Re: google reads your mail

On 17/09/2026 1:39 am, Johann "Myrkraverk" Oskarsson wrote:
> On 9/16/2026 9:57 PM, Bill Sloman wrote:
>> On 16/09/2026 11:08 pm, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
>>> On 16/09/2026 7:37 PM, Bill Sloman wrote:
>>>> On 16/09/2026 12:34 am, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
>>>>> On 14/09/2026 4:18 PM, Don Y wrote:
>>>>>> On 9/14/2026 12:42 AM, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
>>>>>>> On 14/09/2026 11:48 AM, Don Y wrote:
>>>>>>>> On 9/13/2026 2:41 PM, Edward Rawde wrote:
>>>>>>>>> "Don Y" <[email protected]> wrote in message 
>>>>>>>>> news:[email protected]...
>>>>>>>>>> On 9/13/2026 8:51 AM, Edward Rawde wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>> "Don Y" <[email protected]> wrote in message 
>>>>>>>>>>> news:[email protected]...
>>>>>>>>>>>> On 9/12/2026 11:20 PM, Edward Rawde wrote:

<snip>

>>>>> Oh, my original idea -- the one I was thinking of for the challenge --
>>>>> is almost certainly /well known/ in the three letter agency world.  
>>>>> But
>>>>> given the brief overview of a tool used by a /security expert/, I 
>>>>> forgot
>>>>> which or maybe it wasn't named, it didn't seem to be a standard 
>>>>> feature.
>>>>>
>>>>> Then, if I make a custom implementation, there's no guarantee a three
>>>>> letter agency tool will catch it.  Just add a little bit of twist, and
>>>>> it may well bypass the filters the three letter agencies use.
>>>>>
>>>>> Or trigger an alert if a /well known adversary/ has used it before.
>>>>> It's kind of 50/50 that way.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> [When I worked for KCP, a "three letter agency" approached us to
>>>>>> customize a version of our product.  It was easy to see how it could
>>>>>> be used -- and abused -- so we declined their "offer".]
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I also feel no need to explain to the public at large how I'd do 
>>>>>>> so, but
>>>>>>> you are free to raise a challenge if you think it amounts to 
>>>>>>> something.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> There are *countless* ways of "hiding information", especially if the
>>>>>> bandwidth (or, total amount of data) is unspecified.
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Yes, you could for example use /Linear A/, and relatively few 
>>>>> people in the world would be able to tell you're using English -- 
>>>>> or another modern language -- rather than whatever language it was 
>>>>> originally used for.
>>>>
>>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A
>>>>
>>>> None. Linear A doesn't seem to have been deciphered yet, and there 
>>>> aren't enough sample of it around to suggest that it ever will be.
>>>>
>>>> There weren't all that many more example of Linear B, but enough.
>>>
>>> Dear Bill,
>>>
>>> /Linear A/ is a script, not a language.  I never implied it had been
>>> deciphered, but you can absolutely use it to write English.  You even
>>> get to make up your sound values.
>>
>> Not a trivial task.
> 
> Are you referring to the decipherment of Linear A?  For some light read-
> ing, you can pick /The Code Book/ by Simon Singh from your shelf.

Why would I bother?

> Alternatively, a bigger book on the same subject is /The Code Breakers/
> by David Kahn.  Those two book should serve as an introductory material
> on the subject, and the former is amusing -- I haven't read the latter
> yet it is still on my shelf; it's a matter of tsundoku.  I hope you
> don't need to look that word up, being erudite and all.

My wife had several Japaneses collaborators, and while our house 
contains a lot of her books that I haven't read, I do read every book I 
buy (or at least enough of it to realise that I shouldn't have bought it).

The nearest that I've got to a book in that area is "Security for 
Computer Networks" ISBN 0 471 90063 by Davies and Price, and I only 
bought it because I'd done a little bit of work with the authors.

