munging programs? Worried corporations could then add "Dialectizer: *" or "ThirdVoice: *" to their mungers.txt file and not have to worry about it.
Taking this idea one step farther, we could exclude User-Agents entirely. If you're not going to design an accessible page, your mungers.txt file should say so. Use it to exclude Lynx, Netscape, Amaya, MSIE, or any browser you choose. Or just put a big fat asterisk in mungers.txt and proclaim to the world that your web design is so bleeding-edge that there aren't any browsers available yet to handle it. It's your choice.
Real librarians will get a lot of flak over Billington's comments. But the kicker is:
James Billington is not a librarian.
In fact, only two people who have served in his position have ever been librarians -- i.e., only two "Librarians of Congress" had worked as a librarian before being appointed to that job. Billington is a historian, and has neither the master's degree nor the professional education that an actual librarian would have.
Please don't take his comments as representative of all librarians -- most of us DO honor our responsibility to make information as accessible as possible. To that end, many librarians oppose UCITA, oppose the Copyright Extension Act, and oppose censorship offline and online.
Slashdot Mirror
A more concise version would be "Dangerous, my ass!" -- but that would be either redundant or inaccurate, depending on where the tattoo goes.
Just get four friends to stand around you and wheeze loudly. "Tuhh tuhh... WHEE-huhhh! Tuhh tuhh... WHEE-huhhh, WHEE-huhhh!"
This isn't the first time The Sims appeared on prime time. Drew Carey is a very big (hyuk, hyuk) fan of the game; in return for having plugged the game on the show, he is slated to appear in a Sims expansion pack.
Better yet, why doesn't the software company just change its name to 'Generic Ice Cream Treat Entertainment'? Then we might take their complaint, if not seriously, then at least at something closer to its actual value.
'Blizzard Entertainment', my Aunt Fanny.
Bravo to the amici curiae[?] for giving the court (or at least its clerks) such fine reading material!
Too bad movies based on video games don't do as well as TV shows based on video games. That wisecracking "Pac-Man" was amusing in a demented way.
Good... bad... I'm the guy with the guitar.
Cipher Solved, But Mystery Remains
Williams College Professor Shawn Rosenheim announced yesterday that the Edgar Allan Poe Cryptographic Challenge contest has a winner. After over 150 years, Gil Broza of Toronto has solved the second of two mysterious ciphers left by Poe for future readers.
Poe was fascinated by cryptography, which he often treated in his journalism and fiction. His most famous story - "The Gold-Bug" - centers on the solution to a cipher, which turns out to be a map to hidden pirate treasure, and he concealed anagrams and hidden messages in many of his poems. In 1839 Poe even conducted his own cryptographic challenge. Writing in Alexander's Weekly Messenger, Poe challenged his readers to submit their cryptographs to him, asserting that he would solve them all. A year later Poe wrote an article for Graham's Magazine entitled "A Few Words on Secret Writing". In it, he offered to give a free subscription to the magazine to anyone who would send him a cipher he could not crack.
Poe ended the contest six months later, claiming to have solved all of the 100 legitimate ciphers sent to him, and complaining that cracking ciphers consumed time he should have spent writing fiction - a luxury Poe could ill afford. He concluded by publishing two ciphers ostensibly sent in by "Mr. W. B. Tyler," praising their author as "a gentleman whose abilities we highly respect" and challenging readers to solve them.
There the ciphers remained, apparently forgotten, until 1985, when Professor Louis Renza of Dartmouth College suggested that Tyler was actually a double for Poe himself. Renza sees Poe's fiction "as containing not readily apparent anagrams as well as thinly disguised allegories of his process of composing his tales -- often the very tale one is reading." He felt Poe's cryptography articles shared this approach. In addition, a search of the major city directories of the time failed to locate a W. B. Tyler. That absence was, Renza admits, "thin evidence, to be sure, but enough for me to venture my guess."
