

UK cryptographers fail to crack World War II code found on dead pigeon - talleyrand
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/11/23/after-weeks-of-trying-uk-cryptographers-fail-to-crack-world-war-ii-code-found-on-dead-pigeon/

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n-gauge
Some things I noticed when looking at the orginal scanned image:
([http://cdn.thenextweb.com/wp-
content/blogs.dir/1/files/2012/...](http://cdn.thenextweb.com/wp-
content/blogs.dir/1/files/2012/11/large-pigeon-message.png))

The NURP text part contains numbers - why is number 76 on bottom one aligned
under the 194 as if this is a sum (or subtraction)? suggesting the person who
wrote this knew that this was important.

Why is The Time of origin box underlined? is this to show that this number
(1522) is to be used? Also note the style of the number 2 varies as if done by
different people.

Back to the code itself, a comment has been made that there are 27 blocks with
what looks like a time at the end. Was this inserted here as a kind of
checksum to stop any additions to the coded message?

As a side note, if you subtract the NURP numbers: 40-37 = 3 and 194-76 = 118,
grouped together (using the 2 in the Number of copies sent box):

31 18, swap to make the date 1831, and use the 6 as day in a month.... I'll
let you google that!

------
andrewcooke
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4821517>

------
talleyrand
For brevity's sake, the code is:

AOAKN HVPKD FNFJW YIDDC

RQXSR DJHFP GOVFN MIAPX

PABUZ WYYNP CMPNW HJRZH

NLXKG MEMKK ONOIB AKEEQ

WAOTA RBQRH DJOFM TPZEH

LKXGH RGGHT JRZCQ FNKTQ

KLDTS FQIRW AOAKN 27 1525/6

