5 ms·

Cracking a 250-Year-Old Code to Reveal a Secret Society (2012)

90 points by denzil_correa 11y ago

Kinnard 11y ago
One of the best pieces ever published in WIRED magazine.
- joshbaptiste 11y ago
  Indeed.. the author breaks down in laymen terms how the cipher was broken and the journey to breaking made this piece a very good read.
atrust 11y ago
Here is the English version of Copiale cipher in PDF: http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~bea/copiale/copiale-translation.pdf http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~bea/copiale/copiale-translation.pd...
- MatthewTavares 11y ago
  I found a few phase to phrase similarities between this and what appears to be an OCR scan of a free-mason manual: "Knee to knee", "foot to foot", etc. https://archive.org/stream/ritualillustrati00allyuoft/ritualillustrati00allyuoft_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/ritualillustrati00allyuoft/ritual...
ChuckMcM 11y ago
Reading this ... "Dismissed today as fodder for conspiracy theorists and History Channel specials, they once served an important purpose: Their lodges were safe houses where freethinkers could explore everything from the laws of physics to the rights of man to the nature of God, all hidden from the oppressive, authoritarian eyes of church and state." makes me think they may come back in fashion.
- Kinnard 11y ago
  How do you know they haven't already?
  - ChuckMcM 11y ago
    Very true, but one of the things that was clear in the article was that while the contents of the secret societies were secret, their existence was not.
    - kragen 11y ago
      Like a certain conference you and I have both attended whose name is carefully omitted from its website?
      - ChuckMcM 11y ago
        Heh, I was thinking more like the Rainbow Mansion folks need a secret handshake you have to know if you want to get into the "good" discussions. The recent discussions of creating a new, encrypted, network out of a mesh network of base stations kind of thing. Because I think in the 21st century a secret society would exist primarily in network space rather than meat space. And of course Tor is sort of like that already I guess.
- superuser2 11y ago
  Is there even the slightest bit of evidence that intellectuals in the Western world face state harassment or persecution for speaking or writing certain ideas? For dumping classified information to which they have privileged access, yes. Not for expressing original opinions or commenting on published work. For comparison, intellectuals in Iran are routinely detained without charge in Evin Prison for indefinite periods, tortured a bit, and told to stop writing. Straight out of East Germany. The U.S. is out of control in many ways, but this isn't one of them.
  - kragen 11y ago
ablation 11y ago
A good read but a terrible headline (not here on YC, I mean the Wired page itself). This trend of using third-person pronouns in article headlines is mildly annoying and feels like its come around as a result of this style of writing being popular on Reddit, Buzzfeed, etc. It rankles my inner subeditor.
sam_goody 11y ago
The thread from the first time the article was posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4798145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4798145 Glad it was reposted, I was looking all over for this article recently, and "secret society" on Google doesn't get you anything useful ;)
Syi 11y ago
I realise this may sound very conspiracy theorist-y so please forgive that but does anyone else see a very strong relation to the Cicada 3301 organisation? The last two paragraphs especially made me think of the 3301 challenges released in the past few years. "the mystical system in which meaning is derived from the numerical value of letters"...."symbols don’t represent just words and letters, they stand for numbers too" I had a play about with the challenges when they were released and throughtout them were strange runes/ciphertext which could be both used as letters and numbers. I have done a fair few CTFs before but I have never seen anything like the Cicada challenges in terms of combining maths and language in such a way - how prominetly primes featured or how insanely well words and there numeric meaning seemed to align. The reason I immediately thought of them after reading the article is because I remember thinking while looking at the challenges that no one could come up with such an intricate and interconnected mathematical ciphertext system without some special (and as yet unknown/unpublished) "new way of calculating". Not to mention all the secrecy around Cicada and the only rumors or supposed leaks from them suggest a secret organisation with a similar philosophy to the Oculists.

90 points by denzil_correa 11y ago

Kinnard 11y ago

One of the best pieces ever published in WIRED magazine.

joshbaptiste 11y ago
Indeed.. the author breaks down in laymen terms how the cipher was broken and the journey to breaking made this piece a very good read.

atrust 11y ago

Here is the English version of Copiale cipher in PDF: http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~bea/copiale/copiale-translation.pdf http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~bea/copiale/copiale-translation.pd...

MatthewTavares 11y ago
I found a few phase to phrase similarities between this and what appears to be an OCR scan of a free-mason manual: "Knee to knee", "foot to foot", etc. https://archive.org/stream/ritualillustrati00allyuoft/ritualillustrati00allyuoft_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/ritualillustrati00allyuoft/ritual...

ChuckMcM 11y ago

Reading this ... "Dismissed today as fodder for conspiracy theorists and History Channel specials, they once served an important purpose: Their lodges were safe houses where freethinkers could explore everything from the laws of physics to the rights of man to the nature of God, all hidden from the oppressive, authoritarian eyes of church and state." makes me think they may come back in fashion.

Kinnard 11y ago
How do you know they haven't already?
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  Very true, but one of the things that was clear in the article was that while the contents of the secret societies were secret, their existence was not.
  - kragen 11y ago
    Like a certain conference you and I have both attended whose name is carefully omitted from its website?
    - ChuckMcM 11y ago
      Heh, I was thinking more like the Rainbow Mansion folks need a secret handshake you have to know if you want to get into the "good" discussions. The recent discussions of creating a new, encrypted, network out of a mesh network of base stations kind of thing. Because I think in the 21st century a secret society would exist primarily in network space rather than meat space. And of course Tor is sort of like that already I guess.
superuser2 11y ago
Is there even the slightest bit of evidence that intellectuals in the Western world face state harassment or persecution for speaking or writing certain ideas? For dumping classified information to which they have privileged access, yes. Not for expressing original opinions or commenting on published work. For comparison, intellectuals in Iran are routinely detained without charge in Evin Prison for indefinite periods, tortured a bit, and told to stop writing. Straight out of East Germany. The U.S. is out of control in many ways, but this isn't one of them.
- kragen 11y ago

ablation 11y ago

A good read but a terrible headline (not here on YC, I mean the Wired page itself). This trend of using third-person pronouns in article headlines is mildly annoying and feels like its come around as a result of this style of writing being popular on Reddit, Buzzfeed, etc. It rankles my inner subeditor.

sam_goody 11y ago

The thread from the first time the article was posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4798145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4798145 Glad it was reposted, I was looking all over for this article recently, and "secret society" on Google doesn't get you anything useful ;)

Syi 11y ago

I realise this may sound very conspiracy theorist-y so please forgive that but does anyone else see a very strong relation to the Cicada 3301 organisation? The last two paragraphs especially made me think of the 3301 challenges released in the past few years. "the mystical system in which meaning is derived from the numerical value of letters"...."symbols don’t represent just words and letters, they stand for numbers too" I had a play about with the challenges when they were released and throughtout them were strange runes/ciphertext which could be both used as letters and numbers. I have done a fair few CTFs before but I have never seen anything like the Cicada challenges in terms of combining maths and language in such a way - how prominetly primes featured or how insanely well words and there numeric meaning seemed to align. The reason I immediately thought of them after reading the article is because I remember thinking while looking at the challenges that no one could come up with such an intricate and interconnected mathematical ciphertext system without some special (and as yet unknown/unpublished) "new way of calculating". Not to mention all the secrecy around Cicada and the only rumors or supposed leaks from them suggest a secret organisation with a similar philosophy to the Oculists.