A new paper in Nature says they have an algorithm that can read tightly folded letters without opening them physically.
The challenge tackled here is to reconstruct the intricate folds, tucks, and slits of unopened letters secured shut with “letterlocking,” a practice—systematized in this paper—which underpinned global communications security for centuries before modern envelopes.
It makes the bold case that these tight folds from letters 300 years ago should be considered an historic link to modern cryptography.
Source: Nature, letterlocking examples from the Brienne Collection. From: Unlocking history through automated virtual unfolding of sealed documents imaged by X-ray microtomography
Letterlocking was an everyday activity for centuries, across cultures, borders, and social classes, and plays an integral role in the history of secrecy systems as the missing link between physical communications security techniques from the ancient world and modern digital cryptography.
I have to say I disagree with this “missing link” comment. Cryptography doesn’t seem to come into it, as there is no decipher key to unlock them unless you stretch a definition to include unfolding.
A more obvious link from these letterlock examples to modern methods would be… the modern letterlock.
I suppose it’s important to say envelopes were an 1800s innovation in secrecy by providing an, ahem, envelope. Aerogrammes are ostensibly less safe than putting one in an envelope, even though an attacks on either one are basically the same — unlock, unfold, read.
That is why I say a “locking” fold of paper without an envelope doesn’t make a direct link to modern encryption. I mean encryption also existed in letters for many centuries (as I’ve written here before), separate from how the letters were folded.
For example, here is a German message intercepted in 1918 by British operator in Basra after liberating Iraq.
The bottom note says “2 letters missed thro machine gun jam”, which I suppose would be comparable to the “wormholes” in lockletter unfolding. But unlike lockletters, which can be read once unfolded, this text still lacks a key.
For another example here’s an old slide I made to show how the key in a 16th century “cardan grille system” (early steganography) was used during the American Revolution:
Source: Civic Engineering, ONU. Sunrise over a row of cannon at the Antietam Civil War Battlefield at Sharpsburg, Maryland USATwo years ago an article called “The Decline of Historical Thinking” warned that too few people in America were studying the right stuff to understand society (foundation to engineering):
Lately, I’ve noticed a feature of economic inequality that has not received the attention it deserves. I call it “intellectual inequality.” I do not refer to the obvious and ineluctable fact that some people are smarter than others but, rather, to the fact that some people have the resources to try to understand our society while most do not. Late last year, Benjamin M. Schmidt, a professor of history at Northeastern University, published a study demonstrating that, for the past decade, history has been declining more rapidly than any other major, even as more and more students attend college.
Some people have the resources to try to understand our society while most do not.
The big question becomes how many of those with these resources are in any position to improve society. Evidence today suggests far too few, as “today’s civics crises” are being linked directly.
For many close observers, a direct line can be drawn from today’s civics crises to a long-standing failure to adequately teach American government, history and civic responsibility… and the cost is a citizenry largely ignorant of the work needed to sustain a democracy.
STEM fails when its graduates are “ignorant of the work needed to sustain a democracy”.
People like to ask me how I made a “transition” from history to a career in tech, when they instead should be asking others how dare they work in tech without a foundation in history.
Information technology is really about economics, information security is really about philosophy (ethics), and both depend on an understanding of history.
As an example of what it can look like, some indeed are taught STEM properly with a lens on history, as an ONU civic engineering blog explains:
Finding answers would take research, so the eight engineers became historians. They researched the Village of Forest. They studied artillery. They learned about the Civil War. They had historians come speak to their class.
Can you imagine a software engineer saying something even close to that, or imagine a “civic software engineer” title? How many big tech companies are inviting historians to come speak to engineering? No wonder so many in tech, suffering from deep intellectual inequality, are undermining democracy.
White men tend to only listen to other white men. They will occasionally listen to a white woman.
Something I’ve always known about Tom Cruise is that he is a rich white man who made his fortunes by becoming “fake” and assuming the identity of others. Literally. He is a paid actor, who makes a living from impersonation so it should be fair to say he is a highly celebrated faker.
Here’s a helpful chart of privilege suggested by Eugenia Cheng in her tool talk about “understanding inequality”.
Source: “An unexpected tool for understanding inequality: abstract math”
Perhaps we could adapt that chart to one of trust, particularly as it applies to someone presenting themselves with attributes (rich-white-male) that supposedly project integrity in their message delivery.
Tom Cruise is so highly paid since his fakes are received as valued (e.g. entertaining, informative) instead of threatening, and also because of an odd form of acceptance of his reality. People in fact think he’s both tall and well dressed (expected of rich white men yet neither are true — sophisticated teams give him that appearance).
