5 ms·

Codebreaker Cracks 135 Year Old Message [video]

37 points by mattm 3y ago

shermantanktop 3y ago
Cool, but once again it turns out that real life is not like a Dan Brown novel. No Illuminati, no antipopes, no buried treasure, just everyday activities that apparently needed some level of protection.
- derbOac 3y ago
  I guess I feel like there must be more going on though? It's not clear why a weather message would have been hidden away like that. What I read about it suggested that the weather code system was more for telegraph message "compression" reasons than secrecy, although I don't know anything about it so could be missing something. My guess is that the message must have had some other meaning in some way, even if personal, or that there's something about putting paper in the pocket for tailoring reasons? Maybe she just needed a place to put the message and forgot about it.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    The obvious theory would point out that female clothing isn't supposed to have pockets at all. This means that anything carried in any pocket is likely to be carried in a "hidden pocket" - that's the only kind of pocket.
- fnorder 3y ago
  Well the Illuminati wouldn't be using something you could crack, unless they wanted you to think that you had cracked something, which may or may not have been made so you think that it was or wasn't the Illuminati.
  - shermantanktop 3y ago
    That's a great point. Or is it? Is it a joke, or are you serious? Or maybe you're hinting at something you can't say outright? I'm going to have to use a corkboard and some red string to sort out everything that's happening here.
derbOac 3y ago
There's another article about it here: https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/science/earth-science/silk-dress-cryptogram-canadian-researcher-cracks-135-year-old-unsolvable-code https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/science/earth-scie... An academic paper with the solution here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01611194.2023.2223562 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01611194.2023.2... The initial blog post about the piece of paper in the dress: https://commitmentocostumes.blogspot.com/2014/02/bennetts-bronze-bustle.html https://commitmentocostumes.blogspot.com/2014/02/bennetts-br... For me this raises as many questions as it answers in some ways. I have no idea why it would be hidden away like that.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  dry run of some standard operating procedure for delivering messages, practice for wartime. or she was a spy/compromised and stealing secrets from her employer that she was as clueless about as any casual observers today; she did this on the daily but she died or got arrested this particular day. maybe her husband wanted the weather for his horsetrack gambling ring or something. for every actual important encrypted message, there are a ton of similar messages and message transports of lesser importance. (i'm assuming it's not the case that this is the plausible deniability part of some sort of steganography scheme)
  - aaron695 3y ago
    [dead]
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > The pure depth of this code system is utterly fascinating. Each consonant and vowel in each word has its own meaning, so a seasoned veteran could tell the weather just by mentally breaking down each word of the telegram. (from the first link) This claim doesn't make sense. If the words of the telegram encoding for weather information are compositional rather than lexical, most of them shouldn't exist in English. How does it happen that all of them are extant English words? What happens if my observation of the dew point temperature needs to be encoded "luft" instead of "left"?
cf100clunk 3y ago
Related article from which the CBC YouTube video is associated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38721406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38721406
yurejjd 3y ago
[flagged]
nneonneo 3y ago
Academic paper with far more detail, including the decoding of all messages here: https://canwin-datahub.ad.umanitoba.ca/data/publication/breaking-silk-dress-cryptogram/resource/ed7d67d0-5563-4747-8a32-380fc413fda3 https://canwin-datahub.ad.umanitoba.ca/data/publication/brea...
- e28eta 3y ago
  Places where the author notes a mismatch between the “correct” word and the word on the paper, I wish they’d presented the morse code difference too. Otherwise, pretty interesting!
  - nneonneo 3y ago
    It's clear that the author of the pieces of paper knew several words to be incorrect: "lisstd" (should be "linnet"), "piped" (should be "biped") and "meraccous" (should be "meracious") have little x's under them (the cross under "piped" is specifically under the first "p"); while "tertal" (should be tergal), "palm" (should be "bank"), and "dsrch" (should be "duck") are all underlined.
    - e28eta 3y ago
      Maybe they looked into it and found it wasn’t super relevant nor interesting, but while reading the paper I found myself wondering about the “edit distances” in those typos. Ex: ‘e’ is dot, ‘t’ is dash; making a /t/e/ substitution seem very plausible, and my hypothesis is that including that extra layer of info would be interesting. I didn’t go through all the others, and would also be willing to believe it’s a dead end.

