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Cryptography: Or the History, Principles, and Practice of Cipher-Writing (1898) (publicdomainreview.org)
75 points by Petiver on Feb 25, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments



> Though they aren’t strictly ciphers, Hulme does have a lot time for “concealing text”. He finds that letters written with the juice of oranges and onions “or almost any sharp things” can be made to appear by the warmth of a fire.

Strictly/archaically, they too are ciphers - a message that appears to be nothing ...

""" Cipher: [...] 2. dated a zero; a figure 0. synonyms: zero, nought, nil, 0; archaic naught "a row of ciphers" """

The modern cipher is obviously there, linking the communicants, and the old sense of hidden communication has been pushed off to steganography.


I believe that cryptologists use the word "cipher" to refer to a character-substitution type of code.




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