Now comes an article with a stark warning that evidence has been found of Tom Cruise, the fake, being faked.
Deepfake videos of Tom Cruise show the technology’s threat to society is very real: We’re entering scary times.
Scary? Entering scary times? Have you seen this from 1986, the true hey-day of cyber hacking?
WARNING: DESPITE THIS CONVINCING VIDEO IN CIRCULATION, TOM CRUISE WAS NOT IN THE NAVY, DID NOT FLY JETS …ETC ETC
Videos of Tom Cruise have showed since at least the 1980s technology’s threat to society by allowing Tom Cruise to be a fake.
Everyone needs to ask themselves whether Tom Cruise is a threat to society since he is an actor, makes a living being a fake? Think about it. How often have you really seen a real Tom Cruise? Ever?
Incidentally, here was my take several years ago on that movie poster of Tom Cruise showing that anyone these days can make a fake of anything using technology. Admittedly it DID NOT age well.
Original artwork by me.
And if you are wondering how you can reliably detect that my image is a fake, unlike the original image of Tom Cruise (also a fake), then just look very, very closely at the eyes.
In a real photo or video, the reflections on the eyes would generally appear to be the same shape and color. However, most images generated by artificial intelligence — including generative adversary network (GAN) images — fail to accurately or consistently do this, possibly due to many photos combined to generate the fake image.
I mean how to tell aside from the fact that RMS is the known founder of Free Software Foundation (FSF) and GNU is Not Unix (GNU) and obviously would never fit into a flight suit.
We dispense shame and hate on all the “paparazzi” who violate his privacy and dare to expose a real Tom Cruise (e.g. how short and badly dressed he is), yet laud all his fakery that he thrives from.
The alarmist article doesn’t bother to address such a very important and simple problem with its analysis.
It all begs the question of why should we be comfortable and trust a fake like Tom Cruise up until now, but then worry about someone else making a fake of his fakes?
In other words, why should we trust Tom Cruise being the only responsible fake, more than someone who is faking Tom Cruise being a fake?
If we could achieve trust of one fake (a Scientologist of all things, who peddles in fake beliefs), why not achieve trust in the fake of that fake? Or maybe another way of asking it is who really is scared by a world where a Tom Cruise fakes being tall, or fakes being a Navy pilot?
Some may claim to be “scared” by the idea of agency and voice being held by those not in power. That is what this really is about.
Someone who doesn’t appear physically to be Tom Cruise (a non-white, non-male) now may be able to attain the same power of influence that used to be reserved only for Tom Cruise (thanks to technology, just like the technology Tom Cruise used to appear taller than he is).
Imagine a black woman putting her words into the mouth of Tom Cruise and nobody detecting that it really is a black woman’s ideas. SO SCARY!
It’s about power. Why is power scary?
In reality, this kind of fear mongering with technology goes back to the turn of the century when machines put human faces on and people started experimenting with the idea of robots and inauthentic presence enabled by machines.
And even more importantly it takes us back to the first publication by Wollstonecraft (1790 Vindication of the Rights of Men) being extremely popular while she remained anonymous, yet her second publication under her real name was shunned because… the author admitted to being a woman. If only she could have published her brilliant works as a Tom Cruise video, right?
Also, to be fair, Tom Cruise is someone who battled with perception his whole life and made a career out of presenting a different vision than others were assigning to him.
He overcame obstacles and transformed his own physical appearance from something that he was ashamed of into an unbelievable physical representation, thus mastering the art of a fake.
People celebrate his achievement of fake Tom Cruise, so perhaps we should do the same celebrations for achievement of fake fake Tom Cruise.
I’ve written about all this security theater before, with regard to people faking the Queen of England. I write about it because I continue to find it amusing how it is a security topic that is literally about theater, yet nobody seems to admit the huge irony.
Additional food for thought: Americans have been spreading loads of fake traitor General Lee art after the Civil War (back to my point about industrialization-era fakes), not to mention American image manipulation going back to President Lincoln’s time (his portrait was a politicized fake — his head mounted on the body of someone opposed to freedom).
Putting up a statue of Lee is about the same thing as if Americans went about erecting monuments to Osama bin Laden after 9/11. Show me the outrage about statues of Lee before we think someone faking the fake Tom Cruise is a top concern. In fact, for all the deepfake art being generated using old photographs, it’s about time someone animated Lee’s statues with his own authentic words asking his followers to never put up statues of him.
Talk about scary fakes.
