Re: google reads your mail

On 9/17/2026 4:43 PM, Lane W wrote:
> Bill Sloman wrote:
>> 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?

Because /The Code Book/ is a great historical overview of code breaking
through the ages.  It's where I first read an account that describes the
method used to decipher Linear B, and inspired me to buy /The Decipher-
ment of Linear B/ by John Chadwick, alas I seem to have misplaced my
copy.  I was reading it in London earlier this year.  Full disclosure, I
am now very, very far from London.
>>
>>> 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).

I on the other hand, buy books voraciously, and with passion.  I have
books on Egyptology, American history, and now a bit of English history
with the addition of the Kensington palace guide book, and history book,
from the ticket sale next door.  The Bri'ish reading this will know what
I'm talking about.

>>
>> 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.

I alas, have not done anything with authors of security books, that I
know of.  I have personally known the late and great Simon Riggs, form-
erly of 2ndQuadrant.  That was a U.K. company in the field of databases,
but has been gobbled up by EnterpriseDB.  Simon later crashed in an air-
plane he was piloting himself, as I understood the news article.

He wrote a book on administering PostgreSQL, and I have a copy in my
shelf.

Now, in the immediate future, it seems I will not be working much with
databases.  That comes from being a generalist, I can quite literally do
anything when it comes to programming.  It's merely a matter of educat-
ing myself on the specifics, which brings up some of the following para-
graphs.

>>
>>>>> 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.

And that's exactly what I was talking about.  The table in Wikipedia
lists 6 * 15 symbol, and I'm too lazy to enter that in a calculator.  It
is obviously far more than the 26 symbols commonly used to write Eng-
lish.  It gives a steganographer quite some leeway in choosing how to
map the English sounds to symbols, and will throw off most would be sta-
tistical analysts in recognizing the language.

>>
>>> 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.

But you can always communicate with cryptographers!  Why leave those
out?  Do you have anything against cryptographers?  Note, those are not
the morons worshipping [sic] cryptocurrencies -- that's a completely
different field.

>>
>>>> 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.

Well, in my experience, there are also quite a lot of ignorant old
timers who continue to be impolite out of their own ignorance.  And when
someone tries to correct them, they just laugh, as if youth means the
person can't know a thing the old timer doesn't.

>>
>>>> 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).

Well, this book is written -- by my recollection -- by one of the people
involved in the decipherment.  Well worth reading.  I hope I din't com-
pletely misplace my copy.

>>
>>
>>>>> 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.

I guess I never got tutored by heavyweights.  Or at least, they didn't
tell me if so.  One of my teachers the mathematics department of Univer-
sity of Reykjavik, Iceland -- which is different from the University of
Iceland, Reykjavik; this is quite confusing, I know -- said he was doing
some original research in combinatorics, and created his own algorithm
for listing all permutations.  Sadly, I forgot that algorithm, and have
now deleted my Facebook account where I communicated with him last.
>>>
>>> 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.


Well, I started later, but have read science fiction voraciously.  My
favorite science fiction as a kid were the stories of -- I think it was
brothers -- who created their own wonderful vehicles, submarines, and
probably even a space ship.  They were the sons of a famous inventor who
I believed had been written about by the father of the author.  So it
was generational science fiction.

Would you have a clue as to what their names might have been?  I have
totally forgotten at the moment, and it seems the L.L.Ms. don't know
old science fiction books at first glance.

I have added alt.arts.books, alt.books, rec.books, and rec.collecting.
books to this discussion in the hope some of them has a clue about what
I'm talking about.
>>> 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?

To look at my profile?  Nobody should bother with that.  It was an
invitation for the people of comp.lang.python to share their profiles.

After all Cryptohack basically forces their students to deal with Python
and since Lawrence D'Oliveiro -- the Pythong influencer -- convinced me
to give it a try, I thought I'd start with Cryptohack instead of Crypto-
pals.

>>>
>>> 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?

To compete with me in Cryptohack, or to decipher on their own, for their
own amusement?  Nobody should be competing with me, that's a given, but
people can freely decipher the puzzles and level up their own real world
skills in hacking cryptography.

Some people even pay for these skills!

> 
> That's great. An old curmudgeon and an asshole to the last. Your hostile 
> attitude is very quaint and charming.
> 

Don't worry about Bill, he's probably out of stamina, and cannot imagine
other people would want to do hobbies he himself cannot imagine doing.

Worse, he's the kind of guy who tries to dissuade people from enjoying
their own hobbies when he himself gets no enjoyment out other people's
adventures.

I started Cryptohack because I thought, and have not been proven wrong,
that it would be a great project to brush up on my Python skills, as I
haven't used Python for a serious project for fifteen years.

And rest assured I don't really care about Bill, and his dismissal of my
hobbies, I write on Usenet for my own amusement, and have no particular
desire for flame wars.


Best wishes, and happy hobbies in comp.lang.python!
-- 
Johann | email: invalid -> com | http://www.myrkraverk.com/blog/
I'm not from the Internet, I just work there. | via Easynews.com
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