[00:50.430 --> 00:55.810]  Welcome to... All right, good.
[00:56.170 --> 00:57.310]  Good morning, everybody.
[00:57.790 --> 00:58.870]  Well, afternoon, I guess.
[01:02.130 --> 01:05.750]  Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to A New HOPE.
[01:06.330 --> 01:13.050]  Just a heads up, the 2 o'clock keynote speaker will be simulcast in this room for anybody who's interested.
[01:14.530 --> 01:24.110]  So, protecting your communication is nothing new, but putting encrypted messages where anyone can see them, that's apparently also not new.
[01:24.530 --> 01:31.650]  And our next presenters discovered the secret messages in newspapers from over 100 years ago and decrypted them.
[01:31.690 --> 01:34.350]  So, please welcome our next speakers.
[01:42.000 --> 01:42.680]  Thank you.
[01:43.280 --> 01:45.680]  So, we were going to have three people on the panel.
[01:45.840 --> 01:47.020]  Unfortunately, we only have two.
[01:47.200 --> 01:48.540]  Klaus wasn't able to attend.
[01:48.820 --> 01:49.840]  But A.J. and I know the material pretty well, so you won't be missing out on anything.
[01:52.860 --> 01:54.600]  You'll still see all the slides here.
[01:55.420 --> 01:57.520]  So, I am Elonka Dunin.
[01:57.680 --> 01:59.100]  I'm a game developer.
[01:59.380 --> 02:02.960]  I'm an authority on different codes, and I'm a book author.
[02:03.760 --> 02:04.200]  And...
[02:04.200 --> 02:05.460]  And I'm A.J. Jacobs.
[02:06.260 --> 02:16.620]  I am also an author, and I've given TED Talks, and have worked as a journalist at various publications.
[02:17.360 --> 02:18.660]  And he's being shy.
[02:18.660 --> 02:21.480]  I should say that he's worked for Esquire Magazine.
[02:21.480 --> 02:25.040]  He's given about five TED Talks, I think.
[02:25.040 --> 02:37.960]  And he's probably best known for a book he wrote called The Year of Living Biblically, where he counted all the rules in the Bible, about 700 rules, and then tried to see if he could really live by them for an entire year.
[02:38.180 --> 02:44.760]  He gave a really interesting TED Talk on it, which I see is both amusing and also thought-provoking.
[02:45.020 --> 02:45.800]  Thank you, Elonka.
[02:45.800 --> 02:45.920]  Thank you, Elonka.
[02:46.000 --> 02:46.540]  Very nice.
[02:47.240 --> 02:47.740]  All right.
[02:47.980 --> 02:49.960]  And, of course, Klaus couldn't be here.
[02:50.560 --> 02:54.320]  Klaus and I wrote this book, Code Breaking, A Practical Guide.
[02:54.600 --> 02:56.860]  And this came out in 2020.
[02:56.860 --> 03:01.240]  And we have a new edition coming out that will be in early 2023.
[03:01.280 --> 03:03.900]  It's about 20% more material on it.
[03:04.180 --> 03:05.540]  And A.J.'s book?
[03:05.820 --> 03:08.400]  Yeah, my most recent book is called The Puzzler.
[03:08.580 --> 03:15.220]  And it's about my lifelong love of puzzles of all kinds, crosswords and jigsaws and logic puzzles.
[03:15.220 --> 03:19.900]  And it has a large section on secret codes and ciphers.
[03:21.780 --> 03:32.700]  And for part of that, I went to the CIA headquarters to visit the cryptosculpture to see if I could figure it out by being there in person.
[03:32.700 --> 03:36.960]  I won't ruin the ending to the book by telling you whether I got it or not.
[03:36.960 --> 03:38.740]  But I did...
[03:39.380 --> 03:43.200]  One of the main characters in that section is, of course, Klonka.
[03:43.360 --> 03:50.700]  Because she is one of the, if not the, top expert in the world on Kryptos.
[03:51.340 --> 03:54.080]  And, plus, she also is a great character.
[03:54.320 --> 04:02.840]  She's someone who takes five jigsaw puzzles and mixes up all of the pieces and then tries to solve them.
[04:02.840 --> 04:05.500]  That's how she spends her time.
[04:06.340 --> 04:06.920]  True.
[04:07.320 --> 04:07.400]  Okay.
[04:08.520 --> 04:12.840]  So, today we're going to be talking about these different newspaper ads.
[04:13.200 --> 04:15.440]  Mostly from the 19th century.
[04:15.860 --> 04:18.520]  And I'll start with a really interesting one.
[04:18.560 --> 04:20.360]  It's called the Collinson Expedition.
[04:20.740 --> 04:24.960]  So, if you go back and you look through microfilm, as some of us do.
[04:24.960 --> 04:30.700]  And you look at the London Times, and this is between 1850 and 1855.
[04:31.400 --> 04:36.180]  You'll see that right there, in the top there, is an ad that is encrypted.
[04:36.540 --> 04:44.380]  And if you keep looking through the microfilm, right around the first of the month, for five years, appeared these encrypted ads.
[04:44.380 --> 04:52.460]  And the Times republished one of these in 1980, asking, could anyone decrypt it?
[04:52.540 --> 04:53.620]  And no one could.
[04:53.960 --> 04:58.320]  However, one did point out what looked like a latitude and longitude.
[04:58.620 --> 05:01.420]  And so, that gave them a clue of what it might be.
[05:01.580 --> 05:04.580]  It pointed to this area, north of Canada.
[05:04.960 --> 05:09.380]  And they thought, well, maybe this has something to do with the Northwest Passage.
[05:09.380 --> 05:18.460]  The British Royal Navy, for a long time, was trying to find out if there was a faster way to Asia, instead of going around the Horn of South America.
[05:18.720 --> 05:21.580]  Could they go through the Northwest Passage, north of Canada?
[05:22.120 --> 05:26.340]  And one of the famous expeditions there was called the John Franklin Expedition.
[05:26.520 --> 05:32.720]  And it started in 1845, and he had two ships named the Terror and the Erebus.
[05:33.560 --> 05:36.380]  Now, interesting names for an exploration ship.
[05:36.380 --> 05:37.940]  Well, they had been warships.
[05:38.160 --> 05:39.400]  They had been bombships.
[05:39.500 --> 05:40.620]  That's why they were called that.
[05:40.700 --> 05:42.880]  But they were really well-built ships.
[05:42.900 --> 05:49.220]  And they thought that this would be really well-suited towards icebreaking, looking for the Northwest Passage.
[05:49.440 --> 05:51.160]  It was led by Lord Franklin.
[05:51.300 --> 05:52.700]  He wasn't the first choice for it.
[05:52.740 --> 05:55.560]  But he was the one that finally was accepted.
[05:55.720 --> 05:57.780]  He was 59 years old at the time.
[05:57.780 --> 06:02.200]  And they left England, and they headed west.
[06:02.440 --> 06:06.280]  They stopped off in Greenland, and then continued west.
[06:06.480 --> 06:13.500]  And they were seen by a couple of whaling ships on their way across Baffin Bay there, and then vanished.
[06:13.940 --> 06:16.040]  And there was no word from them.
[06:16.720 --> 06:24.920]  Mrs. Franklin, Lady Franklin, was quite insistent that people go and look for her husband in the expedition, what had happened to them.
[06:24.920 --> 06:35.940]  And so there were several rescue expeditions that were sent out over a period of several years, led by admirals such as Ross, McClure, Collinson, Hall, and Schwatka.
[06:36.320 --> 06:42.300]  Those of you who are Star Trek fans may notice the third ship there was the HMS Enterprise.
[06:42.320 --> 06:45.300]  This was an earlier version of the name there.
[06:45.400 --> 06:51.240]  And there was quite a reward for anyone that could find any information about what had happened to the Franklin expedition.
