Codebreakers Find 'Sexts,' Arctic Dispatches In 200-Year-Old Encrypted Newspaper Ads (vice.com) 28
Between 1850 and 1855, someone published a series of unusual ads in the British newspaper The Times. They were made up of a series of seemingly random letters, apparently gobbledygook. An anonymous reader adds: Almost 200 years later, a group of codebreakers has finally been able to decrypt some of them and read what they said, discovering that they were actually encrypted messages from a rescue expedition in the Arctic Ocean.
Sounds familiar (Score:5, Funny)
> a series of seemingly random letters, apparently gobbledygook
200 years from now you'll see a similar story about Microsoft's documentation.
Re:Sounds familiar (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Sounds familiar (Score:1)
"This behavior is by design" would certainly be taken as code for *something* going on around the time of win2kâ¦
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A better question is whether a Windows program will ever fail with a useful error message instead of some nonsense like "This program has stopped responding..."
"This program has stopped. Click OK to continue."
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program has performed an illegal operation = 95% chance of a Segfault. 5% of sigill.
program has crashed = runtime exception.
BSOD = 90% some driver fucked up. 10% (Up from 5%) that Microsoft released yet another broken update.
windows is opening a portal to another dimension = Microsoft acquired Minecraft.
In all retrospect, there's not much for an end user to do in any of these cases. At least not beyond "start workflow over." Most
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Unlikely. They cannot be decrypted since the information is not actually present.
A winnie-winnie strategy (Score:4, Funny)
Then do the horse; you don't have to write it secret love letters.
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Then do the horse; you don't have to write it secret love letters.
I assume the dude was already flogging the horse but wanted something more.
Re:A winnie-winnie strategy (Score:4, Insightful)
If that's how the dude talked, it's no wonder the lady wanted nothing to do with him.
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Maybe being a dickhead was in style back then? Look how many ladies defend the orange dude now.
TFA (Score:4, Interesting)
The decryption revealed that the ads were messages sent back and forth between the Collinson expedition members and their relatives and families back in England.
Sent from the Canadian Arctic how exactly? Did they stop by the local telegraph office? Drop a letter in the local red British Post box? Starlink?
My understanding of that region of the Arctic around that time is that anyone venturing up there was pretty much incommunicado. Hence the loss of the Erebus and Terror crews under mysterious circumstances.
Re:TFA (Score:5, Informative)
Reading the wiki in the man [wikipedia.org] seems like the expedition was primarily a naval one and lasted for a long while with many stops. Seems he was lucky/smart enough to not get his ship wrecked or lost so was probably able to pass off letters to a re-supply ship?
I have watched "Master and Commander" 4 times now so I am an expert on 19th century naval protocols. /s
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and lasted for a long while with many stops
Sounds like he made several attempts, backed up and tried again. So I could understand a message coming from the South Seas:
"Weather is fine. Native girls are friendly. Crew is happy."
Typesetting (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a lot of trust in hand typesetters to not make errors.
Re:Typesetting (Score:4, Funny)
It's OK, they were using auto-correct.
Re: Typesetting (Score:2)
Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine the wrong figures, will the right answers still come out?
Sexting doesn't surprise me (Score:2)
SEXT = (Score:3, Informative)
Re:SEXT = (Score:5, Informative)
That makes sense, but is not how it is used here. From TFA:
During the talk, Jacobs shared another lens into the past, one that is not as high stakes as the Collinson messages: classified encrypted newspaper ads that were actually messages between lovers, “sort of the sexting of the 19th century,” Jacobs joked.
He meant it (jokingly) as the victorian version of salacious stuff.
basic math iz hard! (Score:3)
1850-1855 was 162 to 167 years ago, hot even close to 200. I suppose you're the same type of person who rounds pi to 3.
Re: basic math iz hard! (Score:2)
What's wrong with rounding pi to 3?
I do so for estimation quite often to see if I need to get more precise to answer a yes/no question.
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Clickbait title (Score:2)