Renza's theory was later elaborated by Rosenheim in his book The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet (Johns Hopkins, 1997). In it, Rosenheim musters considerable circumstantial evidence which points to the likelihood that the ciphers were placed in the magazine by Poe as a final challenge to his readers. Tyler's letter to Poe, Rosenheim notes, sounds exactly like Poe's prose, and it praises Poe extravagantly. Tyler also claims that cryptography gives him "a history of my mental existence, to which I may turn, and in imagination, retrace former pleasures, and again live through by-gone scenes--secure in the conviction that the magic scroll has a tale for my eyes alone. Who has not longed for such a confidante?" (Secret Writing, December, 1841)
The appeal of the "magic scroll" has to do with the preservation of the past, fixed by its encoding. Cryptography provides Tyler and Poe with a way to preserve the self (as writing) from the destructions of time.Tyler's "who has not longed for such a confidante?" also echoes "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," where the narrator "confides" to Dupin that his company seems "a treasure beyond price." And Tyler's claim that the cryptograph will not "betray its mission, even if intercepted...or if stolen from its violated depository" (SW, 141), directly recalls the violated crypts and tombs of "Ligeia," "Ulalume," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and other Poe texts. Poe is even known to have written to himself, publishing several anonymous reviews of his own writing, and acknowledging in Graham's Magazine that some readers harbored a suspicion that his amazing decryptions were the result of "our writing ciphers to ourselves."
Spurred to action by Rosenheim's work, in 1992 Professor Terence Whalen solved the first of Tyler's cryptographs -- a monoalphabetic substitution cipher. Decrypted, it read:
At first Whalen believed he had uncovered an original Poe text, even though a number of features, such as the heavy use of alliteration, were unlike Poe. As it turns out, the lines come from the 1713 play Cato, by the English essayist Joseph Addison. But that does not rule out Poe as the originator of the cryptograph, who may have selected Addison's text because its themes of apocalyptic collapse and the soul's immortality were also central to his own poetry and prose, which often treat ciphers as a kind of vault or crypt protected from time
Whalen's solution did not answer the question of who created the cipher. Hoping to discover the answer, Rosenheim established a $2500 prize, supported by Williams College, for the solution of the second cipher. As he explains, "The contest was an avenue of last resort. Because the second cipher uses six separate alphabets to encode its text, it's several orders of magnitude harder than the first. I tried to solve it myself and failed. I also sent it to various cryptographers, from the editor of The Cryptogram magazine to professionals at Bell Labs, but no one was able to help me."
So things would probably have remained, except that in 1998, Jim Moore, a software designer specializing in encryption, heard of the contest and offered to build a website to promote it (a site hosted through Bokler Software Corporation -- www.bokler.com). In the next two years, Rosenheim and Moore fielded hundreds of inquiries from would-be sleuths in America, Europe, and South America. Most wrote once and were never heard of again. Then, in July, Gil Broza, a software engineer living in Toronto, submitted what turned out to be the correct decryption. Tyler's cryptograph proved to be a polyalphabetic substitution cipher using several different symbols for each English letter. The number of different symbols is greater as the plaintext letter is more frequent in English text, for instance 'z' is encrypted by two symbols and 'e' by 14. Given the brevity of the cipher, this meant that there was almost no information about letter frequencies, which cryptographers count as their most potent tool for decryption.In addition, Broza's solution revealed that the original cipher had over two dozen mistakes introduced by the typesetters or the encipherer. Many of these were trivial(such as "warb" for "warm," "shaye" for "share," "langomr" for "langour"), but even after Broza corrected obvious errors, the final plaintext is sometimes garbled:
So who composed the ciphers? Rosenheim believes it was still probably Poe. "The text is clearly not by Poe, but from some unidentified novel or story of the period. But like the first cipher text, its themes (enclosure, the dangers of exposure, immortality) are absolutely typical of Poe's writing. Plus there's the case of Poe's misleading comments about the ciphers." In 1842 Poe wrote to a Mr. Bolton, who was attempting to solve Tyler's ciphers "It is unnecessary to trouble yourself with the cipher printed in our Dec. number - it is insoluble for the reason that it is merely type in pi or something near it. Being absent from the office for a short time, I did not see a proof, and the compositors have made a complete medley. It has not even a remote resemblance to the MS." (http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/gm41sw03.htm).& nbsp;
But as Broza's solutions shows, the cipher is not hash, but English prose. The second cipher's many errors, the judges agreed, stem from the difficulties of distinguishing between the different typestyles and their inversions and reversals. William Lenhart, Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at Williams College, tested a range of alternative solutions, hoping to improve on the spelling and grammar of the plaintext, but found only trivial misidentifications by Broza.
