"Why does my nose hurt after concerts?"

April 14, 2019 8:02 AM

GCHQ cracks Frank Sidebottom's secret codes
posted by dfm500 (4 comments total)

Of course the first word found was 'bobbins'
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:23 AM on April 14, 2019 [2 favorites]

I’m a little sad that GCHQ apparently needed a hint that the outer ring was gibberish. I feel like adding that kind of decoy data to confuse a code breaker would be a standard technique.
posted by a device for making your enemy change his mind at 10:07 AM on April 14, 2019 [1 favorite]

In their statement they said that that sort of codebreaking is done by individuals in their spare time, so I wouldn't worry too much about their abilities based on this.
posted by Barry David at 10:46 AM on April 14, 2019

I’m a little sad that GCHQ apparently needed a hint that the outer ring was gibberish.

Keep in mind that he was using children as his random number generator for the outer ring. Not truely random, and not truly patterned, but ever-shifting arbitrarily selected patterns of whimsical nonsense. That's noise to make a cryptographer weep.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:14 AM on April 14, 2019 [9 favorites]