This appears to share the same ciphertext characteristics as traditional prison kites.
what makes you say that?
FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
61–70 of 159 posts
Re: FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the clarification. To me, as an idiomatic expression goes, it always made sense to be on the "lamb". I thought the expression had originated from shepherding--like a shepherd chasing after a loose sheep.
The online etymology dictionary ( http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=lam ) says it's of uncertain origin, but does not mention ovines.
It comes from lam meaning to thrash or pound. So you're stomping your feet running quickly.
Re: FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess, isn't it weird that nearly matches the graph for English? If each letter moved to the right 8 places closely matched the expected value of that letter that would suggest that that you would be on to something. Doesn't this point to it might be a fraud as you wouldn't expect an encrypted message to contain the exact same distribution as expected unless they just switched letters of near the same frequency aro…
It could just mean that it's a transposition-only cipher.
Exactly. To clarify: a transposition cipher is one that just scrambles the letters in the plaintext according to some algorithm to get the ciphertext, which would cause you to get the same letter frequencies as the plaintext.
The problem is figuring out the rules of transposition so you can reverse them to decipher. There are tons of possibilities and you can't exactly plug a corpus this large into an anagram solver...
That said, the fact that there are also several repeated sections ("words") does make me wonder if it's a hoax, that's not something I'd expect to see with a transposition cipher, unless the transposition rules somehow preserved repetition in passages?
Anyway, food for thought.
Re: FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess, isn't it weird that nearly matches the graph for English? If each letter moved to the right 8 places closely matched the expected value of that letter that would suggest that that you would be on to something. Doesn't this point to it might be a fraud as you wouldn't expect an encrypted message to contain the exact same distribution as expected unless they just switched letters of near the same frequency aro…
That's a valid point. I appreciate that it may be nothing, but that won't discourage me from having a little play with it. Here's a CSV containing the frequency of all words from 2 upto 10 letters http://d122.com/murdermystery/words.csv if anyone's interested. "rcbrnse" five times?!
Looking for a 7 letter word from this list: http://www.world-english.org/english500.htm
gives 27 hits. Could be a name as well though. I realize this might appear as unsophisticated brute force, I'm just thinking aloud really.
Re: FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
#65If I ever murder anybody, I'm going to leave a lot of "encrypted notes" around. It will turn out that one is a review of a restaurant and the other is just random noise.
For double bonus points, make sure you have enough entropy in your code that it "trivially" decodes to your restaurant review in one half, and the other half is just plausible-looking noise.
Re: FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I guess that depends on whether your standards for literacy include knowing the differences between "they're", "there", and "their".
Personally, having worked as a writer and wanting to be a novelist, my standard for literacy does include knowing the differences between "they're/there/their", "we're/were/where/wear", etc. So from what I've seen about 50% of students are graduated illiterate. I'd also add that they should know how to use who and whom, but then that would be making our population 90% illiterate.
Whatever happened to whom? You never hear or read it anymore.
It's gone the way of will and shall, nobody seems to know or care about the difference.
"Do not ask for who the bell tolls..." -- sounds like crap, but that's the way they'd write it today.
Re: FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
#67We know that he's had this "language" since he was a child so I'm going to go out on a limb here (and introduce no small measure of my own bias) and guess its not a cerebral cipher that will easily be unraveled by simple frequency of note correlation.
I've likely got a touch of Asperger's myself and I know I have a bigger touch of synesthesia. I remember vividly during my childhood certain words being an explosion of color and texture and even having under-tones of other unrelated sounds. Even today I've got my own little "esperanto" in my mind for words and concepts that don't feel right in normal language. I use them on occasion on my unfortunate family, although its tough to say "oranger than orange with a texture like crumpled sandpaper and snow" succinctly.
Is there a way to just output the letters as a stream of phonyms? I tried "say" at the command prompt but this ends up reading the names of the letters and not their sounds. I'm going to guess this "code" is a stream-of-consciousness type thing and would be very interested in hearing it slurred out fast as basic sound.
Re: FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
#68We know that he's had this "language" since he was a child so I'm going to go out on a limb here (and introduce no small measure of my own bias) and guess its not a cerebral cipher that will easily be unraveled by simple frequency of note correlation. I've likely got a touch of Asperger's myself and I know I have a bigger touch of synesthesia. I remember vividly during my childhood certain words being an explosion of…
> Is there a way to just output the letters as a stream of phonyms?
After noticing the frequency of NCBE, I focused on these three lines from the first document:
(FLRSE PRSE ONDE 71 NCBE)
(CDNSE PRSE ONS*E 74 NCBE)
(PR+SE PRSE ONREDE 75 NCBE)
> although its tough to say "oranger than orange with a texture like crumpled sandpaper and snow" succinctly.
As a side-note, do you know of any books/novels that authentically explore with that kind of language and method of internally expressing concepts? I think it's interesting to learn how people interpret the world.
Re: FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
#69We know that he's had this "language" since he was a child so I'm going to go out on a limb here (and introduce no small measure of my own bias) and guess its not a cerebral cipher that will easily be unraveled by simple frequency of note correlation. I've likely got a touch of Asperger's myself and I know I have a bigger touch of synesthesia. I remember vividly during my childhood certain words being an explosion of…
> Is there a way to just output the letters as a stream of phonyms? After noticing the frequency of NCBE, I focused on these three lines from the first document: (FLRSE PRSE ONDE 71 NCBE) (CDNSE PRSE ONS*E 74 NCBE) (PR+SE PRSE ONREDE 75 NCBE) They seem pronounceable in a sort of pig-latin style - "Flur-say pur-say ohn-day 71 nick-bay" > although its tough to say "oranger than orange with a texture like crumpled sandp…
I lit on that too. I find myself adding syllables and sounds to words in my mind all the time to "smooth their edges". Some words just don't fit together without "help".
I thought maybe "Firse Perse On de 71 Nice be"
I'm perusing the thought that maybe he's taking notes on how people treated him or something.
Re: FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
#70We know that he's had this "language" since he was a child so I'm going to go out on a limb here (and introduce no small measure of my own bias) and guess its not a cerebral cipher that will easily be unraveled by simple frequency of note correlation. I've likely got a touch of Asperger's myself and I know I have a bigger touch of synesthesia. I remember vividly during my childhood certain words being an explosion of…
No offense, and I think your approach to the cipher sounds like a pretty good one, but why do so many people try to self-diagnose with Asperger's?
Pretty sure there are clinically-accepted criteria for it that go beyond "nerdy and slightly awkward".