37 points by mattm 3y ago

Cool, but once again it turns out that real life is not like a Dan Brown novel. No Illuminati, no antipopes, no buried treasure, just everyday activities that apparently needed some level of protection.

derbOac 3y ago
I guess I feel like there must be more going on though? It's not clear why a weather message would have been hidden away like that. What I read about it suggested that the weather code system was more for telegraph message "compression" reasons than secrecy, although I don't know anything about it so could be missing something. My guess is that the message must have had some other meaning in some way, even if personal, or that there's something about putting paper in the pocket for tailoring reasons? Maybe she just needed a place to put the message and forgot about it.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  The obvious theory would point out that female clothing isn't supposed to have pockets at all. This means that anything carried in any pocket is likely to be carried in a "hidden pocket" - that's the only kind of pocket.
fnorder 3y ago
Well the Illuminati wouldn't be using something you could crack, unless they wanted you to think that you had cracked something, which may or may not have been made so you think that it was or wasn't the Illuminati.
- shermantanktop 3y ago
  That's a great point. Or is it? Is it a joke, or are you serious? Or maybe you're hinting at something you can't say outright? I'm going to have to use a corkboard and some red string to sort out everything that's happening here.

derbOac 3y ago

There's another article about it here: https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/science/earth-science/silk-dress-cryptogram-canadian-researcher-cracks-135-year-old-unsolvable-code https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/science/earth-scie... An academic paper with the solution here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01611194.2023.2223562 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01611194.2023.2... The initial blog post about the piece of paper in the dress: https://commitmentocostumes.blogspot.com/2014/02/bennetts-bronze-bustle.html https://commitmentocostumes.blogspot.com/2014/02/bennetts-br... For me this raises as many questions as it answers in some ways. I have no idea why it would be hidden away like that.

fsckboy 3y ago
dry run of some standard operating procedure for delivering messages, practice for wartime. or she was a spy/compromised and stealing secrets from her employer that she was as clueless about as any casual observers today; she did this on the daily but she died or got arrested this particular day. maybe her husband wanted the weather for his horsetrack gambling ring or something. for every actual important encrypted message, there are a ton of similar messages and message transports of lesser importance. (i'm assuming it's not the case that this is the plausible deniability part of some sort of steganography scheme)
- aaron695 3y ago
  [dead]
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> The pure depth of this code system is utterly fascinating. Each consonant and vowel in each word has its own meaning, so a seasoned veteran could tell the weather just by mentally breaking down each word of the telegram. (from the first link) This claim doesn't make sense. If the words of the telegram encoding for weather information are compositional rather than lexical, most of them shouldn't exist in English. How does it happen that all of them are extant English words? What happens if my observation of the dew point temperature needs to be encoded "luft" instead of "left"?

cf100clunk 3y ago

Related article from which the CBC YouTube video is associated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38721406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38721406

yurejjd 3y ago

[flagged]

nneonneo 3y ago

Academic paper with far more detail, including the decoding of all messages here: https://canwin-datahub.ad.umanitoba.ca/data/publication/breaking-silk-dress-cryptogram/resource/ed7d67d0-5563-4747-8a32-380fc413fda3 https://canwin-datahub.ad.umanitoba.ca/data/publication/brea...

e28eta 3y ago
Places where the author notes a mismatch between the “correct” word and the word on the paper, I wish they’d presented the morse code difference too. Otherwise, pretty interesting!
- nneonneo 3y ago
  It's clear that the author of the pieces of paper knew several words to be incorrect: "lisstd" (should be "linnet"), "piped" (should be "biped") and "meraccous" (should be "meracious") have little x's under them (the cross under "piped" is specifically under the first "p"); while "tertal" (should be tergal), "palm" (should be "bank"), and "dsrch" (should be "duck") are all underlined.
  - e28eta 3y ago
    Maybe they looked into it and found it wasn’t super relevant nor interesting, but while reading the paper I found myself wondering about the “edit distances” in those typos. Ex: ‘e’ is dot, ‘t’ is dash; making a /t/e/ substitution seem very plausible, and my hypothesis is that including that extra layer of info would be interesting. I didn’t go through all the others, and would also be willing to believe it’s a dead end.