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ElfMage83 t1_ja69zp7 wrote

CIA does this too. Agents might lace their shoes in different ways to send messages.

164

J_train13 t1_ja6gtty wrote

I love that the only reason I know what this is is from that one Doctor Who episode with MI6

12

res30stupid t1_ja6m9gf wrote

Replying to The_Safe_For_Work (#2,045,143)

Oh, yeah. This is a great way of hiding things and encoding information that only a few people will know.

For example, the BBC was an important part of the war effort since their song selection would convey secret messages to the troops, spies or POWs in Europe who knew the code. For example, the BBC would deliver secret codes in their broadcasts including letting allies know that they were about to launch a major offensive into Europe.

> The document below, from the BBC’s written archives, [sic: link to PDF] shows the unusually long list of code messages to the French Resistance broadcast on the night of 5 June 1944. It was the eve of D-Day, and the small pencilled cross next to the ninth message, indicates that it was this phrase in particular – ‘Berce mon Coeur d’une langueur monotone’ – that signalled the invasion was about to begin:

D-DAY CODES

They would also use music and other means of broadcasting information into Europe, which actually tended to go horribly wrong because it was kept secret from the general staff of the BBC that they were doing it.

The BBC had a special producer credited for song selections when it was meant to be for the Polish resistance under the name of Peter Peterkin, because the Polish news broadcast was kept short just to deliver important updates via code of musical selection.

But notes from within the BBC at that time complain about about how sometimes these vitally important updates weren't delivered because the records just weren't played because the person meant to play them didn't know they were vitally important to the war effort and ignored the given tracklist; other times, they put the recording on and it was the wrong side of the vinyl.

Interesting thing to note as well is that the BBC actually started their European news outlets this way - they would natively translate news stories and broadcast them into European languages in order to get free information out there that couldn't be supressed by the enemy. To their credit, they actually reported on their own losses in the war to intise the enemy to listen in, so that when the tides of the war turned it would actually demoralise the enemy more later on.

In the Horrible Histories book The Woeful Second World War, one woman was actually reported to the secret police because of the BBC. She was having her radio repaired after it broke down and just so happened to have overheard a news broadcast about how the son of her neighbour, believed dead in a failed military operation, was actually caught and turned over to a Prisoner of War camp. When she happily informed her neighbour about this, she was immediately arrested.

That neighbour was a cunt, wasn't she?

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yourredvictim t1_ja6s8gn wrote

https://www.openstego.com/

Handy if you are a creep or a crook and you want to send secret messages.

Hide your message in a picture and create an item for sale on ebay. Soon you'll be the top terrorist in your cell! Or wind up in a cell. Que sera sera.

8

Orangecuppa t1_ja7a97s wrote

The Simpsons did an episode on this before.

I believe Sideshow Bob tried to hide a hidden message which was "the bart, the" in German but it was written as "Die bart Die".

5

bonreu t1_ja7enp6 wrote

Replying to laserdicks (#2,052,517)

You send a message. They can't tell what's in the message, but they can tell you send a message to someone. And they can ask you who you sent it to, and what was in it. Very thoroughly ask.

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dangil t1_ja7kek8 wrote

I developed a DSSS steganography in 2003... to my surprise the Army has a patent on it from 1999

1

nicky7 t1_ja7l9ay wrote

Annoyingly, the article didn't include any examples, and I couldn't get decent results when searching.

e: tried different keywords and found this one example

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DanYHKim t1_ja7qs4f wrote

171228_Madame-DeFarge_Weaving-a-Revolution.txt

"Vanity Fair Admits Video Telling Hillary Clinton To Take Up Knitting “Missed The Mark”" National Memo. December 28, 2017

With a screenshot of Madame DeFarge, I wrote:

"It's an un-hackable database of political criminality, after all!"

=== to further explain, I wrote:

It's a picture of Madame DeFarge, from the 1935 adaptation of Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities".

DeFarge is a woman bent on revenge against the aristocrats, particularly those of one family that destroyed her own. As part of the French Revolutionaries, she knits, and her knitting secretly encodes the names of people to be killed. Thus, as she sits and witnesses the crimes of the French Aristocracy, she bitterly knits the names and crimes into a tapestry, to be used against them after the revolution.

=== to elaborate, I wrote:

There is much symbolism surrounding DeFarge, since the three Fates of Classical mythology are women who spin the thread of life, and cut it when a mortal life is at its end. In another way, she is a type of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, who weaves a tapestry shroud for her father-in-law in order to hold off the petitions of her suitors, who claim her husband must be dead after so long at sea. Penelope famously unravels the tapestry every night, so she is never finished with it, putting off the suitors for an indefinite time.

The act of weaving the tapestry shroud is supposed to be her last act as a daughter-in-law and member of Odysseus' family and household. The burden of the shroud is symbolic of her duty as a married woman, and its cultural importance makes the labor inviolate in the face of her suitors and their demands, as well as the demands of her clan. Being a woman, Penelope has no authority of her own by which she can choose to remarry or wait for her husband's return, and so she cleverly uses her weaving as a way to use the rigid gender rules of her society in her favor.

