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GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

bbc.co.uk

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Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#41

Post by mmjaa »

It doesn't matter how cute this story is, I still can't find myself empathising with the contention that GCHQ is anything other than a sinister, totalitarian organisation with the purpose of enslaving us all.

The Totalitarian Surveillance State, of which GCHQ is a lynchpin, is not cute, fuzzy, or endearing - in any way. Fluff pieces like this serve to promote the idea of GCHQ as an honourable organisation, when the truth is it is factually a tool of oppression used by the ruling elite to prevent their own usurpation by a revolution of the people.

GCHQ is a tool of the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex. Do not glorify its mission, which is to ensure we cannot, as a people, communicate freely without government intrusion.

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#42

Post by F_r_k »

mmjaa wrote: post #41

It doesn't matter how cute this story is, I still can't find myself empathising with the contention that GCHQ is anything other than a sinister, totalitarian organisation with the purpose of enslaving us all. The Totalitarian Surveillance State, of which GCHQ is a lynchpin, is not cute, fuzzy, or endearing - in any way. Fluff pieces like this serve to promote the idea of GCHQ as an honourable organisation, when the t…

What's pharma's implication in gchq?

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#43

Post by mmjaa »

F_r_k wrote: post #42
mmjaa wrote: post #41

It doesn't matter how cute this story is, I still can't find myself empathising with the contention that GCHQ is anything other than a sinister, totalitarian organisation with the purpose of enslaving us all. The Totalitarian Surveillance State, of which GCHQ is a lynchpin, is not cute, fuzzy, or endearing - in any way. Fluff pieces like this serve to promote the idea of GCHQ as an honourable organisation, when the t…

What's pharma's implication in gchq?

Big Pharma is another key tool in the oppression of the masses.

Big Pharma and Big Military work hand in hand to ensure there are Big Problems for both to solve, keeping us all engaged in a game that is only there so we don't overthrow our true oppressors: Big Industry.

Of course, this isn't a popular opinion - everyone loves their socially-approved drug addictions these days. But it wasn't always that way. People were free from such traps, once.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-pharmaceutical-industrial-...

EDIT: ask yourself these questions, before you forcibly downvote: Why does the wealthiest nation in the world have the worst health care system of any western nation? Why does the most prosperous nation in the world have a track record of engaging in endless, illegal war? Why is the nation that re-built Europe unable to repair its own infrastructure? Why is it that the people of the wealthiest nation of the world are unable to do anything effective about their own war criminals?

The answer: the wealthiest nation in the world is the host to a set of parasites which uses its resources for their own needs: the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex doesn't care about Americans. It cares about world domination through endless war, endless drug addiction and endless possession and subsequent exploitation of other nations' natural resources, and that is precisely what America and its allies are executing.

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#44

Post by vidarh »

willyt wrote: post #38
dtf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once is from the Middle English "anes", meaning "one". Nonce is from "then anes", meaning "the one". The "-n" got smooshed into the latter word, to become "nonce", rather like "an ewt" became "newt".

It’s also UK slang for peadophile, so be careful that everyone understands you are talking about cryptography not sex offenders if you use the word in public as there could be a nasty misunderstanding!

There's a lot of vocabulary like that. I've had conversations about ensuring a daemon reaped zombie children in public before we realized what it sounded like.

Then there's a lot of master/slave terminology.

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#45

Post by DanBC »

krackers wrote: post #22
rjf72 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every {x} could be cracked by normal methods if it was simply added as a rule. So let's assume something just barely more sophisticated and we use a nonrepeating function instead of a fixed {x}. For instance, maybe the nth digit of pi means the next n mod 3th digit is random. How would you even begin to crack this? So imagine "thecodeisx". The first digits of pi are 141592653. So we get a noise pattern of: 1, 1, 1, 2…

Does code cracking still work in the era of modern cryptography? I thought that cryptosystems like AES and others were essentially impossible to crack if implemented right. What role do codebreakers play these days?

> if implemented right

This step is harder than people think.

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#46

Post by jholman »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #35
lisper wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also known as a hapax legomenon.

I... don't understand how it works. Isn't the Wikipedia page listing these words essentially invalidate their "hapax legomenon" status? Also, GP's "Surfari" doesn't sound like a word meant to be used once, but as a word meant to be funny and with high probability of becoming a piece of jargon between a band of friends. My wife & I invent words like these all the time (half of them being born from misspelling or momen…

A hapax legomenon is a hapax legomenon with reference to a particular corpus. In this context, a "corpus" is a set of words, or more generally a set of works under consideration.

Any corpus of one word is, by construction, composed entirely of of hapax legomena. I think the wikipedia page is fairly clear on the subject, honestly. In general, they're a phenomenon which is fairly obvious and uninteresting.

Where it becomes slightly more interesting is when, in some long text, an author uses a word the no one knows, and doesn't bother to explain it, and never uses it again. It becomes particularly interesting when trying to translate important ancient texts... what the devil did this word really mean?

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#47

Post by branchless »

Joeboy wrote: post #29
stevenwoo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The movie Frank is a fictionalized version of the character (written by Ronson), and there was a documentary about the guy as well: http://www.beingfrankmovie.com/info.html I watched the movie and was shocked to learn the movie was based on a real life phenomena.

I don't think the film has all that much to do with Frank Sidebottom, beyond the name and the head. It's more a take on more troubled outsider geniuses like Captain Beefheart and Daniel Johnston. As far as I can tell Chris Sievey was maybe quite eccentric and probably a bit frustrating, but Sidebottom was a piece of art he was doing and not an artifact of mental illness like the film's Frank.

The whole point of the film was that Frank was just talented, with no dark past. His protege assumed dark times were the only true source of talent. His protege was not talented.

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#48

Post by gmueckl »

rocqua wrote: post #31
LeoPanthera wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the article mentions finding duplicate symbols which corresponded to duplicate letters in words, it's probably a simple substitution cipher. Such codes can usually be broken with a combination of frequency analysis, and guesswork. This one was apparently made more difficult by the fact that every other symbol was random. (And apparently using some symbols that did not otherwise appear in the code.)

It feels like they could've figured that out by simply looking at the distribution of triangles on the inside as compared to the outside.

For that you simply need to have the sudden inspiration of how the scheme works. Snark aside, I don't think that discarding half of the source material as random junk is such an obvious thing to do.

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#50

Post by shazeubaa »

F_r_k wrote: post #42
mmjaa wrote: post #41

It doesn't matter how cute this story is, I still can't find myself empathising with the contention that GCHQ is anything other than a sinister, totalitarian organisation with the purpose of enslaving us all. The Totalitarian Surveillance State, of which GCHQ is a lynchpin, is not cute, fuzzy, or endearing - in any way. Fluff pieces like this serve to promote the idea of GCHQ as an honourable organisation, when the t…

What's pharma's implication in gchq?

It's a shame F_r_k's reply here got flagged. It's actually quite insightful.
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