7 ms·

I think this is the most likely answer. Everything in Germany was collapsing at the time, so a garbled message being sent, or incorrectly received seems likely.

• kristopolous 3y ago
  That's a pretty good set up for some wild fiction. You could go to the fabled moon / arctic bases, time travel, aliens ... it's a nice foundation. Problem is these days people would start believing in whatever fiction you write. The internet is broken like that.
  • danielvaughn 3y ago
    A company I used to work for was partly comprised of hackers, and one of the books they always raved about was called Cryptonomicon. I know that it involves the nazis and encoded secrets, though I never read it (still on my to-read list). I'd recommend checking it out if that kind of thing sounds interesting to you.
    • andyjohnson0 3y ago
      I read it back in the day. I can't remember much of the plot, but i do remember that it seemed about twice as long as it needed to be. Which I find ro be typical of Stephenson's fiction. Plenty of people seem to like it though.
      • buildbot 3y ago
        Less so than his later books in my opinion. It’s a lot of great plot throughout with good explanations of the math concepts it refers to. I may be biased, After reading wheel of time, nothing seems too long anymore!
      • sleepybrett 3y ago
        He does like regressions into historical causes and effect chains... hell the whole system of the world trilogy is almost nothing BUT that (and contains some character/family crossovers with cryptonomicon)
      • wkat4242 3y ago
        I liked it but I thought it was overly dramatic in a "survival of the fittest" way and indeed way too long. But I'm not a fan of the guy anyway. It is a decent book to read once though.
    • buildbot 3y ago
      Cryptonomicon is almost exactly this premise :) It’s an amazing book, one that any aspiring hacker should read!
  • RajT88 3y ago
    Not just the internet. Animal Planet made a fake documentary about Mermaids (a somewhat hokey one at that), with a disclaimer that it was a work of fiction. Despite that, it's convinced a generation of fools that mermaids are real. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mermaids-the-body-found/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mermaids-the-body-found/ But back to the internet. Plenty of youtube clips from this program where commenters are insistent that it's evidence that Mermaids are real. And comments linking to the footage of the disclaimer, and resulting dumb arguments. Still! In 2023!
    • bemusedthrow75 3y ago
      It is only somewhat hokey. I love a bad/earnest low-budget movie. I think they are often much more revealing about the nature of culture, cinema and art than -- to pick a single counterpoint -- really anything in the MCU except Age of Ultron [0]. There were plenty of things in that to like. I watched it only recently, I'm glad they made it, and I hope the people who make it continue to reject the big bucks. [0] This is a hill I will die on. Almost everything in the MCU is pointless dross except James Spader as Ultron.
  • canjobear 3y ago
    This is basically the setting of Gravity’s Rainbow.
    • kristopolous 3y ago
      You could claim that about nearly anything and nobody would/could really challenge you for Gravity's Rainbow! See also, Finnegan's Wake. For instance, here's a nonsense claim that sounds plausible: Finnegan's Wake is the best book about the Irish Civil War. You feel the frenzy and delirium of the lucid somnambulism that comes with insomnia on the battlefield. As foggy and vivid as war, the words carefully balance the interregnum between the forbidden, forgotten and forsaken laid bare as poetry. Nothing is clear and there is no closure. It shows how hard narratives are to cobble together using shattered pieces. The deconstruction of the language is married with the deconstruction of life as belligerents fight over conflicting dreams.
      • canjobear 3y ago
        The middle third or so of GR describes a fairly lucid plot in which the characters are traversing Germany during its final disintegration at the end of WW2 and the beginning of the Allied occupation.
        • kristopolous 3y ago
          As does Finnegan's Wake.
  • sofixa 3y ago
    Th are even great historical starting points for such fiction, like the bunch of German U-Boats spread across the world (mostly the Atlantic), including one (U-234) en route to Japan with special cargo including uranium oxide, high-ranking Germans and Japanese and an Me-262. Better starting hook that the Last Resort series (US nuclear submarine with intercontinental ballistic missiles refuses weird orders, is fired upon by the US Navy, and decides to occupy a fictitious island).
• bredren 3y ago
  Maybe solving this would be determining a set of likely encrypted messages. They could be scored by decrypted content matching structure of priors and context. Along with char difference from the encrypted message on record.
• netsharc 3y ago
  I can picture it: a German soldier feeling defeated just set the keys to something random and typed his message, sending a message without expecting anyone to hear... "In the old days, if someone had a secret they didn’t want to share, they went up a mountain, found a tree, carved a hole in it, and whispered the secret into the hole. Then they covered it with mud and leave the secret there forever." - Wong Kar Wai/In The Mood for Love