elahieh
Joined 8 years ago
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Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 1 month ago
"Caveats, stated plainly"
You should have seen the discussion of this on the Schneier blog a few days ago.
Someone had their agent check the solution, presumably it emailed a librarian to check that it was correct for the original edition. Then their comments read like "The BL/EEBO witness lacks it, so the discrepancy is copy-specific, not a disproof of the cipher." and "A complete 285-coordinate physical replication is still pending."
arghhhhh
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/09/claude-fable-...
Comment · 1 month ago
Unfortunately, the totality of the evidence very much indicates that Sanborn went "buck wild" with the enciphering, he made mistake(s), or both. So this is very much in line with the Chaocipher challenge of 1990. Nice little earner for some people though.
Comment · 1 month ago
I presume what the author did was plug Klaus Schmeh's top 50 unsolved ciphers at https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/the-top-50-un... into Fable 5.1 and ask Fable 5.1 to have a go. On this kind of problem it always falls back to Opus 5 anyway so I save time by starting with Opus.
The successor to Klaus's blog is Satoshi Tomokiyo's Cryptiana site, so a month ago I asked Opus 5 to scrape it all, rank them and have a go at solving some. It didn't get the ranking right. But I knew the Civil War Stager ciphers were ripe for solving, so I had it do those https://cryptiana.blogspot.com/2026/09/route-transposition-c...
The art of solving historical unsolved ciphers is knowing what is on the boundary of solvability. Since this site attracts so many OpenAI and Anthropic employees, I'll mention one that was featured by both Klaus and Satoshi in 2023, presumably Spanish transposition, which should be on that boundary but has resisted all attempts at solution https://cryptiana.blogspot.com/2023/09/a-telegram-from-switz...
Comment · 5 months ago
One reason might be that Claude Opus 4.7 thinking benchmarks better on Arena Coding at https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text/coding ... hopefully that effectively assesses correctness. It doesn't account for reliability though.
Comment · 9 months ago
1990 to 1999, that would be exactly the development timeline of Celerity BBS.
Just looking at the revision history of Celerity 2.04 on Discmaster, wow, that went forever!
https://discmaster.textfiles.com/view/43430/BBS_Software/DOS...
Comment · 1 year ago
Interview with the Smithsonian researchers here
https://zonamotel.substack.com/p/interview-kryptos-k4-uncove...
Comment · 1 year ago
A cryptography angle in the article. Would this be illegal in the US under DMCA?
One of the biggest compatibility challenges, Vallette said, was finding a way to work with Bosch's mid-drive motors. The communications between a Bosch motor and battery are encrypted; after "a serious effort," Gouach's app and battery should work with them, Vallette said.
Comment · 1 year ago
Also, another example of an "unreasonable" challenge - the "Decipher Puzzle" https://cisa.umbc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/468/2017/09/S... -- from 1983 to 1985.
You would think that one of the lessons of that is that someone could jump in right at the end and solve it after several clues were released. That hasn't worked with K4, which is increasing people's skepticism.
This cipher context "rhymes" well with Kryptos K4 in many ways.