Bizarre coded messages
Ace has a cool post on those creepy "numbers" stations you can sometimes find on shortwave radio. This was a blast from the past for me, because when I was living in France a dozen years ago, I would frequently run across these eerie broadcasts while surfing the shortwave band. These always sparked my imagination, and I felt like I myself was at the center of some sinister intrigue -- an American expatriate listening in from my small room in Paris, as some covert spy in some remote corner of the world received his cryptic marching orders from the staticy, droning of this anonymous female voice reading through a seemingly random sequence of digits.
Check out Ace's post. He has some cool links where you can actually hear some of these broadcasts. I don't listen to shortwave anymore, but I am glad to know that these broadcasts still take place, and haven't become another victim to the ubiquity of the internet.
And while I'm on the topic of bizarre encoded messages, I have a question for all of you out there. From time to time, I have stumbled across encrypted messages on the Usenet groups. Frequently, these will show up when I do a Google search across the newsgroups (groups.google.com) for a combination of specific words. These results never have anything to do with my original search, but appear to be an aggregation of seemingly random words. It's clearly a code of some sort, but it's not done at the binary or character level. It's always a collection of common, English words put together in a seemingly nonsense fashion.
Most often I will find these posts in groups devoted to extremist or hate-based causes. It's not a surprise that these people would want to encode their messages, but I've never seen or heard any discussion about it, or about how the code works.
They're easy enough to find when doing a search on random combinations of words. Here is a sample excerpt of such a post I ran across recently:
Wearily he transcended up a silk. It has not been every tweedy
black. Another cinder - billion times every enough - and they have
our reminder characterize sleuthing, neither seeing correctly seep its
potentiality since aurally before traditionally a libelous warmth
decided mine emptying reserve. Assuredly, Zen, whatever do we moisten onto him? Horn intruders paled after their wooden employment, minus the insoluble, charge constructed merchants headed below with a milieu session, expelling after collonaded polymerizations in a levies
under no custodial suffixes.
Weird, huh? What the hell does it mean? Anyone know? If you want a link to the post I quoted, it's here. But let me warn you: Whatever this means, I'm sure it's offensive. The very title of the newsgroup it was posted to guarantees that. If you're especially sensitive about such things, you should probably give this one a pass.
Otherwise, can anybody tell me what these mean?
Comments
"Wants pawn term dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift
wetter murder inner ladle cordage honor itch offer lodge dock florist."
This is the first line of a famous children's story,
"Ladle Rat Rotten Hut." Sound familiar?
According to the book "Get Thee to a Punnery" by
Richard Lederer, a man named Howard L. Chase wrote
a book in 1956 called "Anguish Languish" in which
he rewrote famous tales in the above fashion. The
idea was to replace the words you wished to
express with words that sounded similar. Thus,
"Little Red Riding Hood" becomes "Ladle Rat Rotten
Hut."
I also once read an 60s vintage Star Trek novel by
James Blish (title forgotten) in which Uhura
proposed sending a message in such a fashion
to confuse alien eavesdroppers. She referred to
this method as "Eurish".
I thought it possible that this could be such a message when I saw the use of the word "Zen"
preceded and followed by commas as the word "then"
might be in a sentence. Not much to go on I know.
I cannot tell what it says, because you
practically have to know what the person is saying
before you can understand them. In a group where
common topics of conversation are used this
could be an effective way communication that
would defy all but the most intense scrutiny.
Again, I don't know that this is the case, it
is merely a possibility.
Glen
Posted by: Glen | January 9, 2005 10:30 PM
Small update. I did a search for "Eurish" and found one obscure reference from the archive of a linguistic newsgroup that indicated that Eurish was the term James Blish used to refer to the manner in which James Joyce wrote. Much more prevalent, though, is a reference to a constructed language that one "Molla Muhammad Selim" created for the "Islamic Empire of Europe." *Nice* Now they're creating a language for us non-muslims to speak.
Glen
Posted by: Glen | January 9, 2005 11:23 PM
I think most of those nonsense posts are actually spam generated by an application. Not sure why they get sent all over usenet like that, but there you go.
or, if you're feeling sinister, try this: I noticed that immediately after 9.11.01 that kind of content dropped drastically on usenet. In recent months it's been experiencing a resurgence.
Me, I think it's spam. Whatever's the simplest, most logical explaination is usually right. Still, spooky, eh?
Posted by: Sqwakr | January 10, 2005 02:59 AM
What you're seeing is generally referred to as a "sporge". Its only purpose is to be annoying, disrupting conversation and (depending on quantity) flooding old conversations off of smaller news servers.
The design is actually quite clever: by mimicking the patterns of actual English, it disguises itself from basic killfilters.
So in the case of the hate newsgroups you're referring to, the sporges are generally posted by the "good guys" to annoy the resident idiots.
Posted by: apotheosis | January 10, 2005 11:10 AM