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Judge Creates Own Da Vinci Code
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Apr 27, 2006 08:23 AM
from the judges-with-a-sense-of-humor dept.
from the judges-with-a-sense-of-humor dept.
xmedar writes "The BBC is reporting that the judge who presided over the recent Da Vinci Code plagiarism case used steganography to embed his own code in the judgment using italic text in random places throughout the text. The full text of the code reads 'smithcodeJaeiextostpsacgreamqwfkadpmqz' if you want to have a go at cracking it." From the article: "Although he would not be drawn on his code and its meaning, Mr Justice Smith said he would probably confirm it if someone cracked it, which was 'not a difficult thing to do'. In March, he presided over a High Court case brought by authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, who claimed Dan Brown plagiarized their own historical book for The Da Vinci Code."
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Ironsides writes "The message embedded in the Da Vinci Code ruling earlier this week has been cracked. The message reads 'Smithy Code Jackie Fisher who are you Dreadnought' and is a reference to an event from about 100 years ago. The encryption scheme itself was based on the Fibonacci number Sequence which is the same one used in the novel."
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It's not ROT13 (Score:5, Funny)
I checked double, triple and even quadruple ROT13, too! No luck!!
I've solved it... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I've solved it... (Score:4, Funny)
It IS ROT13!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Coolest Judge Ever? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Coolest Judge Ever? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Coolest Judge Ever? (Score:3, Interesting)
FFS, Her Majesty's Courts Service is slashdotted!
[0@42 downloads]$ wget http://www.hmcourts-service.gov.uk/images/judgment -files/baigent_v_rhg_0406.pdf
--14:30:51-- http://www.hmcourts-service.gov.uk/images/judgment -files/baigent_v_rhg_0406.pdf
Re:Coolest Judge Ever? (Score:4, Interesting)
How about Alex Kozinski? Only judge I've seen who, just to make a point, wrote a dissenting opinion as a one-act play for the sole purpose of shaming the government into dropping their obviously stupid case. He succeeded. And, as a bonus, the play was hilarious.
Re:Coolest Judge Ever? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Coolest Judge Ever? (Score:5, Funny)
Woah. This is getting too rich for me. I fold...
Re:Coolest Judge Ever? (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry, didn't mean to end a sentence with a prepostition.
Then tell us which one he's making fun of, asshole.
Re:Coolest Judge Ever? (Score:4, Insightful)
Any person who assumes he knows what the meaning and intent of a secret message is, without bothering to actually decode it first, must be retarded. Or at least lazy.
Smithy Code? (Score:5, Funny)
Offtopic: For those unsure about whether Dan Brown is a fool or a genius, I offer a quote from Digital Fortress: [wikipedia.org] You cannot make this stuff up
Re:Smithy Code? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Smithy Code? (Score:4, Funny)
And even if they do, the resultant files will likely be in Aramaic or some obscure, ancient Mayan language.
Re:Smithy Code? (Score:3, Interesting)
Brown's a hack. Other pop writers less so. (Score:3, Insightful)
There are plenty of examples of both hacks and decent writers being successful. As successful -- maybe there you have a point -- but the question was whether he's a geniu
Re:Smithy Code? (Score:3, Funny)
Oh yes, Michael Chricton is just the person I'd point to for realistic [everything2.com] portrayals of science in popular
Re:Smithy Code? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Smithy Code? (Score:5, Funny)
The First Wives Club [imdb.com]. At one point in the movie, one of the characters is in her husband's office. She opens up a document in Microsoft Word and saves it to a disk.
Re:Smithy Code? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, come on. When is the last time you saw a Microsoft Word document that was small enough to fit on a floppy?
Re:Smithy Code? (Score:5, Insightful)
Office Space
It certainly nails the office politics aspect of IT
Re:Smithy Code? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Smithy Code? (Score:5, Funny)
That's your standard Linux distro ought to include the mystical "tawgo" command. Anyone who can actually keep up with the command-line will get the joke, and it'll look just like ordinary movie computer fluff to everyone else...