In the end, as Jeffery Kurz writes, "If the text turns out to be by Poe, it would fit into his grand scheme of speaking from the dead and be the final message from one of the greatest authors in American literature, a writer obsessed with the macabre and the transcendent power of words" (March 8, 2000, Salon.com).
And if not? That, Rosenheim suggests, may be an equally interesting prospect. "One of the central themes of The Cryptographic Imagination is the difficulty of knowing who speaks in a written text. However much we like to fancy ourselves unique individuals, writing is a slippery, transpersonal medium. Think about the continuing arguments about whether Shakespeare was a middle-class boy from Stratford, or Francis Bacon. Better yet, think about the difficulty even serious scholars have in identifying the provenance of newly discovered poems - often, they simply can't tell if they're by Shakespeare - arguably the greatest and most distinctive English dramatist - or not."
Thus, Rosenheim insists, there is something mysterious even in the decrypted cipher - not only because we do not know who enciphered it, but because it reminds us of the uncanny and limited immortality writing sometimes affords. As Poe wrote in his obituary for Margaret Fuller, "The soul is a cypher, in the sense of a cryptograph; and the shorter a cryptograph is, the more difficult there is in its comprehension." Or as Poe put it, in "Shadow -- A Parable":
Ye who read are still among the living; but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows. For indeed strange things shall happen, and secret things be known, and many centuries shall pass away, ere these memorials be seen of men. And, when seen, there will be some to disbelieve, and some to doubt, and yet a few who will find much to ponder upon in the characters here graven with a stylus of iron.
How the cypher was brokenNote: see the pdf file for additional details
The first task at hand was to determine the language and encryption method. The cypher solved by Whalen being in English, and either presumed author (Poe or Tyler) being an English speaker provided good grounds for assuming the cypher was in English. Further corroboration for that was provided by the distribution of word lengths, which quite resembles modern English but is even more likely older English. Assuming that the running text was indeed broken down at word boundaries - that is, its separation to letter sequences was not intended to mislead cryptanalysis- the repetition of several words, even with minor modifications, led me to believe the method was that of simple polyalphabetic substitution. Repetitions may also occur when using methods such as Vigenère, but the fact that the distances between repetitions had no common denominator ruled these methods out. Letter frequencies, the almost total absence of patterns, and Tyler's bragging about the cypher's resilience (which was obviously to be taken with a grain of salt, judging from the already solved cypher) all contributed to the impression that he simply tried to obliterate letter frequency by using numerous substitutions for frequent letters. This indeed turned out to be the case: he used more than 14 different letters for 'e' but only two for 'z'.
The fact that several cypher-words were repeated with changes in their characters' orientation or size (e.g. 'DNB', 'JCP') made me think that character inversion was just a smokescreen, but pursuing this direction proved futile. The same happened when I tried breaking the cypher with its words reversed, following the Whalen cypher precedent. The more I worked on it, the more my belief grew stronger that even though the cypher may well be simple polyalphabetic substitution, its author obviously took pains to do a good job on it, taking care to spread the use of each cypher-letter uniformly throughout the text. In fact, I am sure that had Tyler not used character inversion "to make assurance doubly sure" - thus employing only half as many cypher-letters - the cypher would have been broken by now. Substituting some repetitive short cypher-words for likely English words (such as 'the', 'and', 'not') yielded nothing, as the low letter frequency and lack of patterns would not allow me to validate these substitutions.
