Solution revealed
Da Vinci judge's secret code revealed Fri Apr 28, 2006 8:25 AM ET By Peter Graff LONDON (Reuters) - Mystery solved. It was the admiral. A secret code embedded in the text of a court ruling in the case of Dan Brown's bestseller The Da Vinci Code has been cracked, but far from revealing an ancient conspiracy it is simply an obscure reference to a Royal Navy admiral. British High Court Justice Peter Smith, who handed down a ruling that Brown had not plagiarized his book, had embedded his own secret message in his judgment by italicizing letters scattered throughout the 71-page document. In Brown's book, a secret code reveals an ancient conspiracy to hide facts about Jesus Christ. The judge's own code briefly caused a wave of amused speculation when it was discovered by a lawyer this week, nearly a month after the ruling was handed down. But the lawyer, Dan Tench, cracked it after a day of puzzling. The judge's code was based on the Fibonacci sequence, a mathematical progression discussed in the book. After much trial and error, we found a formula which fitted, wrote Tench, who had nothing to do with the Brown case but discovered the italicized letters when studying the ruling. The judge's secret message was: Jackie Fisher, who are you? Dreadnought, Tench wrote in the Guardian newspaper. Judge Smith is known as a navy buff, and Fisher was a Royal Navy admiral who developed the idea for a giant battleship called the HMS Dreadnought in the early 20th century. Tench wrote that the judge had e-mailed him to confirm he had guessed the secret code right. The judge later confirmed the existence of the code, and revealed that the Fibonacci sequence was indeed the secret to its solution. The message reveals a significant but now overlooked event that occurred virtually 100 years to the day of the start of the trial, he said in a statement. He said that he is not normally much of a fan of puzzles, such as the Japanese number puzzles that have become an obsession of the British press. The preparation of the Code took about 40 minutes and its insertion another 40 minutes or so, he wrote. I hate crosswords and do not do Sudoku as I do not have the patience. smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Re: PGP master keys
Steven M. Bellovin wrote: Ah -- corporate key escrow. An overt back door for Little Brother, rather than a covert one for Big Brother the key escrow meetings attempted to differentiate between keys used for authentication and keys used for securing corporate data (I only went to a couple of the meetings). the case of key escrow as part of securing corporate data was similar to business processes for backing up corporate data, disaster recovery, and no single point of failure. in fact, escrow of authentication keys was equally a violation of business standards as not having escrow of encryption keys. there was cross-over from backup infrastructure and the transition from all corporate data residing in hardened datacenters to individual desktops ... where the they were finding critical corporate data being managed and maintained w/o adequate backup and recovery capabilities. the point of key escrow as part of infrastructure securing corporate data ... was that the data belonged to the corporation ... and loss of keys could be equivalent to losing the data ... and as such, was as negligent as not backing up critical corporate data and not having a disaster/recovery plan. there was some backup related study that claimed half of the corporations that had a disk failure (where the disk was not being backed up) containing critical corporate data ... filed for bankruptcy withing 30 days of the failure. i assumed that critical was stuff like account-billable files ... loosing a month worth of customer account billing information could create a real dent on the corporation's cash flow. one incident involved a corporation that lost something like $50m in monthly billings. it wasn't suppose to be a back door to anything ... anymore than having copies of all corporate files on corporate backup tapes (however, the corporate backup tapes wouldn't be worth a lot if all the data has been secured with encryption ... and the encryption keys are lost). - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: PGP master keys
note from the corporate side ... is was specifically the escrow of encryption keys for data at rest ... as part of prudent corporate asset protection; it was not escrow of authentication keys nor escrow of encryption keys used for communication. the internal network was larger than the arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until possibly around summer of 85. at the time of the great change-over to internetworking protocol on 1/1/83, the number of arpanet/internet nodes was approx. 250 (a number that the internal network had passed in the mid-70s, the internal network passed 1000 nodes a little later in 83). http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet corporate inter-site links had to be encrypted ... which at the time met link encryptors .. there was claims that the internal network had over half of all the link encryptors in the world. there wasn't any corporate escrow issues with link encryptor keys. there were various problems with gov. agencies ... significant problems especially in europe getting gov/ptt authorization for corporate link encryptors (on corporate links, between corporate sites, purely carrying corporate data) especially when the links crossed country boundaries. issues did start showing up in the mid-90s in the corporate world ... there were a large number of former gov. employees starting to show up in different corporate security-related positions (apparently after being turfed from the gov). their interests appeared to possibly reflect what they may have been doing prior to leaving the gov. - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: PGP master keys
and real-time reference from today ... on backup tapes ... at off-site location that weren't encrypted (and should have been): Data storage firm apologizes for loss of railroad data tapes Information on as many as 17,000 workers at risk http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2006/04/28/data_storage_firm_apologizes_for_loss_of_railroad_data_tapes/ - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: PGP master keys
Steven M. Bellovin [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: In an article on disk encryption (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/26/pgp_infosec/), the following paragraph appears: BitLocker has landed Redmond in some hot water over its insistence that there are no back doors for law enforcement. As its encryption code is open source, PGP says it can guarantee no back doors, but that cyber sleuths can use its master keys if neccessary. What is a master key in this context? Interesting epilog: theregister has apparently now edited out all mention of master keys. In a version downloaded via the Agora web-to-mail gateway at Sat, 29 Apr 2006 03:42:05 +0900 (JST), the second sentence reads PGP says its open source encryption code also guarantees no back doors. (full stop) -- StealthMonger - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]