It'd save them a fortune on getting media companies to hack up fake OS screens in Flash as well...
Re:Smithy Code? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dan Brown uses basically the same plot outline for each of the three books of his that I've read. (Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons and Digital Fortress). Here it is in a nutshell:
Egghead professor-type gets sucked into something Really Important To the World (tm) with the help of a very intelligent woman who happens to be an expert in the Really Important Thing (tm) but STILL needs him to explain everything to her anyway. While they try to make it to the end of the book they are pursued by a merciless killer who wants to bump them off before they discover the Big Secret (tm). Did I forget anything?
Re:Smithy Code? (Score:5, Insightful)
Makes one wonder why you keep on reading his books if they're all the same...
Re:Smithy Code? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Smithy Code? (Score:4, Informative)
You forgot the link to the parody [ubersite.com].
italic letters may not be useful by themselves (Score:3, Insightful)
It's "Smithy code" (Score:5, Informative)
I got it! (Score:5, Funny)
One Question (Score:5, Interesting)
I knocked something together... (Score:5, Informative)
As far as I can see the letter list is:
smithycodeJaeiextostgpsacgreamqwfkadpmqzviMi
Re:I knocked something together... (Score:5, Informative)
smithycodeJaeiextostgpsacgreamqwfkadpmqzv
And these are the paragraph numbers and words I found them in, for those who wish to look at the original ruling and confirm:
1 Claimant(s)
2 clai(m)ant
3 (i)s (t)hat
4 (c)ynicism
5 f(o)r
6 prece(d)ed
7 T(e)mplar
8 New (J)ersey
9 res(e)arch
11 th(i)s
13 e(x)tinguished
14 (t)echnical
16 st(o)ry
18 (t)he
19 somethin(g)
20 grou(p)s
21 u(s)ed
23 w(a)s
25 do(c)uments
26 elsewh(e)re
27 Templ(a)rs
29 Clai(m)ants
30 (w)ith
31 o(f)
34 (k)ey
35 Plant(a)rd
37 intro(d)uced
38 manuscri(p)ts
40 ulti(m)ately
42 (q)uestions
43 embla(z)oned
This could be just a substitution cipher, in which Mr. Justice Smith has contrived to make the first ten characters "smithycode." The lack of spaces between words, though, makes it tough for me to decipher -- though I'm sure there are people out there better at deciphering than I.
A Codesmith Exists (Score:5, Interesting)
Reverse the first part to get 'codesmith' and take away the word 'a' & 'exists' from the next few letters
This leaves you with 'Jaeotpcgream' which you will use later.
Take letters on the keyboard next to 'qwfkadpmqz' to get 'asriseonas' which is then combined with 'Jaeotpcgream' to form 'jaeotpcgreamasriseonas'
You take out the words 'to raise a scam' then throw away the rest of the letters.
These words are then rearranged to form the sentence:
'A codesmith exists to raise a scam.'
Re:A Codesmith Exists (Score:5, Funny)
...which is clearly an anagram for "masons jar epic ogre at sea", referring to their role in overthrowing the British empire through a series of clever but obscure naval battles.
Partial Decryption (Score:5, Funny)
ISALQRAPPXGSJZPQNIYKXRTBBJMH
As you can plainly see, the first three words are: "Is All Crap"
Clue? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know if this is useful or helpful, but I noticed that the character sequence past smith(y)code has the same number of characters from the phrase to abbreviate both books:
Jaeiextostpsacgreamqwfkadpmqz
HolyBloodHolyGrai lDaVinciCode
Re:Sorry (Score:5, Insightful)
The plaintiff's premise for suing was "Dan Brown wrote about the same stuff we wrote about" followed by their lawyer's logic of "Dan Brown is rich" and "this pays better than the lottery". They deserve not to be taken seriously.
Re:You've missed the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sorry (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:too much time on their hands? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:too much time on their hands? (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, there are good arguments against levity in court proceedings, but I can say that these cases have made the lives of countless law students at least slightly more pleasant.