[06:51.240 --> 06:58.480]  And there are many other rescue expeditions, and there are many books that have been written about the Franklin expedition.
[06:58.980 --> 07:01.480]  Actually, the ships were recently found.
[07:01.480 --> 07:04.960]  In 2014, one of the ships was found.
[07:04.960 --> 07:07.600]  And in 2016, the other ship was found.
[07:08.080 --> 07:14.120]  The HMS Terror was actually found in the aptly named Terror Bay.
[07:14.380 --> 07:15.700]  Complete coincidence there.
[07:15.700 --> 07:19.060]  But now we come back to that encrypted message.
[07:19.300 --> 07:22.420]  And what could it be related to what was going on there?
[07:22.520 --> 07:28.520]  Was there a relationship between the encrypted ad and Northwest Passage or the Franklin expedition?
[07:28.840 --> 07:30.820]  And it came out probably, yes.
[07:31.040 --> 07:34.760]  So there is a cryptography journal called Cryptologia.
[07:34.760 --> 07:43.380]  And in 1992, John Rabson published the solution of these messages and one of the plain texts in this article.
[07:43.580 --> 07:49.500]  And what he was finding as he was analyzing the plain text, he found that there were many four-letter groups.
[07:49.500 --> 07:54.160]  Anyone here that's into cryptography, you go counting and looking for similarities there.
[07:54.240 --> 07:57.100]  So he found some four-letter groups and he found some three-letter groups.
[07:57.100 --> 08:02.600]  And he noticed that in all of these groups, all of the letters were from G to Q.
[08:03.160 --> 08:03.480]  All right?
[08:03.800 --> 08:08.560]  And then there were also some capital letters that were always only from B to F.
[08:09.220 --> 08:14.180]  And as analyzing it, there were also little bits and pieces of what we call clear text.
[08:14.440 --> 08:19.180]  So thinking, hmm, maybe this was based on a code book of some sort.
[08:19.340 --> 08:22.280]  Well, what's the best way to break a code book code?
[08:22.280 --> 08:24.000]  Well, find the code book.
[08:24.600 --> 08:27.340]  In this case, this is not the code book that was used.
[08:27.500 --> 08:29.100]  But it is an example of a code book.
[08:29.460 --> 08:31.400]  And many ciphertexts are being cracked.
[08:31.620 --> 08:34.500]  Even today, many ciphertexts are being cracked.
[08:34.560 --> 08:38.040]  Because we find the encrypted text.
[08:38.220 --> 08:40.140]  And then we also find code books.
[08:40.280 --> 08:41.920]  And so databases are being built.
[08:42.100 --> 08:44.720]  Like, just because it's a code book, which code book could it be?
[08:44.800 --> 08:48.560]  So we're using the computers to try and figure out, is it one of these code books?
[08:48.640 --> 08:51.360]  And if so, is all of it done with the same code book?
[08:51.360 --> 08:54.900]  And this codebook that we're looking at right now is from 1899.
[08:55.380 --> 08:57.080]  This is the State Department codebook.
[08:57.280 --> 09:03.620]  So the question then is, is there a codebook that uses those four-letter groups based on G to Q?
[09:03.960 --> 09:05.940]  Well, no, not that we know of.
[09:06.000 --> 09:10.880]  But there is one that uses four-digit groups, four-numbered groups.
[09:10.940 --> 09:13.240]  And this is the Marriott Signal Code.
[09:13.240 --> 09:18.380]  And this was introduced in 1817 by an English Navy officer, Frederick Marriott.
[09:18.380 --> 09:20.500]  This is a reprint of one of the books.
[09:20.760 --> 09:23.600]  And in that book, there are these flags.
[09:23.880 --> 09:33.580]  And so if you've wondered about the flags that ships would post as they're sailing past each other and wanted to send a message, and some of these flags do represent different numbers.
[09:33.820 --> 09:36.860]  So was this code the one that was used for the ads?
[09:37.000 --> 09:38.440]  Well, we took a look at it.
[09:38.500 --> 09:46.860]  We said, okay, well, we're going to replace those letters, G to Q, with digits going zero to nine, and then apply the code of this book to it.
[09:47.180 --> 09:48.400]  But that didn't work.
[09:48.760 --> 09:50.960]  So then we figure, okay, well, what else can we try?
[09:51.380 --> 09:53.200]  And so was it the wrong table?
[09:53.300 --> 09:54.380]  Was it the wrong codebook?
[09:54.560 --> 10:00.040]  So then we start what we call looking for cribs and trying to find some little piece of it that we can dig into.
[10:00.280 --> 10:06.840]  And we noticed as we were looking at these different ads, there would be these little bits and pieces of clear text.
[10:06.840 --> 10:10.160]  So right after this IQHL was the word born.
[10:10.480 --> 10:13.660]  So we're thinking, hmm, could they be talking about a baby that was born?
[10:13.660 --> 10:15.400]  A child, a son, or a daughter?
[10:15.620 --> 10:20.040]  So we started looking like, okay, could IQHL mean the word son?
[10:20.180 --> 10:27.220]  And so you look for where the word son is in this book, and it comes out IQHL could be encrypted with 8196.
[10:27.360 --> 10:29.040]  And so, okay, could it be 8196?
[10:29.180 --> 10:31.620]  And then we go on like this and looking for other cribs.
[10:31.760 --> 10:34.760]  In this case, M-I-O-Q, we're thinking, could it be the word month?
[10:34.960 --> 10:36.240]  And in that case, yes.
[10:36.240 --> 10:40.860]  And so then we fill in more of this table here.
[10:41.040 --> 10:47.720]  And what we finally get is that we can get the entire thing, but instead of going 1 to 9, going backwards, 9 to 1.
[10:47.920 --> 10:51.180]  And that turned out to actually be the system that was being used.
[10:51.200 --> 10:55.940]  So you replace the letters with the digits, you apply the code, and you do get the plain text.
[10:56.140 --> 11:01.400]  The plain text, I'm not going to read all of it to you, but it's basically chatty stuff.
[11:01.400 --> 11:03.240]  You know, your wife and family are well.
[11:03.800 --> 11:10.220]  And then something here about Captain Penny arrived from Baffin's Bay early in September without success.
[11:10.520 --> 11:12.560]  Captain Austin hourly expected.
[11:12.800 --> 11:15.140]  And then Margaret's sixth son born, and so on.
[11:15.140 --> 11:22.220]  So Captain Penny and Captain Austin were also ship masters who were engaged in these Franklin rescue expeditions.
[11:22.500 --> 11:24.680]  Now, why did they do this in the Times?
[11:24.860 --> 11:34.280]  Well, they knew that no matter where the ship would go, that the Times was really available in any city around the world, and this would be a way of communicating.
[11:34.280 --> 11:36.780]  So who published these particular ads?
[11:36.960 --> 11:41.020]  Well, they tended to be signed AC or J to W, and these were identified.
[11:41.320 --> 11:47.820]  We have a source that says they were identified as relatives of Richard Collinson, who was the leader of one of the rescue expeditions.
[11:48.340 --> 11:51.080]  It turned out that was the one that used the HMS Enterprise.
[11:51.400 --> 11:57.820]  And the Collinson expedition was 1850 to 55, and the ads were published 1850 to 1855.
[11:59.120 --> 12:05.800]  So, now, they never found the Franklin expedition, but they were going around from a different way.
[12:05.920 --> 12:12.040]  So they were going from England around the Horn, coming in and trying to see if they could get to the Franklin expedition from the other side.
[12:12.280 --> 12:13.940]  They did not have any success.
[12:14.100 --> 12:16.160]  And then after that, they went back to England.
[12:16.160 --> 12:18.700]  So it was a full around-the-world journey.