At this point I began to believe that I should try to use the computer to break the cypher. Since there were around 140 different cypher-letters, half of which were obviously difficult to manipulate in ASCII, I employed a transcription of two characters for every cypher-letter, the first indicating its orientation and the second its identity and case. There were some multi-word patterns: groups of non-consecutive cypher-words that shared several characters. I wrote a program, "Matches", that tried to match these patterns against wordlists. The output for a multi-word pattern typically amounted to hundreds or thousands of word groups that matched the patterns. These lists were mostly useless due to their sheer size, but they did help in some cases, such as identifying broken repetitions and ruling out certain substitutions. I also wrote a second program, "Patterns", to help me identify those multi-word patterns that shared the most letters, and as such provided enough constraints against the wordlists. But the more I used the program the more it became clear that solution did not lie in these programs because the outputs I got were, for the most part, meaningless. The wordlists I found on the Internet were either too comprehensive, providing too many far-fetched words, or too small to reflect common use of the English language (e.g. missing conjugations). Any good yields turned out to be incorrect substitutions. Much of this work I had to revisit once I found that not only I had several mistakes when transcribing the cypher to a file, the cypher I had downloaded from the contest's website differed in at least nine cypher-letters from the one actually published by Poe, a blurred scan of which was provided on the website of the Poe Society of Baltimore. Apparently, the contest's website used a tome from the turn of the century that contained a manually copied version of the cypher.
Not wanting to believe that the cypher was a hoax, my only conclusion from the above results was that the cypher simply contained too many errors to allow successful pattern-matching against lists of correctly spelt words. I tried another approach with the computer's aid: looking for on-line texts containing word sequences that had the same lengths of words as some sequences in the cypher. My primary focus was on the sequence 'XQCMKUYWEKa gs B', or word lengths 11-2-1, which has a rather low probability of appearing in English texts. I searched the Internet for texts by Joseph Addison - the author of Whalen's plaintext - and other poets and writers predating Poe, but found nothing. Fortunately, I abandoned this search early, since it would have yielded nothing, as the text I finally deciphered was nowhere to be found on the Internet.
By now, almost seven weeks after first tackling the cypher, I was on the brink of giving up. But I decided to give it a final chance before saving it aside for next year. I determined to try substituting ALL repeating three-letter words with 'the', 'and', 'not' and follow each direction, letting my imagination roam freely. As I was certain there were many errors, I decided not to back down on any approach. I was almost certain that 'AmL' stood for 'the', since it appears once after a long word, and once after a long word and a two-letter word, which must be a preposition. With these three plaintext letters I now had the following three patterns: '1?2e??', 'e?3' and '132', which seemed promising enough. "Matches" provided over 3500 word groups, many of which were likely, but when correlating them with other occurrences of these characters a specific one caught my attention: 'ardent', 'eye', 'and' (one character in '132' had to be in error because they contradict, but I tried both.) This was the crux of the solution: I now had a word that looked like '??ter???n', which had to be 'afternoon'. I also had two words, 'th??' and '??re', which seemed plausible parts of words in English. Substituting the remaining letters in 'afternoon' provided the word 'of' before the second appearance of 'the', and I was quite certain now that I was on the right track. Other patterns that now had at least one plaintext letter could be re-scrutinized; thus I had a sure substitution with 'KJ' 'JERK' = 'no' 'open'. The five-letter word starting with 'ea' had to be 'early' or 'earth'. The penultimate plaintext letter 'n' in some words indicated 'ing'. All this time I was trying likely guesses as well as wild ones, since most substitutions had at least one occurrence that didn't look promising, due to errors. At several points during the deciphering procedure I was stymied by grave errors in the cypher, as well as by bad substitutions on my part, the most amazing of which was that the 'ardent eye' turned out to be an 'ardent sun', with the latter word also misspelt 'zun'...
The Winner: Gil Broza was born in 1973 in Israel. He has been interested in languages and mathematics since early age, and has been solving cryptograms in crossword magazines since age 13. He holds a B.Sc. in mathematics and computer sciences and an M.Sc. in computational linguistics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has been working as a software engineer in the last seven years. In 1999 he moved with his wife Ronit to Toronto, Canada. His personal interest in Poe's writing was first sparked in high school while studying "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven". It wasn't until finishing David Kahn's The Codebreakers and looking for cryptographic challenges on the Internet that he discovered the Poe contest, which had already been running for two years. This provided the perfect opportunity to engage in a real, historically valuable cryptanalytic challenge. The Judges: William Lenhart is chair of the Computer Science Department, and Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at Williams College. The recipient of both Sloan and NSF grants, he has authored or coauthored numerous papers in Graph Theory, Graph Drawing, Computational Geometry, and Combinatorial Algorithms. Webmaster:For Further Information:
So I'll vote for Gore in Florida on behalf of my Texan swapmate, and he'll vote for Nader in Texas on my behalf. It's not Single Transferable Vote, but it's the best system available.