A particular favorite is the wrongful appropriation case of Zim v. Western Publishing Co., 573 F.2d 1318 (5th Cir. 1978), which begins -- for no particular reason that I can discern -- in a mock King James style:
My guess is some law clerk won fifty bucks for getting Irving Loeb Goldberg (a great judge and perhaps even a great jurist) to do this.Re:too much time on their hands? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:too much time on their hands? (Score:3, Funny)
I'd reckon it falls somewhere in the middle; that its mostly a management issue.
Re:too much time on their hands? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The courts are overloaded enough... (Score:3, Informative)
Dan Brown, Artiste! (Score:5, Funny)
Where the hell am I?
The cobwebs in my head blow away, like candles in the wind. Oh, that's right, I am in my New England bedroom recovering from a trip to the world renowned city of Paris, where I attended a lecture given by world renowned Harvard religious symbologist Robert Langdon, who gave me an idea for a novel about religious symbology. On my bedside table I see Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum
Hello?
I pick up the phone. "Monsieur?", says the voice. "Sir, an important man is here to see you, s'il vous plait?" I wish Juanita would stop putting on a French accent. "A very important man," she pressed. That could only be my friend, Sir Leigh Teabing, the Royal Historian and Ambassador-Plenipotentiary to the Exchequer. He was awarded a knightency by Queen Elizabeth the II for his amazing volume on the House of Percy, in which he revealed for the first time the ninth earl's involvement in a Rosicrucian-Illuminati-Masonic conspiracy to do, er, something or other.
"Good evening, old fruit!," he exclaimed as he shimmered in, his monocle popping out. "I say, how the devil are you, old bean? Lawks-a-mercy, had a spot of bother getting up the apples and pears, don't you know! Good lord, is that settee kosher or wot? Must 'ave a knees-up round the old Joanna, eh!" (Did I not already tell you my research skills are second to none?: I based this dialogue on The Code of the Woosters, a useful compendium of contemporary slang). His manservant, Rémy Legaludec, stood by, menacingly. I don't trust him. Rémy, I mean, not Sir Teabing, who is as straight as a piece of string.
But who was the femme fatale (fatal woman) accompanying him? She looked familiar, like a beautiful Jacques Saunière, world renowned curator of the Louvre (the Louvre), the world renowned art museum in Paris. "Ah, 'alo, 'alo, monsieur (Mister), my name is Sophie Neveu," she said in flawless English, "I studied at the Royal Holloway." There is a sadness about her, as if she were about to find out her grandfather had been shot by a psychotic albino assassin working for Opus Dei -- hey, it happens -- but on the outside she smiles enigmatically, like Amon L'Isa.
Sophie took off her glasses, the ones that made her look like the renowned French government cryptographer she was. "My God," I said, "you're beautiful." "Thank you," she said, tossing her mane of thick burgundy hair playfully. Her playfulness disguised the haunting memory of witnessing her beloved grandfather participating in a bizarre sex ritual, but I wasn't to know that, though I thought I'd mention it now to keep the narrative tension at fever pitch. See, that's what good writing is all about.
Sir Teabing was also a sight for sore eyes. I wanted to pick his brains about an idea I'd had for a new bestselling book. "Sir Teabing," I said to the Royal British Knight of the Realm, "I'd like to pick your brains about an idea I've had for a new bestselling book."
"O, Jubilate!," Sir Teabing said. "Fire away!, as we used to say on the hunting-fields of Eton College, the world renowned school for the British upper-crust."
"From my researches at the Institute of Historical Review, and with the help of world renowned scholar David Irving, I've discovered the existence of a secret cabal -- known as 'Jews' -- which controls the destiny of the world through its factotum, an entity called 'Israel' that worship
Re:Dan Brown, Artiste! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:More Clues (Score:5, Funny)
The judge, who is 53 and lists some of his hobbies as reading military history and the sinking of the Titanic,...
I just can't respect a person who sinks cruise liners and kills thousands as a hobby.
That seems more like work to me:)