[12:19.340 --> 12:27.520]  Also, I would point out that they stopped in Hawaii, or what we call Hawaii today, and at the time they called it the Sandwich Islands.
[12:28.300 --> 12:32.120]  Sandwich Islands, because that's what Cook named it when he found those islands.
[12:33.040 --> 12:36.620]  And that's also where he was killed, when he really ticked off the locals.
[12:36.860 --> 12:40.040]  But that name of Sandwich Islands stuck for quite a bit.
[12:40.800 --> 12:46.400]  And about Collins' expedition, there are a few books that have been written about that as well, if anyone is interested.
[12:47.880 --> 12:49.580]  Let me come back to this one.
[12:49.660 --> 12:51.260]  On the far left is Blue Book.
[12:51.480 --> 12:55.560]  This came out in 1880, and this was done by Collins' brother.
[12:55.820 --> 13:01.680]  He went through all of the log books from Collins' expedition and edited them together.
[13:01.860 --> 13:04.280]  And really, what comes out is a nice adventure story.
[13:04.480 --> 13:09.200]  And as part of it, he does talk about the cipher notices that were in the Times.
[13:09.200 --> 13:15.380]  And I won't go into great detail other than to say it is described here.
[13:15.640 --> 13:25.280]  But even though this was described in 1880, when the Times did their challenge in 1980, people didn't know where to look.
[13:25.400 --> 13:28.580]  They didn't know that there had been a description of this code at the time.
[13:29.720 --> 13:33.960]  So, as I said, the Times was really available in every major port in the world.
[13:33.960 --> 13:41.980]  And we could potentially call this the first known secure global communication system in the 1800s.
[13:42.080 --> 13:43.160]  Now, did it work?
[13:43.360 --> 13:44.700]  Well, only once.
[13:44.820 --> 13:46.620]  And that was in 1855.
[13:47.100 --> 13:52.160]  Collinson, on his way out, passing through the islands northwest of Australia there.
[13:52.260 --> 13:55.820]  And in Indonesia, there was a strait where many of the ships passed through.
[13:56.000 --> 14:01.060]  This was the islands of... or the port of Bango Wangi, or Banyu Wangi.
[14:01.060 --> 14:05.860]  And he was able to get four copies of the paper there, four different month editions there.
[14:06.000 --> 14:08.560]  And so, he was able to get some news from home in that way.
[14:08.880 --> 14:13.020]  So, about the Collinson Expedition, the encryption has been broken.
[14:13.360 --> 14:17.180]  However, not all 50 of the ads have been formally decrypted yet.
[14:17.180 --> 14:21.760]  So, if anyone wants to kind of take this on as a puzzle, you can go.
[14:21.880 --> 14:28.220]  You can find copies of the newspaper on newspapers.com and decrypt it and let us know.
[14:28.220 --> 14:28.500]  Aha!
[14:28.740 --> 14:29.420]  We've solved this one.
[14:29.560 --> 14:30.220]  We've solved this one.
[14:30.660 --> 14:31.240]  All right.
[14:31.760 --> 14:32.400]  And next.
[14:32.780 --> 14:34.300]  Thank you, Elonka.
[14:35.040 --> 14:39.720]  Now, we go from international exploration to romance.
[14:40.360 --> 14:51.360]  In the 19th century, a lot of lovers and prospective lovers communicated through classified newspaper ads.
[14:51.360 --> 14:55.480]  It was sort of the sexting of the 19th century.
[14:56.100 --> 14:59.820]  And some of them were in plain text.
[14:59.920 --> 15:02.280]  Some of them were not encoded or enciphered.
[15:03.140 --> 15:05.420]  One of my favorites was...
[15:05.420 --> 15:07.880]  I think you should go... got to go back one.
[15:08.140 --> 15:16.040]  It is an ad that says, I have the most beautiful horse in England, but not the most beautiful lady.
[15:16.320 --> 15:18.340]  Your silence pains me deeply.
[15:18.340 --> 15:21.160]  So, very romantic comparing her to a horse.
[15:23.960 --> 15:28.940]  However, many of these ads were encoded and enciphered.
[15:29.060 --> 15:38.780]  There is a book from 2006 by Gene Palmer, a pseudonym for Tony Gaffney that has about a thousand of them.
[15:39.000 --> 15:41.300]  The Agony Column Codes and Ciphers.
[15:41.900 --> 15:43.240]  Highly recommend it.
[15:43.240 --> 15:48.660]  And here is an example from 1853 of one.
[15:49.580 --> 16:13.220]  As you can see, it was enciphered and it was broken using the frequency analysis, which as many, maybe most of you know, you look at which letters appear most frequently in the cipher and compare that to which letters appear most frequently in the cipher.
[16:16.340 --> 16:23.860]  And in this case, it turned out to be a Caesar cipher, one of the simplest ciphers where you just shift the letter.
[16:23.860 --> 16:30.120]  So, here we're shifting A five or six sections over.
[16:30.650 --> 16:46.560]  And when it was decrypted, it turned out to be a note from one lover to another, basically begging her to write back.
[16:46.700 --> 16:49.040]  Do write a few lines, darling, please.
[16:49.040 --> 16:51.840]  I have been far from happy since you went away.
[16:52.280 --> 16:56.960]  This turns out to be quite a running theme through many of these classified ads.
[16:57.140 --> 16:57.900]  Please write.
[16:58.040 --> 16:59.060]  I haven't heard from you.
[16:59.240 --> 16:59.840]  Please, please.
[16:59.980 --> 17:00.520]  I miss you.
[17:02.000 --> 17:10.340]  In this one, another little bit of interest is that they are addressed to...
[17:10.340 --> 17:10.880]  Terrell...
[17:10.880 --> 17:11.540]  Terrell...
[17:11.540 --> 17:11.900]  Terrell...
[17:11.900 --> 17:12.040]  Terrell...
[17:12.040 --> 17:12.440]  Terrell...
[17:12.440 --> 17:12.840]  Thank you.
[17:13.100 --> 17:14.120]  For the Italian...
[17:14.120 --> 17:15.560]  I needed that.
[17:16.100 --> 17:17.220]  Which is...
[17:17.220 --> 17:18.000]  Cinderella.
[17:18.100 --> 17:19.960]  Cinderella in Italian, exactly.
[17:20.740 --> 17:21.500]  Thank you.
[17:21.860 --> 17:22.120]  All right.
[17:22.180 --> 17:23.980]  Here's another interesting example.
[17:24.200 --> 17:25.900]  This is from 1873.
[17:26.260 --> 17:28.000]  And this was an encrypted ad.
[17:28.480 --> 17:32.700]  Now, this one was decrypted using something called Cryptool.
[17:32.700 --> 17:35.160]  Some of you may be familiar with that.
[17:35.480 --> 17:49.220]  This is a software that looks at the letter patterns of the words to see if they are replicated in actual English words.
[17:49.220 --> 17:58.440]  So, this one that's highlighted, for instance, has a D in the 7th position and a D in the 14th position.
[17:59.500 --> 18:00.580]  Are there...
[18:00.580 --> 18:06.540]  So, the software will look and see what other English words have the same letter in those two positions.
[18:07.080 --> 18:11.000]  And it was able to be deciphered.
[18:11.240 --> 18:15.100]  It was a simple substitution cipher.
[18:15.100 --> 18:20.420]  And it turns out that it was from an unhappy wife.
[18:20.960 --> 18:23.120]  We don't know the whole story.
[18:23.300 --> 18:32.380]  But this man, apparently a man, left and his disgrace that he left behind was quite ugly.
[18:34.920 --> 18:35.800]  This...
[18:35.800 --> 18:44.680]  Another code that appeared in 1902 in the Evening Standard in England was very interesting.
[18:44.680 --> 18:47.820]  Because this one was not cracked for many, many years.
[18:49.220 --> 18:54.800]  People applied the frequency analysis to it, but it didn't map onto English.