>>> Now please direct yourself to the nearest juniour high school, and work
>>> on improving your reading comprehension.
>>
>> Your own needs some work. I never claimed that linear A was a language 
>> - it's a writing system. It will have been devised to write down 
>> elements of at least one language - the roman alphabet we use is used 
>> to write down several.
> 
> You now need to explain and expostulate [1] to yourself why you used the
> the word /none/.  You see, I was talking about using Linear A to write
> English, and there are indeed people -- or at least people who claim
> they are -- able to discover it's not the original language but a modern
> one.  The books I referred to in the previous paragraph explain how, in
> practice, such is done with statistical analysis.  Even though they're
> not a good introduction to the practicalities of modern cryptanalysis.

I used the word "none" because anybody using the symbols of Linear A to 
write modern English would have had to have made some arbitrary choices 
about what the symbols represent in modern English.

> For that, you might want to read /Differential Cryptanalysis on Hash
> Functions: Theory and Practice/ by Tao Xie, and Fanbao Liu; or other
> books on the subject of modern code breaking.  I admit I haven't read
> this one either.  It's on my tsundoku shelf still.

I certainly don't want to read either book. I'm interested in 
communicating with people, not with communicating with some people and 
freezing others out.

>> My late wife was a world class psycholinguist and I don't think a 
>> junior high school would have much to teach me.
> 
> Well, presumably she could have told you that it's not polite to assume
> nobody can do something, just because you can't.

My wife was frequently impolite in just that way. The nobodies in 
question were young kids and most of them acquire particular linguisitc 
skills as they get older that they don't have when young.

>> American secondary education isn't wonderful, and it probably wouldn't 
>> have taught me any more than Tasmanian secondary schools did back when 
>> I was reading about the  decipherment of Minoan linear B.
> 
> I take it you were reading /The Decipherment of Linear B/ by John Chad-
> wick.  Have you thought about buying yourself the corpus of Linear A,
> and attack the problem heads on?

Wrong, as usual. The decipherment of Linear B was in the news back then 
- not as front page news, but in specialist magazines (some of which 
made it even to Tasmania).


>>> Best wishes, and happy reading!
>>
>> Wishing me into an American junior high school isn't a good wish. I've 
>> been reading happily for many years now, but selectively, and reading 
>> the nonsense they they serve up - about America being a exemplary 
>> democracy - would not be a pleasant experience. Occasionally amusing, 
>> but I'd have to hide my amusement.
>>
> 
> Oh, don't worry about the American juniour [sic] high school, you can
> now study /popular culture/ in universities.  I bring you a link to your
> very own University of Texas,
> 
> https://texasconnect.utexas.edu/2025/09/29/swifties-trekkies-and-other-devotees-unite-in-ut-class-rhetoric-of-fandom/

It's not mine. My wife got her Ph.D. in Psycholinguistics from the 
University of Texas at Austin, and went on to do as post-doc at MIT 
where she took part in seminars with Noam Chomsky and other 
psycholinguistic heavyweights. Her supervisor at Austin was good value 
but the rest of the faculty was mixed.
> 
> and I wouldn't know how to react, if I were forced to take such a 
> course in this day and age, when I hardly like any of the current crop 
> of popular amusements, and mostly read [or listen to] space captain 
> dramas.  At least that branch of literature still has men in the lead role, and
> role, and manly adventures -- in space.

I started reading science fiction in the late 1950's and later found 
that trying to put science fiction on TV or film dumbed it down to an 
unacceptable extent. American science fiction does tend to be 
unfortunately right wing. Ken MacLeod is Scottish and knows the 
difference between a Leninist, a Trotskyist and Stalinist which make his 
work less fatuous.
> Now, if that isn't enough hobbies to get you started, you can always
> create an account at cryptohack.org, and start doing -- in Python --
> instead of reading.  I myself only started today, so don't read anything
> from my current low score.
> 
>    https://cryptohack.org/user/myrkraverk/

Why would anybody bother?
> 
> And for that, I've added comp.lang.python to this discussion.  People
> there are welcome to share their Cryptohack profiles, and we can have
> a friendly competition in cryptographic practicalities!
>  
> Best wishes, and happy deciphering!

Why would anybody bother?

> [1] Yes, I believe this word fits nicely, even though I'm not entirely
> sure if Merriam Webster is current on the meaning of it
"Expostulate" is part of my passive vocabulary. I can't recall ever 
posting the word. I have been know to post "albeit" here, and nobody 
else seems to have. It is evidence that I read too many books as child.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney