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elahiehon Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

Without a third-party check, nope. Case in point, Chaocipher ... https://www.chaocipher.com/ e.g. see "Progress Report #23" the PDF there. Transcription errors galore!

This cipher context "rhymes" well with Kryptos K4 in many ways.

elahiehon Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

"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-...

elahiehon Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

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.

elahiehon Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

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...

elahiehon Elevated error rates on Opus 4.7

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.

elahiehon SCiZE's Classic Warez Collection

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...

elahiehon Solution to CIA’s Kryptos sculpture is found in Smithsonian vault

Interview with the Smithsonian researchers here

https://zonamotel.substack.com/p/interview-kryptos-k4-uncove...

elahiehon French firm Gouach is pitching an Infinite Battery with replaceable cells

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.

elahiehon The secret code behind the CIA's Kryptos puzzle is up for sale

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.

elahiehon The secret code behind the CIA's Kryptos puzzle is up for sale

Here's what's up for sale from RR Auction

https://www.rrauction.com/jim-sanborn-kryptos-k4-solution-au...

The Wired piece has Sanborn saying the reserve should be "around $300,000."

It sounds like Sanborn really doesn't think it'll be solved before the auction date of 20 November (his 80th is on 14 November). If it does get solved due to this publicity bump, that's huge earnings foregone.

Perhaps he knows it is still an "unreasonable" challenge even with the 24 known letters.

elahiehon The secret code behind the CIA's Kryptos puzzle is up for sale

Good point, and it's also entirely possible the code designer just did a terrible job. e.g. around 57:00 of https://youtu.be/JOXPYkjvDaA

As Kryptos gots a huge amount of media attention in 1999, references to him changed from "chairman of A cryptographic center" to "chairman of [THE] CIA's cryptographic center" when it doesn't even seem that it has such a center.

And the featured story (around 52:00 of the video) has him apparently claiming credit for helping solve a Caesar cipher!

https://web.archive.org/web/19990501000000*/http://www.tecse...

elahiehon The secret code behind the CIA's Kryptos puzzle is up for sale

I'm inclining to this too. I heard about it first on Usenet in the 90s, and started looking at it again seriously in June 2017 when I came across the Bauer paper.

But after the 2020 clues (another 13 letters), it became clear that it wasn't any single ACA cipher type, and it was probably something very difficult (because of K4's very low index of coincidence, i.e. 0.036 just below "random" 26-letter text at 1/26, plus the huge number of revealed plaintext letters "in place" i.e. letter-for-lettter correspondence).

That plausibly left a combination of two or more well-known cipher types, but if they were somewhat complex ciphers, the chance of solution would be rather remote.

Hence I always thought a "good" end to the puzzle would be like the book "Masquerade" by Kit Williams where the only guy in cahoots with the creator (Bamber Gascoigne) thought the initial puzzle was an unrealistic challenge, but Williams released clues which enabled two schoolteachers to solve it. So that part was satisfactory, even if hardly anybody remembers the solvers' names!

In contrast, the cribs for K4 haven't helped at all.

elahiehon The $5000 Compression Challenge (2001)

I'm rather skeptical of this claim that the data was compressed in 2018 because there is no further information, apart from a hash value given.

If it's a true claim they must have identified some "non-random" aspect of the original data, and then they could have given more info.

elahiehon Why does FM sound better than AM?

It's certainly perceived that way. "Diff'rent Strokes" "Baseball Blues", 1985... Willis does mention stereo is part of the appeal.

- Now, Dad, you gotta picture me cruising along in my Mercedes. Head held high. Rocking to the FM stereo. Waving to the chicks. Hey there, mama, looking good. Catch you later, baby.

(making engine noises)

- You can do all of that in a $4,000 car.

(imitating brakes squealing)

- Dad, for $4,000 I'll have to slouch way down in my seat so no one can see me. And turn on my AM radio. Wave at the chicks. Hi there, mama, you're looking quite adequate. Chug, chug, chug.

- That's just fine, son, chug chug chug means that you won't be spending any of your days in traffic court.

- Or any of my nights at a drive-in movie.

- Willis, you don't want to date a girl who only likes you for your car.

- Sure I do.

elahiehon How large language models will disrupt data management [pdf]

Yeah, call me snobby or OCD but I lost confidence in the authors and reviewers when I saw that slipped through.

Then I started wondering if this is going to become the new anti-AI marker. AI-written papers use "delves", "underscores" and "showcasing" too much. Avoid those words, throw in some errors and readers will think your paper was written by humans.

elahiehon How large language models will disrupt data management [pdf]

Section header: "Who's data is it?"

Couldn't they have had an LLM proof-read they're paper?

elahiehon The Epson HX-20 – A Contrarian's View (2021)

What a coincidence, I pulled out my S1500M (vintage 2010-10) to do some scanning a few weeks ago (after several years) and found the rubber rollers had melted and become like superglue. Currently reading about how I might try to do an ad-hoc fix, because forums say disassembly and reassembly is very finicky indeed. Now that I learn it's CCD I am more motivated to repair.

elahiehon Ask HN: Is Twitter/X working for you?

No - https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/twitter

(Nobody even posted "Concerning" yet)

elahiehon The Professionalization of Cryptology in Sixteenth-Century Venice (2018) [pdf]

Here's the 2023 paper - https://ecp.ep.liu.se/index.php/histocrypt/article/view/691/...

And the 2022 paper on cryptanalysis, the other side of the coin - https://ecp.ep.liu.se/index.php/histocrypt/article/view/389/...