[18:54.800 --> 18:56.100]  It was all over the place.
[18:57.560 --> 19:05.420]  Finally, in 2014, a German philologist named Thomas Ernst was able to make a breakthrough.
[19:05.420 --> 19:21.900]  He realized that if you split it up into two parts, alternating parts, the red and the blue parts, then it becomes... and then do a frequency analysis, it actually will line up.
[19:21.900 --> 19:35.600]  And then, he has sort of loosened the jar on the mayonnaise, and a man named Jarl van Eycke, a computer specialist from Belgium, he used that and actually cracked it.
[19:35.720 --> 19:42.500]  And as you can see, if you put them together, it spells out actual English.
[19:42.500 --> 19:48.260]  I was aghast at her pain, but oh my dearest, I cannot bear it.
[19:48.600 --> 19:52.020]  I always said it would kill me to have no sign of you.
[19:52.420 --> 19:56.440]  Again, with the please write, I don't hear from you, it's killing me.
[19:58.160 --> 20:16.000]  And I won't read the rest of the cipher, but that is... those are three examples of romantic ciphers, but there are many out there that are still to be solved, so I encourage people to look into it, because it's a fun puzzle, and of course, we want them all cracked.
[20:16.420 --> 20:16.640]  Yeah.
[20:16.640 --> 20:22.980]  Yeah, Jarl van Eycke, he actually just solved this in May, so just a couple months ago this year.
[20:22.980 --> 20:26.600]  He was also one of the guys that was involved with cracking the zodiac cipher.
[20:27.080 --> 20:29.660]  So if you were following that, he was one of the trio there.
[20:30.600 --> 20:35.400]  So, next we'll go to something called the Gunwa Cryptogram, and this is in Denver.
[20:35.640 --> 20:44.880]  And this is interesting partially because it's the only example we have of an American cipher, of an encrypted classified ad in an American paper.
[20:45.380 --> 20:48.340]  If there's any others, we don't know about them, so please do tell us.
[20:48.680 --> 20:51.360]  Other than that, it was really kind of a European thing.
[20:51.360 --> 20:59.540]  So we have this encryption, and it's all encrypted except for the bottom line, which says Gunwa, 1629 Larimer Street.
[20:59.700 --> 21:06.460]  This is an address in Denver, and there really was a company called the Gunwa Company in the 19th century there.
[21:07.320 --> 21:11.590]  And this Gunwa was a fake Chinese doctor.
[21:12.160 --> 21:22.920]  So this Gunwa was a company that was created by a handful of businessmen who were selling somewhat doubtful remedies, and there were several branches across the United States.
[21:23.080 --> 21:27.940]  And one of the branches was in Denver, which existed from 1888 to 1894.
[21:28.580 --> 21:30.160]  Here's one of their ads.
[21:30.280 --> 21:32.620]  This was in an Indianapolis newspaper.
[21:32.760 --> 21:34.260]  Here's another one of their ads.
[21:34.320 --> 21:36.260]  This was in a Pittsburgh newspaper.
[21:36.560 --> 21:41.300]  And coming back to the Denver one, it was founded by an Irish immigrant, William Hale.
[21:41.300 --> 21:56.060]  Now, later, he was indicted on mail fraud charges and mailing pornographic materials, but we're continually curious what would qualify as pornography in the mid-1800s, you know, showing their ankles or what is it.
[21:56.140 --> 22:02.800]  But in any case, he fled to England to escape prosecution, and then he came back to the United States and was arrested.
[22:02.800 --> 22:05.600]  So here's kind of the timeline on it.
[22:05.680 --> 22:08.220]  He founded the Denver branch in 1888.
[22:08.420 --> 22:11.100]  Then this ad was published in 1889.
[22:11.280 --> 22:14.080]  But then he wasn't arrested until 1891.
[22:14.460 --> 22:17.740]  Then in 94, he escaped to Europe, returned, came back arrested.
[22:18.100 --> 22:19.860]  So, hmm, what is this ad?
[22:19.920 --> 22:21.820]  This one single encrypted ad.
[22:21.960 --> 22:24.640]  We don't know why this one ad was encrypted.
[22:24.820 --> 22:25.860]  It's 77 letters.
[22:25.860 --> 22:28.480]  We've done frequency analysis on it.
[22:28.580 --> 22:30.840]  You know, the index of coincidence is kind of odd.
[22:30.840 --> 22:36.880]  It's 4.1 percent, as opposed to English, which has an IOC of 6.7 percent.
[22:37.120 --> 22:42.040]  So it's probably not a transposition or a mono-alphabetic substitution.
[22:42.400 --> 22:43.320]  Now, we've...
[22:43.320 --> 22:56.760]  Klaus has a blog where he has some very solid code breakers, and they've kind of talked about it and saying, well, maybe it's a poly-alphabetic cipher with a period of five, but still, no one has cracked it.
[22:56.780 --> 22:58.300]  So what could it be?
[22:58.300 --> 23:01.880]  It doesn't mean that it's communication with one of the other branches.
[23:02.040 --> 23:04.600]  Was he communicating with other business partners?
[23:04.840 --> 23:08.360]  Or was it communicating with a smuggler or a blackmailer?
[23:08.440 --> 23:09.340]  We don't know.
[23:09.620 --> 23:12.640]  And this thing still stays unsolved.
[23:15.040 --> 23:24.320]  So next, I'm going to go into Enola Holmes, who is not really 1800s, but we're fitting her in here because the time period.
[23:24.460 --> 23:28.440]  Enola Holmes is a fictional sister of Sherlock Holmes.
[23:28.600 --> 23:29.740]  She is non-canon.
[23:29.900 --> 23:34.720]  There is no mention of Enola Holmes in any of the original Sherlock Holmes stories.
[23:34.720 --> 23:39.500]  But there is some teen fiction these days.
[23:39.980 --> 23:42.380]  And Enola Holmes is a very popular character.
[23:42.620 --> 23:44.840]  And there was a movie that came out in 2020.
[23:45.060 --> 23:47.340]  And they're really putting some budget on it.
[23:47.400 --> 23:52.460]  You can see there's Millie Bobby Brown that some of you may recognize from Stranger Things.
[23:52.800 --> 23:54.600]  She was 11 or L.
[23:54.600 --> 23:55.920]  Henry Cavill.
[23:56.100 --> 23:56.980]  You know, he's Superman.
[23:57.520 --> 23:58.400]  The Witcher.
[23:58.840 --> 23:59.260]  Tudors.
[23:59.500 --> 24:01.520]  And then also you see Helena Bonham Carter.
[24:01.880 --> 24:02.560]  Harry Potter.
[24:02.780 --> 24:03.460]  King's Speech.
[24:03.700 --> 24:04.580]  Princess Margaret.
[24:04.740 --> 24:05.120]  And The Crown.
[24:05.340 --> 24:09.720]  So they're getting some big names into this Enola Holmes movie.
[24:09.920 --> 24:13.220]  Enola Holmes 2 is about to drop on Netflix.
[24:13.660 --> 24:15.260]  I've been checking Netflix every day.
[24:15.400 --> 24:18.780]  And it's kind of like they said it's going to be in fall, but it's not quite here yet.
[24:19.400 --> 24:23.000]  But in the first version, there are many codes and ciphers.
[24:23.000 --> 24:26.480]  This is one that shows up very briefly on the screen.
[24:26.680 --> 24:29.580]  It has no relationship to the plot that we know of.
[24:29.740 --> 24:31.920]  We have not been able to crack this one.
[24:32.040 --> 24:34.040]  It looks like it's a Playfair message.
[24:34.100 --> 24:38.100]  It looks like Playfair, but we haven't been able to solve it.
[24:38.160 --> 24:39.860]  Maybe it's an Easter egg for later.
[24:40.240 --> 24:41.740]  And there are many other messages.
[24:42.080 --> 24:45.720]  And you'll be able to see these pictures from our slides.
[24:45.900 --> 24:47.380]  We're streaming the talk right now.
[24:47.660 --> 24:52.720]  And later, the entire recording of this talk is going to be available on the web.
[24:52.720 --> 24:54.840]  I think at the end of the convention.
[24:55.160 --> 25:01.620]  So on the right here, we have something from the, as I said in the plot, Palmel Gazette and a code there.
[25:01.760 --> 25:02.940]  That one is crackable.
[25:03.020 --> 25:04.640]  I'll talk more about that in a second.
[25:04.980 --> 25:12.320]  And also in the movie, which is why we're including in this talk, we have this encrypted classified ad with these numbers in it.
[25:12.320 --> 25:16.900]  And it's curious to us because we're also thinking about, where did they get the idea for this?
[25:16.920 --> 25:19.680]  And we're a little suspicious about one thing here.
[25:20.480 --> 25:24.820]  Because there was this movie ad and also a graphic novel that uses these numbers.
[25:24.840 --> 25:33.580]  And also in 1833, there was a real classified ad that used a similar code system.
[25:33.740 --> 25:35.660]  So we're like, hmm, did they get the idea for it from there?
[25:36.760 --> 25:40.480]  Going on, the ad that is in the movie, they decrypt it.
[25:40.540 --> 25:43.380]  And she's decrypting it with this code wheel, which is completely ridiculous.
[25:43.700 --> 25:46.420]  You wouldn't use a code wheel to solve that kind of code, but anyway.
[25:47.260 --> 25:49.240]  And then she decrypts it and she writes it out.
[25:49.320 --> 25:51.140]  And she writes it out wrong, which makes us crazy.
[25:51.540 --> 25:53.920]  But, you know, it is solvable.
[25:53.920 --> 26:02.040]  And if you go, the correct decryption of the ad is using this kind of square on the left-hand side there, which is kind of a Polybius square.
[26:02.380 --> 26:05.140]  Ivy, Meet Me, Royal Academy, Five Tonight, Mother.
[26:05.640 --> 26:09.180]  And also there's a similar system that's used in the graphic novel.
[26:09.560 --> 26:17.180]  Also has this kind of square system where you can take each two numbers as a pair, rows and columns, and figure it out that way.
[26:17.300 --> 26:18.580]  Again, you don't do it with a code wheel.
[26:19.640 --> 26:21.800]  Anyway, and this is what's in the graphic novel.
[26:21.800 --> 26:26.460]  And then the real ad also uses this modified system.
[26:26.720 --> 26:31.740]  And this is what the real ad said from 1833, which is, again, as A.J.
[26:31.900 --> 26:32.940]  said, very similar.
[26:33.180 --> 26:35.100]  You know, I've been ill, loved very ill.
[26:35.260 --> 26:37.980]  My doctor has ordered a change of scenes and air and so forth.
[26:38.080 --> 26:40.440]  I haven't heard from you since you left.
[26:40.780 --> 26:41.180]  Adieu.
[26:41.720 --> 26:44.620]  And so, again, these kind of agony.
[26:44.780 --> 26:46.420]  That's why it was called these agony columns.
[26:46.640 --> 26:51.420]  So the timeline for Enola Holmes, again, we had these numbers in the graphic novel.
[26:51.420 --> 26:59.000]  Then Klaus, who's not here, but he had blogged about this other ad, the real ad in 1833.
[26:59.020 --> 27:01.520]  He blogged about it in January 2019.
[27:01.640 --> 27:11.020]  And then movie production started around July 2019, which is why we're kind of thinking that, hmm, you know, maybe they read Klaus's blog.
[27:11.340 --> 27:13.140]  We don't know for sure, but just could be.
[27:13.140 --> 27:13.480]  Okay.
[27:13.920 --> 27:17.100]  So the sequel has been announced for coming out later this year.
[27:17.260 --> 27:21.380]  And I am eagerly awaiting to see what kind of codes they use in it.
[27:22.780 --> 27:23.940]  Thank you, Elonka.
[27:24.800 --> 27:33.100]  Next, we go to the Ruby series, which is an example of what I was talking about before, the romance ads.
[27:33.860 --> 27:37.240]  But it's a particularly interesting one, so we wanted to quickly highlight it.
[27:37.400 --> 27:39.960]  It was in Gaffney's book.
[27:40.140 --> 27:44.020]  And also the readers of Klaus's blog helped to decrypt it.
[27:44.520 --> 27:46.360]  It's a great blog, by the way.
[27:46.900 --> 27:51.640]  And we're sad that he couldn't be here, but definitely check out Klaus's blog.
[27:52.540 --> 27:59.020]  It was a series of 25 ads in the Daily Telegraph over a period of three or four years.
[27:59.720 --> 28:02.420]  And they have been decrypted.
[28:02.420 --> 28:06.180]  As you can see, they were simple substitution ciphers.
[28:08.400 --> 28:16.280]  And when they are decrypted, they read, they are dressed to Ruby.
[28:16.280 --> 28:24.300]  But the writer is, once again, talking about her lack of communication.
[28:24.300 --> 28:27.760]  So she's, as they say now, ghosting him.
[28:27.920 --> 28:29.440]  And he is not happy.
[28:30.720 --> 28:38.080]  And just skipping over to Advertisement 8, he gets more and more frustrated.
[28:38.080 --> 28:44.580]  And finally, he starts lashing out, I think it is mean of you not to write oftener.
[28:45.420 --> 28:52.900]  And then in the last five ads, I found this particularly interesting.
[28:53.180 --> 29:05.680]  Because he says, on August 15th, he says, I am going to write you no more until I hear from you.
[29:05.720 --> 29:07.480]  So he lays down the line.
[29:07.480 --> 29:10.140]  He is putting an ultimatum out there.
[29:10.140 --> 29:15.340]  Five, seven days later, he's like, anything, please, just write.
[29:15.640 --> 29:16.860]  I mean, come on.
[29:17.100 --> 29:19.840]  So he didn't have the best impulse control.
[29:20.360 --> 29:26.780]  Now, what we particularly like about these ads is that Elonka and Klaus did additional sleuthing.
[29:26.780 --> 29:30.760]  And were able to find out more about the writer.
[29:33.540 --> 29:44.580]  And he says, please write me at number three, Falcon Terrace, Falcon, Clampham Junction.
[29:45.000 --> 29:52.460]  And Klaus and Elonka were able to use Google Maps and Google View to actually find where he lived.
[29:52.460 --> 29:55.720]  Which is now, it's on this block.
[29:56.040 --> 29:59.220]  And right now, it's a motorcycle repair shop.
[29:59.620 --> 30:02.820]  And he lived nearby.
[30:02.820 --> 30:05.740]  He lived just a stone's throw from that.
[30:06.100 --> 30:09.700]  The actual apartment has been torn down, we believe.
[30:10.180 --> 30:16.900]  Elonka found a map from 1893 that shows exactly where the apartment would have been.
[30:17.920 --> 30:24.480]  And then we did some even more sleuthing because we want to find out the identity of this person.
[30:24.720 --> 30:33.780]  And there was an interesting hint in an 1884 ad where he apologizes that he has not written.
[30:33.960 --> 30:39.120]  I'm sure she doesn't care, judging by the amount of responses he gets.
[30:39.260 --> 30:43.040]  But he apologizes and says, he was up in the Himalayas.
[30:43.040 --> 30:45.840]  And this, we think, is not a metaphor.
[30:46.020 --> 30:51.620]  Because this era was when the British were exploring and mapping the Himalayas.
[30:52.660 --> 30:55.460]  So we know his physical address.
[30:55.780 --> 30:58.640]  We know that he was a Himalayan explorer.
