
GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes - rb2e
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-47907370
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dlgeek
"I'm embarrassed to say, on the very next day Chris's very own code grid was
found in the back of his address book. It was almost like Chris Sievey was
going, 'There you go, now we've all had our fun, there's the explanation.'"

And they say the universe doesn't have a sense of irony...

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paulgb
If Frank Sidebottom is an unfamiliar name, I recommend the short audiobook
Frank by Jon Ronson as an entertaining story. Jon played keyboards in his band
and is an entertaining writer.

~~~
ozzmotik
oh wow thanks for sharing that! I had never heard of frank but i definitely
have heard of jon ronson from his research and look into psychopathy. oh and
the men who stare at goats, of course. anyway i must now add yet another line
to my ledger of things i really should be looking into

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stevenwoo
The movie Frank is a fictionalized version of the character (written by
Ronson), and there was a documentary about the guy as well:
[http://www.beingfrankmovie.com/info.html](http://www.beingfrankmovie.com/info.html)
I watched the movie and was shocked to learn the movie was based on a real
life phenomena.

~~~
Joeboy
I don't think the film has all that much to do with Frank Sidebottom, beyond
the name and the head. It's more a take on _more_ troubled outsider geniuses
like Captain Beefheart and Daniel Johnston. As far as I can tell Chris Sievey
was maybe quite eccentric and probably a bit frustrating, but Sidebottom was a
piece of art he was doing and not an artifact of mental illness like the
film's Frank.

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mellosouls
An example of Frank's original worldview.

Anybody who's only seen the fictional film representation may find it
surprising.

[https://youtu.be/yrM6sLx_DXo](https://youtu.be/yrM6sLx_DXo)

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bcherny
Any more details on how the encoding worked? Was this just a substitution
cypher with some gibberish sprinkled in?

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brad0
Is gibberish called nulls or nonces? I forget.

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cortesoft
Nonce is short for "number used only once"

~~~
dtf
Once is from the Middle English "anes", meaning "one".

Nonce is from "then anes", meaning "the one".

The "-n" got smooshed into the latter word, to become "nonce", rather like "an
ewt" became "newt".

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rocqua
Is the term that old? I was told it literally meant N(umber)once.

~~~
dtf
Yes, the construction "for the nonce" goes back to the Middle Ages. The
concept of a "nonce word" goes back to 1884, according to this article.

[https://www.dailywritingtips.com/nonce-words-for-the-
nonce-a...](https://www.dailywritingtips.com/nonce-words-for-the-nonce-and-
nonce/)

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Hendrikto
> I spent a while just looking at them going, 'What could he be saying, what
> could this mean?'

> But it was impossible to crack them […]

Confirmed uncrackable. He looked at it Jim, what else was he supposed to do??

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ape4
I didn't know til now that the GCHQ headquarters is a flying saucer like
Apple's

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keithpeter
A couple of quotes from OA with a personal 'translation'

 _" GCHQ told Sullivan that Sidebottom "had a small but dedicated following"
among its staff."_

Couple of people do Sidebottom dialogues as an in-joke to the extent that it
begins to annoy co-workers.

 _" [After random outer triangles explained] 'Right, we've cracked it during a
light-hearted training exercise.'"_

Took a couple of minutes as a starter in a session.

PS: I use a Playfair style grid to jumble up my pass phrases to try to make
them less susceptible to rainbow table attack. Am I wasting my time?

~~~
sjclemmy
Forgive me but;

You know you are, you really are.

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laurencei
"The country's top codebreakers too seemed flummoxed until Sievey's son
Stirling recalled how his dad would get the children to fill an outer row with
random symbols, while Sievey would insert real code into the inner row."

Is it really that hard to fool some of the worlds top code breakers, simply by
including some random digits?

So a code where every {x} symbol is random, and suddenly you've got an
uncrackable code? Surely it cant be that simple?

~~~
rjf72
Every {x} could be cracked by normal methods if it was simply added as a rule.
So let's assume something just barely more sophisticated and we use a
nonrepeating function instead of a fixed {x}. For instance, maybe the nth
digit of pi means the next _n mod 3th_ digit is random. How would you even
begin to crack this? So imagine "thecodeisx". The first digits of pi are
141592653. So we get a noise pattern of: 1, 1, 1, 2, 0, 2, 0, 2, 0. So the
code in deciphered format, but with our noise added, could look something
like:

tlhpebcokqodengisxf

And keep in mind that is the code before it's enciphered. Even better, the
random characters could be not entirely random but rather weighted to try to
bring most characters in the message to a roughly similar frequency. So far as
I know the primary tool of code cracking is just plain old frequency analysis.
Curious if anybody has any proposals on how this would even be possible to
crack.

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krackers
Does code cracking still work in the era of modern cryptography? I thought
that cryptosystems like AES and others were essentially impossible to crack if
implemented right. What role do codebreakers play these days?

~~~
jdietrich
The very complex modern approaches to cryptanalysis still borrow from the
oldest attacks.

A simple substitution cipher is easily broken by frequency analysis - find the
most common letter in the ciphertext and it'll probably be E in the plaintext.
Nothing so simple would work today, but we often see vulnerabilities in
cryptosystems due to pseudorandom number generators with inadequate entropy.
It's the same basic principle (exploiting a lack of randomness to identify
patterns in the ciphertext), albeit with vastly more mathematical
sophistication. The NSA allegedly took advantage of this principle to
deliberately weaken cryptosystems by promoting an intentionally weak PRNG.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG)

~~~
manquer
frequency analysis works easily if you know the source language, i.e. English
in this case, while entropy of the message is critical to cracking, complex
approaches are not the only ones which are immune to attacks, for example
simple ciphers like using a one time pad is mathematically impossible to
crack.

~~~
rocqua
The power of a one time pad relies on the inherent entropy of the pad though.
So attacks against a real one time pad still need to deal with entropy.

