Gknova6

Mystery video game viral campaign: Unmarked USB sticks were sent out to various game magazines and web sites, bearing no return address an no other identification. When deciphered, the code on it leads to a web site called GKNOVA6 and furthermore contains the note "April week two".

Due to the Maryland stamps on the envelope, and the retro-ish appearance of the secret web site, it was first suspected that this is a viral campaign for the new Fallout video game. Developer Bethesda has since denied this, and current leads point to an Activision-developed game-- Singularity and the new Call of Duty are prime suspects.

What's On This Mystery USB Drive? [Update] - PlayStation 3 News at IGN

Taman Shud case

In what is commonly referenced to as the Taman Shud case, a dead man was found in the morning of December 1st, 1948 in Somerton Beach (Australia). Mysteries surround his death; there was no trace of poison or other cause of death, no records of the man could be found, so identification has not been made to this date. Also, all his clothes labels were removed, and when police found a suitcase thought to belong to the man, they found inside a scrap of paper with the words "Taman Shud" on it.

This piece of paper was removed from a rare edition of the book The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam. After recovering the book, police found an as yet uncracked code, pictured above. All attempts at solving this have been futile, and it is unknown if it's just ramblings of a madman or an extremely sophisticated encryption.

The 5 Creepiest Unsolved Crimes Nobody Can Explain | Cracked.com

Hacking Time.com

An interesting and detailed report how users of 4chan hacked the TIME 100 poll (which polls the "World's most influential person", on the Internet, of all places). They managed to both vote moot (creator of 4chan.org) to the top position and also to spell out the message "Marblecake, also the game" with the letters of the top 21 finalists.

[The] loose collective known as ‘Anonymous’ took to hack the poll. This group (that gathered on an IRC channel at anonnet.org) probed for weaknesses in the poll protocols and wrote autovoters to stuff the ballot box with votes that would put the candidates in the proper order to spell out the Message, adapting as necessary whenever Time adjusted its protocol in a meager attempt to keep the hackers out. But two weeks ago, Time got serious about poll security. They modified the poll so that you needed to prove that you were human (via a captcha) in order to vote.

This instantly shut down all of the autovoters. Anonymous was offline - no longer able to submit thousands of votes per minute. And what’s worse, when the autovoters were shutdown, the Message ‘Marblecake, also the game’ soon decayed into a meaningless “mablre caelakosteghamm”. It seemed that Time.com had won - the Message would not survive the next two weeks of voting. But Anonymous didn’t give up, they considered it a challenge to restore the Message. Here’s how they did it.

moot wins, Time Inc. loses « Music Machinery

First contact

Michael Quinion, British etymologist and writer, rounds up some of the problems in the (hypothetical) communication between humans and aliens and shows some science fiction writer's concepts to cope with it:

In real life, so to speak, the alien and the human would be facing much intensive co-operative work to get a basic understanding of each other’s methods of communication, language and culture. Ask any field linguist who has encountered a previously unknown tribe just how difficult this can be, even when both parties are human. SF writers struggle with this problem every time they write a first-contact story. (...)

Naomi Mitchison suggested in Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) that trying to communicate with a five-armed starfish would show the extent to which our bilateral symmetry constrains us to a binary view of the world — true versus false, right versus wrong, black versus white. In The Mote in God’s Eye (1974), Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle imagine three-armed aliens, who argue not just “on the one hand” and “on the other hand”, but also “on the gripping hand”, a trilateral logic. C J Cherryh’s Hunter of Worlds (1977) presents the language of the Iduve, in which there’s “no clear distinction between noun and verb, between solid and action”, so that translation cannot be literal if it is to be meaningful. Jean-Luc Picard comes across something similar in Star Trek: The Next Generation when he encounters a race that speaks only in metaphor.

First Contact : OUPblog

Cryptonomicon, 1999

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, 1999. The greatest read imaginable. Parts of the present storyline reads dated now, but the WWII chapters of Stephenson's story are unbelievably realistic and exciting. Also he manages to portray his characters in an incredibly emmersing and funny way. It's a thrill from beginning to end, so don't be deterred by the sheer volume (of awesomeness) of this book.

Two tires fly. Two wail.
A bamboo grove, all chopped down
From it, warring songs.

...is the best that Corporal Bobby Shaftoe can do on short notice--he's standing on the running board, gripping his Springfield with one hand and the rearview mirror with the other, so counting the syllables on his fingers is out of the question. Is "tires" one syllable or two? How about "wail?" The truck finally makes up its mind not to tip over, and thuds back onto four wheels. The wail--and the moment--are lost. Bobby can still hear the coolies singing, though, and now too there's the gunlike snicking of the truck's clutch linkage as Private Wiley downshifts. Could Wiley be losing his nerve? And, in the back, under the tarps, a ton and a half of file cabinets clanking, code books slaloming, fuel spanking the tanks of Station Alpha's electrical generator. The modern world's hell on haiku writers: "Electrical generator" is, what, eight syllables? You couldn't even fit that onto the second line!

"Are we allowed to run over people?" Private Wiley inquires, and then mashes the horn button before Bobby Shaftoe can answer. A Sikh policeman hurdles a night soil cart. Shaftoe's gut reaction is: Sure, what're they going to do, declare war on us? but as the highest-ranking man on this truck he's probably supposed to be using his head or something, so he doesn't blurt it out just yet. He takes stock of the situation:

Shanghai, 1645 hours, Friday, the 28th of November 1941. Bobby Shaftoe, and the other half-dozen Marines on his truck, are staring down the length of Kiukiang Road, onto which they've just made this careening high-speed turn. Cathedral's going by to the right, so that means they are, what? two blocks away from the Bund. A Yangtze River Patrol gunboat is tied up there, waiting for the stuff they've got in the back of this truck. The only real problem is that those particular two blocks are inhabited by about five million Chinese people.

Read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon

Turing machine built with LEGO

Some guys constructed a working Turing machine from Lego! Unbelievable I think. Those are probably the same guys constructing Skynet in a couple of years! Beware!

Famous uncracked codes

The disc of Phaistos is the most important example of hieroglyphic inscription from Crete and was discovered in 1903 in a small room near the depositories of the “archive chamber”, in the north - east apartments of the palace, together with a Linear A tablet and pottery dated to the beginning of the Neo-palatial period (1700- 1600 B.C.). Both surfaces of this clay disc are covered with hieroglyphs arranged in a spiral zone, impressed on the clay when it was damp. The signs make up groups divided from each other by vertical lines, and each of these groups should represent a word. Forty five different types of signs have been distinguished, of which a few can be identified with the hieroglyphs in use in the Proto- palatial period.

Funnbee.info: The World`s 10 Most Famous Uncracked Codes