[30:59.560 --> 31:08.560]  And so we just need some help actually tracking down the name, which we think is probably somewhere in the housing records in England.
[31:08.560 --> 31:13.920]  So we throw that out as a possible puzzle to someone out there.
[31:14.240 --> 31:14.820]  All right.
[31:15.620 --> 31:17.720]  Next, we're going to go to French ads.
[31:18.080 --> 31:21.380]  So again, as I said, there was only one in the United States that we know of.
[31:21.420 --> 31:23.340]  We actually found several in France.
[31:23.700 --> 31:29.540]  And this was because we had, again, Klaus, one of his blog readers, learned of this.
[31:29.540 --> 31:36.480]  And he was, one of his readers was French and had bound many ads in France.
[31:36.740 --> 31:49.280]  And what we learned about was this man named Etienne Bazery, who became a military cryptologist, starting with his interest in cracking the codes of the agony columns in the newspapers.
[31:49.500 --> 31:51.120]  So this was common in England as well.
[31:51.120 --> 31:53.420]  People would put these encrypted ads in the paper.
[31:53.620 --> 31:57.460]  And others on Sunday would go, aha, Sunday time.
[31:57.660 --> 32:09.340]  And they would pick up a copy of the paper and go to a coffee shop and just start cracking the codes of the classified ads, just so that they could kind of snoop in and see what people were saying, because it was just simple substitution ciphers.
[32:09.500 --> 32:12.300]  And so this is what Etienne was doing in the French ciphers.
[32:12.520 --> 32:16.980]  But later he become probably the leading French cryptologist of his time.
[32:17.460 --> 32:22.760]  And so this was, as I said, Didier Muller was one of Klaus's blog readers.
[32:22.940 --> 32:25.780]  He found hundreds of ads in French.
[32:25.940 --> 32:29.240]  And he has a full database of them up on his website.
[32:29.460 --> 32:30.760]  He's done a wonderful job here.
[32:30.960 --> 32:33.000]  Most of them, it's exactly the same as the English.
[32:33.160 --> 32:34.280]  They use simple substitution.
[32:34.680 --> 32:37.620]  This is an example, Chiffre and Claire.
[32:38.120 --> 32:39.540]  And then I'll read it.
[32:47.680 --> 32:55.160]  So, because I can't see you, I can't go to see you, please let me tell you that I love you this way, and that way no one will see me blush.
[32:55.740 --> 32:58.280]  And so, again, very romantic things.
[32:58.480 --> 33:01.680]  Now, some of them we have not solved yet.
[33:01.680 --> 33:03.960]  And this is just very briefly.
[33:04.100 --> 33:07.180]  I'm going to go over these if anyone wants to take a shot at them later.
[33:07.680 --> 33:10.060]  Some of them have very interesting systems.
[33:10.320 --> 33:11.880]  This one, it sort of looks musical.
[33:12.900 --> 33:16.200]  Ce qu'on ne peut se dire, ni s'écrire, on peut le chanter.
[33:16.860 --> 33:22.380]  Do-mi, do-mi, do-ré, re-fa, re-fa, re-mi, et cetera, et cetera, vous avez compris.
[33:22.620 --> 33:26.360]  Meaning, that which can neither be said nor written can be sung.
[33:26.360 --> 33:29.460]  And then, do-ré-mi, and then, have you understood this?
[33:29.600 --> 33:32.120]  So, a lot of discussion about what this is.
[33:32.300 --> 33:43.120]  I do have a couple fans who are classical music fans themselves, and they say it sounds like a choir's practice, as they're going through the different notes.
[33:43.300 --> 33:46.260]  So, maybe this meant something in secret to them.
[33:46.460 --> 33:54.800]  There's also this language called salrassal, which was an artificial language designed by a Frenchman based on musical notes.
[33:54.800 --> 33:58.760]  So, I was thinking, well, hmm, if it's salrassal, who can I find who knows salrassal?
[33:58.820 --> 34:04.000]  So, I go on Discord, and I look for a community of people who know salrassal.
[34:04.140 --> 34:04.940]  And I found one.
[34:05.600 --> 34:07.220]  And you can find everything on Discord.
[34:07.560 --> 34:13.480]  And I found a community, and I said, hey, can you, you guys know salrassal, can you tell me what this says?
[34:13.480 --> 34:15.460]  But they, it didn't mean anything to them.
[34:15.720 --> 34:17.220]  They got some basic words on it.
[34:17.280 --> 34:21.860]  And I said, well, if we can commute, if we can decrypt it, it's probably, I miss you.
[34:22.100 --> 34:23.720]  Why haven't you sent me a letter?
[34:23.720 --> 34:25.340]  Or did that kind of standard thing.
[34:25.780 --> 34:27.520]  And, but still, they couldn't solve it.
[34:27.680 --> 34:30.060]  So, we don't know exactly what this could mean.
[34:30.060 --> 34:31.420]  I meet you at choir practice.
[34:31.620 --> 34:32.240]  We don't know.
[34:32.460 --> 34:33.740]  So, unsolved.
[34:34.240 --> 34:37.520]  And then we have Ignatius Palaki.
[34:37.980 --> 34:39.500]  Yes, thank you, Elonka.
[34:39.700 --> 34:42.620]  And also, thank you for your excellent French accent.
[34:42.980 --> 34:43.820]  Very impressive.
[34:44.200 --> 34:50.320]  Yeah, Ignatius Palaki is one of the best characters in code-breaking history, in my opinion.
[34:50.320 --> 34:51.780]  Right up there with Ilanka.
[34:52.020 --> 34:56.180]  He was a, one of the first private detectives.
[34:56.360 --> 34:58.920]  He's been called the real Sherlock Holmes.
[34:59.240 --> 35:03.500]  There is a debate over whether he actually influenced Arthur Conan Doyle.
[35:04.040 --> 35:05.900]  But it's quite likely he did.
[35:07.200 --> 35:13.680]  And he, he was also satirized as a character in a Gilbert and Sullivan play.
[35:13.680 --> 35:16.260]  So, or, what do they call them?
[35:16.360 --> 35:16.920]  Operettas?
[35:17.860 --> 35:21.540]  So, he's, he was quite famous in his day.
[35:21.720 --> 35:26.700]  And he often made use of newspaper advertisements to communicate with his clients.
[35:27.680 --> 35:34.700]  And he would, he would sometimes write where that they should meet on Elm and Second Avenue.
[35:34.700 --> 35:37.120]  Now, this one, I think, is a classic.
[35:37.380 --> 35:49.360]  In 1869, he wrote to one of his clients, Although possessing a thorough knowledge of eight languages, I cannot detect sense from your epistle.
[35:49.600 --> 35:51.600]  So, completely condescending.
[35:51.600 --> 35:54.900]  That, to me, reminds me of something that Sherlock Holmes would write.
[35:57.200 --> 36:04.620]  He also put in ads for missing people, sort of like the, the milk cartons from my childhood.
[36:05.700 --> 36:14.220]  But in addition to that, the plain text messages, he would also send encrypted messages to his clients.
[36:14.940 --> 36:20.280]  Now, these encrypted messages, as you can see, they were often numerical.
[36:21.440 --> 36:24.760]  Which leads us to think they might be a code book.
[36:24.940 --> 36:25.920]  There might be a code book.
[36:26.120 --> 36:28.660]  But that code book has yet to be found.
[36:29.020 --> 36:31.280]  So, these remain unsolved.
[36:32.100 --> 36:35.220]  We've cracked some of Palaki's, but not all.
[36:35.800 --> 36:38.800]  So, again, we encourage people to try.
[36:39.020 --> 36:43.980]  This one is one of my favorites, because it's so unusual.
[36:43.980 --> 36:49.280]  It looks a little like a pig pen, cipher, maybe mixed with Braille.
