NOT an official Vleeptron Intercept! NOT a PizzaQ! Mike! Don't try to decode this! It's not from me! It's not Sanitized for your Protection!

NOT an official Vleeptron Intercept! NOT a PizzaQ! Mike! Don't try to decode this! It's not from me! It's not Sanitized for your Protection!

"Abandon most hope,
ye who enter here."

(apologies to Dante)


I know very little about this code. Of course the first and most important thing I don't know is what the hell it says.

I DO know two things:

1. It is a Very Famous Code

(as codes go. Famous Codes are not exactly Famous the way Paris Hilton is Famous.)

2. It is Possible to decrypt it and read and understand its plaintext original.

(Because somebody did. )

So this is NOT a problem like the Beale Cipher, promising and teasing every codebreaker on the planet for nigh-on to 200 years, with yet no solution. (Immediately after succesfully cracking Beale Cipher Document 1, you drive to rural Virginia and start digging a hole.)

So there exist two sets of codes:

1. solved code

2. unsolved code

and maybe

3. code-like nonsense, no solution exists, haha

Beale, with its lurid promise of U$22,000,000 (in today's money) of gold, silver and precious stones, is either a hard nut of Type 2, or a superbly successful Type 3, haha.

But as noted before, perhaps the last laugh is on Beale or the Merrie Prankster who cooked up this bizarre legend -- the Unwed Mother of All Nigerian e-mail scams.

The thousands of obsessive, greed-crazed amateurs who have flushed centuries of their lives down the toilet trying to solve Beale have distilled themselves into a half-century of the world's premier and foremost professional cryptographers. No gold. No diamonds. Just the world's most brilliant professional cryptographers. Top security clearance, parking space, health plan, and job for life. Haha.

The Vleeptron Ministry of Big, Little & Average-Sized Secrets is NOT going to tell you anything more about the above image and cyphertext. If you need to know immediately, surf for it yourself. You're smart. You can find it. I did. I'd heard faint echoes about it before, but this was the first time I read the whole story. And it's a Very Juicy Story.

But BE CAREFUL because you might click and find yourself looking at a screen with THE SOLVED PLAINTEXT.

Which would make you some sort of Heroically Unethical or Lazy Person. A person who lets somebody else solve difficult, challenging, famous codes.

MIKE I HAVE STOLEN TOO MUCH OF YOUR LIFE ALREADY! Don't try to solve this! Flee as fast and as far as you can from this problem!

And you can forget all about ETAOINSHRDLU with this sucker. At least on first encounter. ETAOINSHRDLU is not the Magic Golden Key to get your fingers on the sardines here.

Magic Words like Rumplestiltskin or Open Sesame are odd things, and most of the time they live most comfortably in fable and fiction.

But ETAOINSHRDLU is a Magic Word that rawks in everyday Reality, that can really walk the dog and actually turn the Unknown into the Known, if you know how to cast the Magic Spell correctly. And if you like Jolt Cola, and not sleeping regularly.

Computers that reasonably ordinary people could get their fingers on date to about 1960. Edgar Allan Poe cooked up his Magic Word in "The Gold Bug" in 1843. Mike notes that Poe spelled his Magic Word slightly differently from the Standard Magic Word accepted and generally used by the early 20th century.

High-speed electronic digital computers were first invented and built to crack military codes during World War Two. This is one whack hobby, but its members and fans seem to be Very Smart People, perhaps promising good conversations on a comfortable train or ferry.

Before World War One, President Woodrow Wilson (a Princeton professor of jurisprudence and political economy) declared that "Gentlemen do not read each others' mail," and forbade his military and diplomatic service from trying to read the coded messages of Imperial Germany's diplomatic service.

The British, already in a desperate war, were not quite the gentlemen that Wilson felt gentlemen should be, and cracked one message, "The Zimmerman Telegram," uncovering a German plot to foment revolution / civil war / insurgency / monkey business in Mexico, to distract the USA and keep it from entering the European war. Publication of the secret German plot across our border inflamed the government to declare war on Imperial Germany.

The whole sneaky spy and boffin business is in Barbara Tuchman's "The Zimmerman Telegram." It's quite the Ripping Yarn. Occasionally modern cryptography takes place in a workplace of bombs and bullets, speeding cars and sinking submarines. Cryptography can be quite the thrilling profession.