Paolo clearly loves spending time in the Venice archives!

elahiehon The Professionalization of Cryptology in Sixteenth-Century Venice (2018) [pdf]

Paolo Bonavoglia gave a talk on Venetian cryptography at this year’s Histocrypt, here’s the slide on the timeline

Summary of the cryptography of the Republic of Venice

... - 1510 Prehistory : archival vacuum

1510-1578 The Golden age of codebreakers (Soro, Ludovici, Borghi, Marin)- Venice had the most effective team of code breakers, if indeed even the pope and the emperor asked the help of Venice in decrypting intercepted

- 1578-1600 The Golden age of eipher designers (Franceschi, Partenio) - They designed stronger ciphers, fearing that other states could have equally good code breakers. Franceschi proposed true ciphers, i.e., polyalphabetic ciphers like his cifra delle caselle. Partenio aimed instead at enhanced nomenclators with super-encryptions.

1600 - 1620 Interlude: indeed both ciphers were abandoned as too complicated and slow. A z10, a very simple cipher was in use.

• 1620 - 1650 Medici's years: last attempts to reconcile safety with ease and speed of use.

1650 - 1797 The unstoppable decline

elahiehon Travel website Booking.com leaves hoteliers thousands of dollars out of pocket

Part of his frustration has been the struggle to get in contact with anyone at Booking.com about the issue.
“There is no way to contact them. Online it says you must talk to finance or credit control, neither of whom have a phone number or email address.”

He said you can call a contact centre, which then lodges a ticket for those teams. But the ticket expires every four days, requiring another phone call to lodge a new ticket. The Guardian has been told by multiple hotel operators that this is the practice.

This sounds like innumerable other HN front page stories. Once the company is big enough (e.g. AirBnB host cancellations/bait-and-switch, Amazon book piracy) they apply super-duper ML revenue optimization. This guides the behemoth company to decide it's not worth responding to small customers - unless the victim causes a social media firestorm (e.g. makes the HN front page, iamharaldur on Twitter).

The one and only time I tried to use AirBnB in April 2016 I got a last minute host dodgy cancellation in Amsterdam, after which I never used it again. It was good that I learned that lesson on my first attempt.

elahiehon The Battle over Books3

In bytes:

39,516,981,435 books3.tar.gz -- 36.5% compression ratio

108,371,325,720 tar -- uncompressed

Recompressed with 7-zip and xz:

25,221,357,605 b3.7z # with flags: -m0=ppmd (23.3%)

27,077,329,052 books3.tar.xz # with flags: -e9 (25.0%)

To see what other slower compressors could do, I checked results from a random 1,000 books. MCM would achieve about half the original tar.gz file size, but it's very slow.

104,043,048 q-x11.mcm - 19.0% -- from q.tar

106,181,190 q-m9.mcm

114,564,722 q.tar.bsc-m03-b1000000000

118,636,713 q.tar.bsc-m03

130,621,411 q.ppmd -- 23.9%

137,874,349 q-s29.tar.lzip

138,274,566 qultra.7z

141,815,136 q.lzma

142,626,724 q9.xz -- 26.1%

146,786,015 q.brotli

146,933,603 q.p7zip

146,933,619 q.7z

149,371,106 q9.bz2

198,213,051 q.gz -- gzip -9 -- 36.3%

198,213,193 q.zip

227,074,912 q.lz4

228,463,000 q.lzop

546,201,600 q.tar

elahiehon Falcon LLM – A 40B Model

Is there a guide out there for dummies on how to try a ChatGPT like instance of this on a VM cheaply? eg pay $1 or $2 an hour for a point and click experience with the instruct version of this. A docker image perhaps.

Reading posts on r/LocalLLAMA is people’s trial and error experiences, quite random.

elahiehon QSL Card

Radio Biafra must be one of the rarest QSLs in existence. It was very dangerous to get mail in and out during the civil war.

https://swling.com/blog/2018/08/guest-post-possible-last-rem...

elahiehon I almost bought a scanner

Sounds like maintaining these high end medium format cameras and scanners can be a real hassel.

I have a Nikon Coolscan V and nothing is wrong with it but the switch, but it’s hardly worth repairing or trying to sell on eBay. Working, it might be worth more than I paid for in c2005.

elahiehon Twitter Non-Functioning in Australia

It's been fully down for around 2 hours for me in NSW, 1230-1430 AEDT 4 January. Template loads and that's it.

elahiehon Twitter’s head of product and engineering resigned

A direct link to a tweet doesn't work for people in Australia/NZ right now so for ref, the text of it is "NEW: Behnam Rezaei, Twitter’s head of product and engineering, and one of the last non-Elon Musk appointed leaders at the company, just resigned."

elahiehon Taylor Lorenz Banned from Twitter

This also follows the pattern of journalists who report directly on him being suspended - Linette Lopez of Business Insider is still suspended.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-suspends-insiders-li...

elahiehon Taylor Lorenz Banned from Twitter

She explains at https://taylorlorenz.substack.com/p/elon-musk-banned-me-from...

elahiehon Twitter is suspending journalists who cover Elon

It is hard to follow the chains of banning because they happen so fast, but @donie was apparently suspended for posting a quote from LAPD: "LAPD's Threat Management Unit (TMU) is aware of the situation and tweet by Elon Musk and is in contact with his representatives and security team. No crime reports have been filed yet."

Then @MattBinder posted "uh i just shared this straight news update just posted by @donie and moments later he's suspended" (with a screenshot of that) and got banned himself.

So it's not just links to ElonJet, or links to reporting about that, it's anything Elon related.

That place is burning up fast.