Saiyine sends word that the
mysterious code received at Fermilab, which we
discussed last Friday, has been
mostly decoded, inside of two days, by two separate people. The poster at the second link seems to have constructed a more complete rationale for the message.
That was ridiculously quick (Score:5, Insightful)
solved within 7hrs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, based on the "employee number" speculation in the second link especially, I want to point out that although I am the furthest thing from a "codecracker," I do believe the BASSE misspelling of BASE is intentional and is a clue. Likewise, the FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE stanza may be a reference to his work for fermilab (detecting signal that often hides amongst noise), but is probably a double entendre of some sort. If someone is methodical enough to encode this text and mail it to Fermilab, they wouldn't misspell such a simple word (BASE), unless for a good reason. Along these same lines of thought, I believe the "noise" comment is also a clue with multiple meanings. Also, from what I gather, the middle stanza can be assumed to be hex, so that makes the third stanza fairly insignificant, unless it has other meaning (hence looking at "BASSE" for a clue as to some other meaning).
Re:solved within 7hrs... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Many eyes make all bugs shallow (Score:5, Insightful)
No, not really. This only shows that a lot of people will try to solve interesting problems, and some of them eventually will. It does not say anything about open source software and finding bugs or security vulnerabilities, which involves (among other things) reading tons of "boring" code.
Note: I did not say that open source is bad for finding bugs and vulnerabilities, I just want to mention that breaking this code does not say anything about open source software.
Re:Many eyes make all bugs shallow (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That was ridiculously quick (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:solved within 7hrs... (Score:4, Insightful)
Does EFC mean anything?
Re:Many eyes make all bugs shallow (Score:3, Insightful)
Furthermore, many bugs do NOT make all bugs shallow - look at recent news, the 25 year old BSD bug, the Debian OpenSSL debacle. Why did the many eyes not make those bugs shallow? Partly because that isn't an interesting problem for nearly as many people as the fermilab stuff, and partly because code changes.
You see, I could fully audit some code tomorrow. My eyes would have made all the bugs shallow. But what is the likelihood of me going back and reauditing that SAME code time and time again, whenever a change is made? Far lower and far fewer people actually do that or enjoy doing it. That's how bugs creep in and stay, even in open source software.
Actually, this is more interesting than u realize (Score:3, Insightful)
I see 2 issues here, The first is that it really was too easily "solved". My guess is that the real message really is being missed (i..e keep looking).
But the second and more important issue is what group thought appears to do to dynamics. If fermi did this interesting, they have 3 messages in here and are watching us get focused on just one. IOW, group though leads to solutions (local maximas), but may end up having us miss the other messages (absolute maximas). It really shows that group thought needs outsiders to shake things up.
Anyone look up the Unicode for all these symbols? (Score:2, Insightful)