maximus otter
Recovering policeman
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- Aug 9, 2001
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Between 1850 and 1855, someone published a series of unusual ads in the British newspaper The Times. They were made up of a series of seemingly random letters, apparently gobbledygook. Almost 200 years later, a group of codebreakers has finally been able to decrypt some of them and read what they said, discovering that they were actually encrypted messages from a rescue expedition in the Arctic Ocean.
“We could potentially call this the first known secure global communication system in the 1800s,” Elonka Dunin, one of the cryptography enthusiasts who decrypted the messages, said.
The story of the ads starts in 1845, when explorer Lord John Franklin set out from England on an expedition with two warships called Terror and Erebus with the goal of finding the Northwest Passage, a sea route that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Arctic Ocean—a faster way to get from England to India and the rest of Asia.
Three years later, Franklin and his 129 men vanished and were never heard from again.
In 1850, the English naval officer Richard Collinson was sent to the Canadian Arctic in hopes of finding any traces of the Franklin expedition, or at least figuring out what happened to the explorer and his ships. Collinson’s ultimately failed expedition lasted from 1850 to 1855, exactly the same time period of the encrypted ads published in The Times.
“Was there a relationship between the encrypted ad and Northwest Passage, or the Franklin Expedition?” Dunin asked.
What they did find was a codebook, the Marryat signal code from 1817. This codebook uses four-digit groups or numbered groups, as a system for sailors to send each other encrypted messages using flags, which represent different numbers. Dunin and her colleagues then replaced the letters in the encrypted ads with digits, first zero to nine, which didn’t work, and then nine to zero.
“And that turned out to actually be the system that was being used. So we replaced the letters with the digits contained in the code and we did get the plaintext,” Dunin said.
The decryption revealed that the ads were messages sent back and forth between the Collinson expedition members and their relatives and families back in England. For example, they contained notes about where they were, and how they were doing, such as “your wife and family are well,” according to Dunin.
One of the decrypted ads
“Why did they do this in The Times? Well, they knew that no matter where the ship would go, that The Times was readily available in any city around the world. And this was their way of communicating,” Dunin said.
Jacobs shared another lens into the past, one that is not as high stakes as the Collinson messages: classified encrypted newspaper ads that were actually messages between lovers, “sort of the sexting of the 19th century,” Jacobs joked.
Jacobs shared several messages, including one from 1856, which read: “I have the most beautiful horse in England, but not the most beautiful lady. Your silence pains me deeply. I cannot forget you.”
He shared other examples, but as Dunin said earlier, there are still a lot of messages left to be decrypted.
“There are many out there that are still to be solved. So I encourage people to look into it,” Jacobs said. “Because it's a fun puzzle. Of course, we want them all cracked.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4ax...tches-in-200-year-old-encrypted-newspaper-ads
maximus otter
“We could potentially call this the first known secure global communication system in the 1800s,” Elonka Dunin, one of the cryptography enthusiasts who decrypted the messages, said.
The story of the ads starts in 1845, when explorer Lord John Franklin set out from England on an expedition with two warships called Terror and Erebus with the goal of finding the Northwest Passage, a sea route that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Arctic Ocean—a faster way to get from England to India and the rest of Asia.
Three years later, Franklin and his 129 men vanished and were never heard from again.
In 1850, the English naval officer Richard Collinson was sent to the Canadian Arctic in hopes of finding any traces of the Franklin expedition, or at least figuring out what happened to the explorer and his ships. Collinson’s ultimately failed expedition lasted from 1850 to 1855, exactly the same time period of the encrypted ads published in The Times.
“Was there a relationship between the encrypted ad and Northwest Passage, or the Franklin Expedition?” Dunin asked.
What they did find was a codebook, the Marryat signal code from 1817. This codebook uses four-digit groups or numbered groups, as a system for sailors to send each other encrypted messages using flags, which represent different numbers. Dunin and her colleagues then replaced the letters in the encrypted ads with digits, first zero to nine, which didn’t work, and then nine to zero.
“And that turned out to actually be the system that was being used. So we replaced the letters with the digits contained in the code and we did get the plaintext,” Dunin said.
The decryption revealed that the ads were messages sent back and forth between the Collinson expedition members and their relatives and families back in England. For example, they contained notes about where they were, and how they were doing, such as “your wife and family are well,” according to Dunin.
One of the decrypted ads
“Why did they do this in The Times? Well, they knew that no matter where the ship would go, that The Times was readily available in any city around the world. And this was their way of communicating,” Dunin said.
Jacobs shared another lens into the past, one that is not as high stakes as the Collinson messages: classified encrypted newspaper ads that were actually messages between lovers, “sort of the sexting of the 19th century,” Jacobs joked.
Jacobs shared several messages, including one from 1856, which read: “I have the most beautiful horse in England, but not the most beautiful lady. Your silence pains me deeply. I cannot forget you.”
He shared other examples, but as Dunin said earlier, there are still a lot of messages left to be decrypted.
“There are many out there that are still to be solved. So I encourage people to look into it,” Jacobs said. “Because it's a fun puzzle. Of course, we want them all cracked.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4ax...tches-in-200-year-old-encrypted-newspaper-ads
maximus otter
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