You can do this too.
Find a friend you can trust who usually votes against your candidate, and agree among yourselves that you will both vote for your favorite third-party candidates. It's that simple.
I'd also address why they hadn't felt comfortable talking to me about it. Communication problems can bite you in the ass later on. Mostly, though, I'd be proud, and a little bit scared, to have a fellow geek on board.
H.R. 5364 has been sent to the House Committee on the Judiciary.
CueCat decoder .signature by Larry Wall: /\.([^.]+)/g;
#!/usr/bin/perl -n
printf "Serial: %s Type: %s Code: %s\n", map { tr/a-zA-Z0-9+-/ -_/; $_ = unpack
'u', chr(32 + length()*3/4) . $_; s/\0+$//; $_ ^= "C" x length; }
Sure, you could store every mp3 on Napster in one electron. There's just one problem: where do you plug it in?
I feel your pain, AC.
I recently alerted my fellow epixtech/Dynix customers to the HP-UX ftpd vulnerability. Not only did epixtech not tell anyone about it until I sounded the alarm, they'd rather extort $200 per server to install a new *binary* than patch it proactively and get a reputation as a security-conscious vendor.
Public libraries, unfortunately, are too often dependent on fiercely proprietary-minded vendors for their daily operations.
Incidentally, the "go get MySQL, you dumbass" posters are missing an important point: libraries use the MARC data standard for catalog records, and SQL doesn't cope well with the kind of tricks MARC can do.
At 64MB and 200MHz, my desktop PC is less powerful than this video card! Has anyone ported NetBSD to run on the GeForce2 yet?
So it not only cost these guys NZD 1000, but it also contributes significantly to global warming. Right on, guys! Well done! At this rate, most of New Zealand will be underwater in a few more years. Now that's what I call a problem that solves itself.
Here, have some more. Let's see if we can get that 286 to play Diablo 2.
As others have already noted, the Library of Congress and other libraries offer a free Z39.50 service. If you'd like to build your own interface, try the Perl Z39.50 module.
How about a mungers.txt standard for exclusion of web-munging programs? Worried corporations could then add "Dialectizer: *" or "ThirdVoice: *" to their mungers.txt file and not have to worry about it.
Taking this idea one step farther, we could exclude User-Agents entirely. If you're not going to design an accessible page, your mungers.txt file should say so. Use it to exclude Lynx, Netscape, Amaya, MSIE, or any browser you choose. Or just put a big fat asterisk in mungers.txt and proclaim to the world that your web design is so bleeding-edge that there aren't any browsers available yet to handle it. It's your choice.
mungers.txt: I See A Great Need.
I love the idea, but VAX is a trademark of Digital. I wonder if they'll throw a few lawyers at the EmVAX name...
Real librarians will get a lot of flak over Billington's comments. But the kicker is:
James Billington is not a librarian.
In fact, only two people who have served in his position have ever been librarians -- i.e., only two "Librarians of Congress" had worked as a librarian before being appointed to that job. Billington is a historian, and has neither the master's degree nor the professional education that an actual librarian would have.
Please don't take his comments as representative of all librarians -- most of us DO honor our responsibility to make information as accessible as possible. To that end, many librarians oppose UCITA, oppose the Copyright Extension Act, and oppose censorship offline and online.
See for yourself -- looks like someone decided to counterattack.
Funny, that seems to be the principle (sic) occupation of the binaries groups on Usenet, too. I guess we're all in it together. Thanks, Jack!
This may be the first time Playboy has praised something for going down on you *less* often...
Every platform, every browser? Good God, man! Do the math on that one someday!