John leCarre's evil Soviet master spy Karla detests wranglers, cryptographers, and radios, because intercepted messages from his operation in San Francisco early in the Cold War got himself and his whole crew blown and tossed in enemy prison. Karla believes radio, and the nerd specialists the technology requires, are the fatal weak link of any espionage operation. Smiley tends to agree.

In the leCarre spy novels, the British foreign intelligence agency routinely uses the "One-Time Pad." Every authorized communicator in the worldwide network posseses a pad of fresh daily codes, changed each month, sealed and hand-delivered by security messengers. Each code is randomly generated by the agency's central cryptographic computer in London, and complete gibberish to everyone except someone who possesses that day's pad.

A One-Time Pad code is almost universally believed to be unbreakable by purely mathematical, logical, computational or intellectual processes. (i.e., the only way to crack a One-Time Pad cipher is to start offering bribes, liquor, drugs, cash, hot sex, blackmail, threats of violence to close family members, to get your hands on a photocopy of today's pad.)

But even One-Time Pad codes are vulnerable to dumb and sloppy encoding/transmission/broadcasting mistakes by crypto clerks, broadcasters and message authors. Sometimes code makers get sloppy, and sometimes code breakers get lucky. Much of modern codebreaking is statistics anyway, as Poe first demonstrated. If luck exists, it lives in probability and statistics. Most probability and statistics experts do not believe in luck, but they do believe in probability and statistics. And Abstract Algebra. And Symbolic Logic. And whatever works.

The latest buzz about the Hot Codes of Tomorrow, about which I know utterly nothing, is Quantum Cryptography. Maybe you can use it on your iPod. Or your cell phone. Or your crackberry.

During the Clinton Administration, Vice-President Al Gore, who invented the Internet, was the White House point man for Clipper -- a government mandated word-length standard for commercial Internet-based cryptography.

The White House and Gore wanted the word-length standard shorter, with a government-only back door, to make the technology of eavesdropping on coded messages easier for the government. I used to have a "Sink Clipper" t-shirt. I don't know exactly whatever happened to Clipper. I suspect the government got what it wanted. And then the technology evolved and made Clipper irrelavent. If you know anything about Quantum Cryptography or whatever happened to Clipper, Leave A Comment.

After the One-Time Pad, the most unbreakable alphabetic text codes are those based on a pair of very long prime numbers. In The Beginning -- when they were invented around 1978 -- it was Accepted Dogma that the world's most powerful and fastest computers would require a century to break such a code -- in other words, a long-prime-pair code would guarantee to conceal your secret message until long after you had died of old age. Twenty-five years after your obituary, a huge government computer would scream: PURCHASE THREE ONE-WAY CABINS, MEET AT BERLIN DROME, WE LEAVE FOR BUENOS AIRES ON THE TUESDAY NIGHT ZEPPELIN and everybody would know your naughty secrets.

This is no longer exactly the Accepted Dogma. The Accepted Dogma has had the crap beaten out of it over the last decade by Distributed / Cooperative Computing, and -- the usual suspects -- amateur codebreakers (and those loopy Overclockers who just hunger for Stats! Stats!).

Breaking public challenge codes -- often with $ub$tantial ca$h prize$ -- has become a very popular choice of the Distributed / Cooperative and BOINC computing communities. Every time the computer communications industry announces a tougher new word length for its prime pair keys, RSA (the company which first made these codes practical and easy to use on the Internet) posts a cyphertext message composed in the new standard, and the Distributed Computers get to work to crack it. The codes grow tougher, the Distributed Computing community grows in number, popularity and computational power, the codes get cracked, the totally passive computerist who accidentally broke the code gets $100,000 from RSA, which holds a big news conference, the codes grow tougher, the Distributed Computing community grows in number, popularity and computational power, the codes get cracked, the totally passive computerist who accidentally broke the code gets $100,000 from RSA, which holds a big news conference, the codes grow tougher, the Distributed Computing community grows in number, popularity and computational power, the codes get cracked, the totally passive computerist who accidentally broke the code gets $100,000 from RSA, which holds a big news conference ...

Long-Prime-Pair codes involve the fundamentally slow and difficult computational problem of Factorization. Statistical methods -- controlled wild guessing -- are now fundamentally important tools of cracking prime-based codes.

MIKE! Get back to your Life! Don't try to crack this code! (But somebody did.)