Similarly, perhaps, DeFarge conceals her important role in the Revolution behind a different kind of tapestry. The domestic labor of knitting cannot be suspected to be 'political' or 'revolutionary', since it is a 'woman's work'. Thus, the death list of the Revolution is never revealed to the Aristocratic forces.

In a final parallel, though, we have seen this year a third act of fabric-making as a concealed act of empowerment. Millions of women marched in cities, towns, lonely roads, and isolated fields around the world in protest against Donald Trump's inauguration as President. On their heads were the pink knitted hats, pointedly named after the object of one of Trump's many transgressions against human decency. While the sight of multitudes of protesters crowding streets and parks and plazas worldwide was powerful in itself, the "pussy hat" provided a colorful punctuation to the crowd, making a statement as straightforward as an upraised fist: 'Donald Trump is the enemy, and I will oppose him'.

03/28/2020

And now, we have yet another act of fabric craft, largely by women, as a consequence of this horrifying election. Because of short-sighted mismanagement, petty vindictiveness, and now-familiar stupidity, medical protective equipment must be hand-crafted in homes across the country. The cloth mask is a public and visible sign of the failure of the Republican-dominated government to accomplish even the most basic of functions in an emergency.

Wear yours proudly in public. It is the "Phrygian cap" of American resistance against incompetent kakistocracy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/business/coronavirus-masks-sewers.html "A Sewing Army, Making Masks for America"

0

DanYHKim t1_ja7s2jy wrote

Shortly after the 9-11 attack, I read that intelligence services were concerned that secret messages were being concealed within pornographic images. The article started that the investigators had not yet found such messages, but they were committed to redoubling their efforts by downloading and analyzing even more porno to find them.

I so wish I had downloaded the article!

1

Esherymack t1_ja7wpcu wrote

this is actually something i've studied! As an avid knitter and software engineer I had to take cryptology classes in school, and it was the topic of one of my research projects.

Knitting is ultimately a binary system (knit, purl) and as such it's fairly straightforward to figure out how to send messages on a basic level (say, assign a "knit" as a 1 and a "purl" as a 0). this is at least suspected to be similar to the method Madame DeFarge used in "A Tale of Two Cities", underneath a further level of code (although instead of calling it binary, we can assume certain combinations of knit/purl = a singular letter). I've also done encoded lace in base-16, morse, and binary in colorwork.

I believe it got to the point that during one of the world wars, the sale of knitting patterns was prohibited overseas for fear of sending encoded messages. Alas, they did not forbid the sale of or shipping of knitted objects.

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cramduck t1_ja812h6 wrote

The game Monaco uses a steganographic technique to make the save l files for player-created maps. They create a preview image of the map for you, and tweak the color values pixel-by-pixel to be odd or even, corresponding to the 1s and 0s of a binary message. That binary message is the actual level data.

3

PaperPritt t1_ja881me wrote

Always reminds me of Jeremiah Denton who blinked his message (T-O-R-T-U-R-E) during his "interview" while being a POW during the Vietnam War.

3

darcynader t1_jaa9n2j wrote

Similarly, Lord Baden Powell, the founder of scouting, worked as a spy during WWII [edit: been corrected that it was the late 1800s, not WWII, and now I'll be fact checking things before posting them to Reddit 😅]. Posing as a lepidopterist , Powell would scout occupied territory with a sketchpad and the tools of his "trade". All the while sketching enemy defences into the patterns of butterfly wings.

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RealJonathanBronco t1_jacfz72 wrote

Replying to SHEEEIIIIIIITTTT (#2,090,058)

>"Here is a book code. To find the book, and more information, go to https://www.reddit.com/r/a2e7j6ic78h0j/

1:20

2:3

3:5

4:20

5:5

6:53

7:1

8:8

9:2

10:4

11:8

12:4

13:13

14:4

15:8

16:4

17:5

18:14

19:7

20:31

21:12

22:36

23:2

24:3

25:5

26:65

27:5

28:1

29:2

30:18

31:32

32:10

33:3

34:25

35:10

36:7

37:20

38:10

39:32

40:4

41:40

42:11

43:9

44:13

45:6

46:3

47:5

48:43

49:17

50:13

51:4

52:2

53:18

54:4

55:6

56:4

57:24

58:64

59:5

60:37

61:60

62:12

63:6

64:8

65:5

66:18

67:45

68:10

69:2

70:17

71:9

72:20

73:2

74:34

75:13

76:21

Good luck. 3301"

Hope you like book codes.

1

RealJonathanBronco t1_jackdth wrote

Replying to SHEEEIIIIIIITTTT (#2,103,040)

lol I wish but there's no TL;DR for any of Cicada 3301 really. The best I can do is that complex code leads you to a book where another complex code emerges. The chain just continues on and on. Very few got to the end solve, the current iteration of the puzzle has been unsolved for years.

1