> The solution was reached by using codebreaking software the team had developed along with extensive manual work, in part required because Perwich had mistakenly omitted a couple of letters in his ciphertext.
That explains how the team of 3 codebreakers got it, but what about the other codebreaker, Matthew Brown, who figured it out by himself? The article doesn't say anything about his approach. Seems impressive if he can match the effort of three cryptographers using their own custom software. I want to read more about him!
The article mentions a code breaking software - any idea what that is? I have a coded letter that is about 250 years old, but it is written in Devanagari script so letter frequency isn't straightforward. Please do suggest any tools that can help in decoding.
So many machninations amongst the elites even hundreds of years ago. And imagine today, with the current set of goons in power. It's amazing they've survived for so long.
.... Satoshi?
Different Satoshi.
Not a cryptologist, not cryptology.
It's fascinating to me that the keywords were further encoded such that even if the message was deciphered, the strategic plans could not be acted upon.
It was quite common to have a codebook that might list several numbers or words used to substitute for places, individuals, actions, etc.
These also existed for corporate entities. A concern might have their own codebook such that the telegraph office would not be privy to their internal business.
They would also use codebooks as a type of compression, since the telegraph company charged less for sending English words as opposed to enciphered characters, and obviously, there are many uncommon words that could substitute for longer common phrases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codebook
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_code_(communication...
Spying was a profession 400 years ago due to the intense rivalry of France and England. Vast sums and amounts of time were spent on various schemes. Probably for revenge for losing western Europe in the 100 years war. Religion seems to have been mostly a cover for plunder and stealing treasure. France remained mostly Catholic, however the religious turnover in England created interesting dynamics.
The proprietor of Maryland landed the title Baron Baltimore through friendship with the spymaster to Queen Elizabeth, "whom Calvert had met during an extended trip to the European mainland between 1601 and 1603".
"He also held the title of Earl of Salisbury in 1605 and Lord High Treasurer in 1608, making him the most powerful man at the royal court."
The Calvert family lost the Maryland estate after the armed insurrection of 1689, however the Crown returned the estate to the Calvert family in 1715 "after Charles Calvert, 5th Baron Baltimore, declared in public that he was a Protestant."
The final "23rd Governor of Restored Proprietary Government" Sir Robert Eden, 1st Baronet, was the great great grandfather of Prime Minister Anthony Eden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Calvert,_1st_Baron_Balt...
I sat through a briefing last week about quantum encryption and the threat that quantum computing poses to encryption in use today. It was stressed that nation states are hoovering up encrypted data now in order to decrypt later with quantum computing. Much the same way America decrypted old soviet encrypted data. I wonder if it will take as long and if anyone will still be alive to make use of that data.
I don't think this is true at anything resembling a concerning scale.
Even trying to do something like saving 'just' the average yearly traffic tor handles would account for 2-3% of all the current storage available.
We're talking about the same government that quickly abandoned their quest of 'archiving every tweet in the Library of Congress'
What I want to know is how they guess which 0.001% of signals or internet traffic is actually worthwhile to keep? The biggest nation states could conceivably store about 1 year’s worth of internet traffic right now, but then they also need to store whatever other signals intelligence they’re gathering for analysis, so it will be less than a single years worth.
But almost all that data is going to turn out to be useless if or when they gain quantum ability to decrypt it, and even the stuff that could be useful now gets less useful with every month it stays encrypted. Stuff that is very useful intelligence now could be absolutely useless in five years…
2000 years in the future people will know which porn you slobbed it to.
If quantum computing would progress just like in the last 30 years it may take 300 years before it can be useful.
Thanks for sharing this, great read.
If you know a better way to factor 35, I’d like to hear it.
As has been previously pointed out, the 2001 and 2012 quantum factorisation records may be easily matched with a dog trained to bark three times [33]. We verified this by taking a recently-calibrated reference dog, Scribble, depicted in Figure 6, and having him bark three times, thus simultaneously factorising both 15 and 21. This process wasn’t as simple as it first appeared because Scribble is very well behaved and almost never barks. Having him perform the quantum factorisation required having his owner play with him with a ball in order to encourage him to bark. It was a special performance just for this publication, because he understands the importance of evidence-based science.
> we also estimate that factorising at least two-digit numbers should be within most dogs’ capabilities, assuming the neighbours don’t start complaining first
An exabyte isn't as much as it sounds like.
It was a lot more in 2014. Presumably they have upgraded it significantly since.