[36:49.840 --> 36:51.100]  But, again, unsolved.
[36:52.700 --> 36:56.420]  And we would love to have help figuring these out.
[36:56.760 --> 36:57.480]  Thank you.
[36:57.960 --> 36:59.920]  So, there are lots more.
[37:00.160 --> 37:03.900]  We could give examples and go on for another hour with the various ones.
[37:04.080 --> 37:06.960]  But I'll simply say that there are many more.
[37:07.160 --> 37:09.220]  Most were published in the late 19th century.
[37:09.220 --> 37:14.980]  I think things sort of trailed off there, because it was not as necessary to be secret.
[37:15.200 --> 37:16.900]  Like, dating became an option.
[37:17.140 --> 37:20.080]  You didn't have to hide your feelings for someone all the time.
[37:20.680 --> 37:23.840]  Most of these encrypted messages are broken, but some are not.
[37:24.140 --> 37:29.500]  And also, looking for the code books is also a very fun activity.
[37:29.760 --> 37:32.960]  People are like, well, okay, we have these encrypted messages that need a code book.
[37:33.080 --> 37:34.580]  Oh, look, I found a new code book.
[37:34.580 --> 37:39.740]  And then they're immediately trying to see if that may help us to crack all the previously encrypted messages.
[37:40.180 --> 37:41.840]  And other than that, thank you.
[37:53.310 --> 37:55.850]  I think we have time for a couple questions.
[37:56.550 --> 37:58.630]  If you have any questions, please line up.
[37:59.810 --> 38:02.910]  I have a question from the Matrix chat.
[38:03.270 --> 38:03.410]  From the Matrix.
[38:05.030 --> 38:09.830]  How realistic are the crypto storylines in Neil Stevenson's Cryptonomicon?
[38:10.550 --> 38:12.530]  How realistic are what?
[38:12.530 --> 38:17.990]  In the book Cryptonomicon by Neil Stevenson, there were various ciphers that were used.
[38:18.190 --> 38:19.270]  That's a big question.
[38:19.530 --> 38:19.690]  Yeah.
[38:20.450 --> 38:21.370]  I'd have to...
[38:21.370 --> 38:23.410]  I think I can answer that one in more detail.
[38:24.690 --> 38:27.950]  I'm, of course, aware of the book Cryptonomicon by Neil Stevenson.
[38:28.370 --> 38:30.610]  But, yeah, that's a big question that I think...
[38:30.610 --> 38:32.190]  Well, I will just say...
[38:32.250 --> 38:38.150]  ...that Elonka has been featured as a character in Dan Brown's novel.
[38:38.990 --> 38:39.870]  It was...
[38:39.870 --> 38:40.730]  Which novel?
[38:40.870 --> 38:41.470]  Angels and...
[38:41.990 --> 38:43.110]  Lost Symbols.
[38:43.250 --> 38:44.070]  Sequel to Da Vinci Code.
[38:44.270 --> 38:44.730]  Lost Symbols.
[38:44.850 --> 38:49.230]  And it was a character who is an anagram, a scrambled version of your name.
[38:49.450 --> 38:49.610]  Yep.
[38:49.610 --> 38:50.410]  Nola Kaye.
[38:50.890 --> 38:51.030]  Right?
[38:51.230 --> 38:51.670]  So...
[38:51.670 --> 38:53.350]  And I actually had...
[38:53.350 --> 38:54.750]  I don't know if you can't see it here.
[38:54.870 --> 39:00.310]  But I had special shoes made from Vans that have Nola Kaye embroidered on them.
[39:00.370 --> 39:01.410]  Nola on the left foot.
[39:01.470 --> 39:02.330]  Kaye on the right foot.
[39:02.330 --> 39:05.710]  So if anyone wants to take pictures of my shoes later, that's fine.
[39:05.950 --> 39:06.510]  And were you...
[39:06.510 --> 39:09.890]  Were you a consultant for Dan?
[39:10.190 --> 39:11.590]  Or was he just a fan of your work?
[39:11.710 --> 39:12.030]  No, no.
[39:12.250 --> 39:14.270]  He'd talk to me and he'd ask me questions.
[39:14.290 --> 39:16.730]  And I'd give him advice on this and that.
[39:16.930 --> 39:18.410]  And often he'd ask me a question.
[39:18.410 --> 39:22.230]  I'd tell him and then he'd ignore it and go on and do whatever he was gonna do.
[39:22.990 --> 39:23.250]  Yeah.
[39:24.150 --> 39:24.530]  Okay.
[39:25.430 --> 39:30.550]  Sir, just following on the thread of where one person had two ciphers in one ad.
[39:30.550 --> 39:35.790]  Are there any examples of people distributing messages across multiple classified ads?
[39:36.530 --> 39:41.590]  So, you know, half the information is in one ad and the other half is in another ad either the same day or another day.
[39:41.670 --> 39:44.370]  Is there any kind of evidence of that kind of activity?
[39:46.430 --> 39:48.550]  I'm having a lot of trouble hearing...
[39:49.130 --> 39:50.710]  Yeah, I didn't quite catch it.
[39:50.870 --> 39:50.990]  Yeah.
[39:51.310 --> 39:53.630]  Sir, I'm asking...
[39:53.630 --> 39:57.930]  Following on from the thread where there was each four-letter group was a different cipher.
[39:57.930 --> 40:08.590]  Has there been any examples where people have used spread mass ciphers over multiple messages either in the same day or the next day to make it harder to find cribs and so on?
[40:10.830 --> 40:17.830]  Well, we certainly had a series of ads, but I'm not sure exactly whether they were spread over...
[40:17.830 --> 40:18.970]  What do you think, Elonka?
[40:19.030 --> 40:20.190]  Did you run across any of that?
[40:20.550 --> 40:22.170]  Well, tell me again what...
[40:22.170 --> 40:30.750]  Oh, it's basically where they split up into several ads, so that you needed the first ad to decipher the second ad.
[40:30.850 --> 40:30.950]  Yeah.
[40:30.950 --> 40:32.450]  Yeah, we actually do have an example.
[40:32.690 --> 40:43.230]  We didn't have a slide for it, but someone said, this message will become clear if you look at my message from the 18th inst.
[40:43.550 --> 40:48.270]  And inst was something commonly used called instante mensa, which meant in this month.
[40:48.270 --> 40:49.190]  It was a common thing.
[40:49.310 --> 40:50.930]  So we looked at the other ad.
[40:51.050 --> 40:56.770]  There was another encrypted ad on that day, but we still couldn't understand what the two of them meant.
[40:56.910 --> 40:59.050]  But I can definitely get you that if you're interested in seeing it.
[40:59.070 --> 40:59.090]  Great.
[40:59.090 --> 40:59.930]  Thank you so much, Jocelyn.
[41:00.030 --> 41:00.150]  Okay.
[41:02.350 --> 41:08.810]  Hey, so just a off... not really off question, but not off track.
[41:09.090 --> 41:16.310]  You mentioned that you kind of got into this because of your love for puzzles, but what made you think to look in an 1890s newspaper?
[41:17.250 --> 41:20.330]  Got into this because of love for puzzles, but...
[41:20.330 --> 41:24.050]  What made you look an 1890s newspaper as?
[41:26.890 --> 41:27.470]  Wow.
[41:28.090 --> 41:43.350]  Well, people write to us all the time with different codes and puzzles, and especially they say, I went through our attic the other day, and we found this postcard to my great-great-great-grandfather, and it seems to be in code.
[41:43.590 --> 41:44.810]  We'd love to know what it says.
[41:44.950 --> 41:45.670]  Can you help us?
[41:46.110 --> 41:47.430]  And sometimes we can.
[41:47.570 --> 41:49.970]  We say, oh, it's a substitution cipher, and sometimes we have no clue.
[41:50.770 --> 42:00.490]  But through that, we often are doing research for it and saying, hmm, this reminds me of something I saw here, and you just kind of spiderweb out and find something that leads you to something.
[42:00.490 --> 42:00.970]  Yeah.
[42:01.170 --> 42:01.310]  Yeah.
[42:01.650 --> 42:13.330]  And also, for my book, I ran across several other examples of codes and ciphers crossing over with newspapers.
[42:13.590 --> 42:33.190]  And some of you might know that the famous crossword puzzle that appeared in the Telegraph at the start of World War II, and it said that if you're able to solve this in 12 minutes or less, please get in contact with this number.
[42:33.430 --> 42:40.630]  And it turned out to be the Enigma cipher, the Bletchley Park folks.
[42:40.850 --> 42:44.770]  So I always argue crossword puzzles help save the world.
[42:45.730 --> 43:05.130]  There was also a very bizarre scandal, like a national security scandal towards the end of World War II, where several puzzles in a row, I believe it was in the Telegraph again, contained words related, top secret words related to D-Day.
[43:05.330 --> 43:07.470]  And this was right before D-Day.
[43:07.630 --> 43:16.910]  So it was words like Utah and Overlord, which was the code name for the whole enterprise.
[43:16.910 --> 43:22.590]  And the British Secret Service understandably got very nervous.
[43:22.890 --> 43:24.310]  They did not like this at all.
[43:24.490 --> 43:36.410]  And they arrested the crossword puzzle maker who was this shy headmaster of a British school, you know, a public school.
[43:37.130 --> 43:43.770]  And they interrogated him and they decided in the end it was just a very weird coincidence.
[43:43.770 --> 43:58.970]  There have been further conspiracy theories that it was more than a coincidence because the school was apparently located near some sort of military base and the crossword puzzles were co-written with the students.
[43:59.210 --> 44:09.450]  So this theory says the students were eavesdropping on the soldiers, heard the words, and being sneaky and mischievous, put them into the crossword puzzle.
[44:09.450 --> 44:11.370]  So that remains a mystery.
[44:11.370 --> 44:18.790]  But I just love that overlap between puzzles and codes and national security.
[44:21.310 --> 44:25.030]  There's an interesting question here from Band-Aid in the Matrix chat.
[44:25.430 --> 44:29.370]  How much would one of these ads cost in modern currency?
[44:30.770 --> 44:32.250]  That's a great question.
[44:32.830 --> 44:33.550]  Sorry.
[44:33.990 --> 44:35.810]  That's something I should research.
[44:35.810 --> 44:37.330]  How much does an ad cost today?
[44:37.550 --> 44:39.850]  I mean, in the papers that still do them.
[44:40.150 --> 44:40.750]  I don't get...
[44:40.750 --> 44:42.590]  I think zero because it's Craigslist.
[44:42.770 --> 44:42.930]  Yeah.
[44:47.150 --> 44:50.310]  And another question from the Matrix chat from CellSplit.
[44:50.870 --> 44:53.090]  What is the oldest known encrypted message?
[44:53.330 --> 44:59.370]  And also, those messages that haven't been decrypted, are they unique encryptions made by the writers of the messages?
[44:59.530 --> 45:01.550]  Or are they just examples of really good encryption?
[45:04.440 --> 45:05.080]  Wait.
[45:05.220 --> 45:06.080]  I almost heard it.
[45:06.260 --> 45:06.760]  It was...
[45:06.760 --> 45:07.460]  Are they...
[45:07.460 --> 45:10.260]  It's tough when someone's talking through a mask into a microphone.
[45:10.860 --> 45:11.560]  Are they...
[45:12.020 --> 45:24.500]  So the question is, if the undeciphered messages, if they were simply one-offs by the original writers, or are they just examples of excellent encryption?
[45:25.680 --> 45:26.200]  Yeah.
[45:26.320 --> 45:28.560]  If it's a single message, it's hard to tell.
[45:28.740 --> 45:33.360]  I mean, but we can do some analysis of it to see, okay, it's one message we can't...
[45:33.360 --> 45:34.860]  Like the Gunwa message.
[45:35.040 --> 45:37.700]  We don't know if it's really good encryption.
[45:37.700 --> 45:42.080]  Maybe the message was someone, I'm going to post an ad that means nothing.
[45:42.080 --> 45:47.120]  But when you see that, this means you should, you know, set to port on the third or something.
[45:47.120 --> 45:48.860]  I couldn't tell you.
[45:49.060 --> 45:49.360]  Yeah.
[45:49.500 --> 46:03.300]  I think, you know, obviously the shorter the message, the more difficult it is to decipher, which is why, partly why, part four of the cryptosculpture is only 97 characters.
[46:04.280 --> 46:04.440]  Yeah.
[46:04.440 --> 46:07.980]  So that's partly why it has stumped us for so long.
[46:08.260 --> 46:08.400]  Yeah.
[46:08.400 --> 46:08.480]  Yeah.
[46:08.480 --> 46:12.060]  If we had a lot of text from K4, it would have been...
[46:12.060 --> 46:13.460]  We'd probably have it solved, I think.
[46:15.340 --> 46:19.440]  One more question from the online check from Aesthetics.
[46:19.980 --> 46:22.760]  You have mentioned many kinds of ciphers.
[46:23.020 --> 46:25.440]  How could a beginner know or learn more about them?
[46:26.140 --> 46:27.680]  Learn more about ciphers?
[46:27.900 --> 46:33.540]  I recommend the book by Elonka and Klaus, or my book, of course.
[46:34.200 --> 46:36.860]  But yeah, this is a great guide.
[46:36.880 --> 46:39.620]  It's partly why I interviewed Elonka for my book.
[46:39.920 --> 46:40.040]  Yeah.
[46:40.520 --> 46:47.500]  There's also a really good book by Simon Singh, S-I-N-G-H, called The Code Book.
[46:47.740 --> 46:58.540]  And if you want to learn more about the people that made codes, you want to look for a book by David Kahn, K-A-H-N, The Code Breakers, which is really considered the gold standard in the community.
[47:01.200 --> 47:02.060]  I have a question.
[47:02.320 --> 47:06.100]  Have you found any evidence of how these solutions were shared with the recipients?
[47:08.140 --> 47:15.320]  Like, so, you know, the ciphers are in the ads, but then how did the person that's receiving it know how to decipher it?
[47:17.740 --> 47:19.580]  I can't understand it.
[47:19.660 --> 47:19.960]  I'm sorry.
[47:20.480 --> 47:21.320]  Yeah, I'm sorry.
[47:21.560 --> 47:25.380]  It was how do we know that the people understood what that is?
[47:25.400 --> 47:30.500]  Like, how did the recipients of the message get the solutions to them?
[47:34.000 --> 47:35.840]  If someone has an answer, bring them a mic.
[47:36.280 --> 47:37.160]  Pre-arrangement.
[47:37.220 --> 47:38.400]  Yes, pre-arrangement.
[47:38.480 --> 47:39.440]  I would agree with that.
[47:39.440 --> 47:42.620]  Yeah, you agree on here's the code book we're going to use.
[47:44.120 --> 47:44.640]  Yeah.
[47:46.580 --> 47:47.100]  Okay.
[47:47.700 --> 47:50.560]  Any other questions from the matrix?
[47:53.260 --> 47:54.100]  All right.
[47:54.300 --> 47:55.020]  Well, thank you all.
[47:55.020 --> 47:55.520]  Thank you.
[47:55.660 --> 47:56.820]  That was super fun.
[47:57.020 --> 47:57.980]  Hope you had a good time.
[48:04.320 --> 48:10.720]  Anyone that wants an autograph or to take pictures of my shoes, I'll be in the back left over there.
[48:11.020 --> 48:11.200]  All right.
[48:11.540 --> 48:11.860]  Thank you.