If anyone thinks it is “scary” now that Americans believe something is real that instead has been entirely faked… have I got some very real news about frightening times we’ve been in for over 100 years!
Update March 5: Vice has investigated the source of fakes of the fake Tom Cruise, and found it’s a sophisticated operation using professional actors!
The Tom Cruise TikTok videos required not only the expertise of Ume and his team but also the cooperation of Miles Fisher, a well-known Tom Cruise impersonator who was behind a viral video in 2019 that purported to show Cruise announcing his candidacy for the 2020 election. […] Ume has even detailed some of the highly complex and involved technical processes he had to go through to produce previous deepfakes. So, while the Tom Cruise TikTok videos that went viral last week may look like they were created in minutes, the reality is that they took a lot of time, technical expertise, and the skilled performance of a real actor.
If this is good news for anyone, that it takes a huge professional team including an actor to fake another actor, then the fears are being validated as about power and barrier of entry being lowered by technology.
And I would argue that the economics of a lower barrier to entry means regulation, let alone social norms of use, should kick in the same way as ever because artistic fakes are nothing new. Even the media hasn’t changed here so there’s literally nothing new except the idea that more people can do what already has been done for centuries if not longer.
Lattice of pseudonyms. Source: A terminology for talking about privacy by data minimization, 2010
In 2016 the National Socialist Movement (NSM) of America, also known as Nazis, claimed to be “buoyed by a Donald Trump victory”, and announced a shift in symbols they considered headline-worthy:
The Odal rune, a less-well-known Nazi Germany symbol, will take the place of the swastika on all official uniforms and banners. Mr Schoep says it’s a gentler approach to preaching the same messages. “The party leadership has every intention to bring the party, our leaders, our members and supporters into the halls of government here in the United States, and to do that we must reach more of the public.”
What would the Nazi version of an odal rune look like in their campaigns to enter the halls of US government?
The CPAC 2021 event gives an obvious answer by creating a main stage in the shape of one:
German Strafgesetzbuch (Criminal Code) in section § 86a outlaws this use of the Nazi Odal rune, but since it’s being done in America…
Way back in 2014 this kind of thing used to be a huge problem. A London retailer was forced to apologize and recall a jacket that “inadvertently” displayed the Nazi odal.
Source: Mirror UK
Its £205 “grunge look” Horace hooded denim jacket featured an emblem worn by Second World War SS troops. The ancient Norse odal rune, which is similar to a swastika, was used to symbolise Adolf Hitler’s belief in a pure Aryan race.
Just to be clear an ancient Norse odal has straight arms, lacking the very distinctive up-turned “surrender” arms of the SS odal.
The Nazis shamelessly appropriated others’ symbols as their own and forever tainted them, so sometimes it can be hard to establish the shift from ancient symbol to Nazi beliefs. I’m not sure how much that matters though as the ADL documents how a Norse odal is often displayed by white supremacist groups in general, so it’s pretty clearly a symbol of hate.
In 2017 white supremacists marched with the straight-armed Norse odal. If you look carefully at a photo of hate groups “uniting” to attack America, there is a giant NSM banner with Norse odal.
See the NSM at the top of the banner with a Norse odal?
The man occupying the White House delivered the argument that Nazism was mainstream to the Republicans, exactly what NSM and white supremacist activists had promoted in their campaigns to wave a dog whistle flag and be seen as “many people” — wearing a red hat, waving an odal rune, instead of obvious Nazis with a swastika armband.
In 2018 a white supremacist activist published how the Republican party had become the Nazi vehicle for “legal” destruction of American government
If we want to abolish [democracy], we’ll first need to master it. […] We always gain power legally. This is more terrifying to our rivals than any number of street fighters or gunmen. They would rather lay down their own lives fighting us in the streets, than live to old age under our rule. If we really want to punish them, we must be Republicans, not revolutionaries.
Want a historian protip? Nazis hate more than anything else in the world being embarrassed and shamed. It is their kryptonite. They are so insecure in their sense of self worth, if they are made to feel embarrassed and shamed they lose bodily function and fall apart. The same article has this tell:
This is not to say we should descend into optics cucking. Far from it. Anyone who dares punch right should be descended upon with all of the venom we can muster. However, we should master the art of the dog whistle…
In other words, shame is toxic to the Nazis and so they still defend the interchangeability of a swastika and confederate battle flag, while also running “dog whistle” symbols to attract followers who normally would worry about the optics and obvious shame of being seen as Nazis.
It also is a repeat of more recent history, with “Christian Villain” training leaflets made by hate groups in America intended to help Nazis rebrand their image to “mainstream” anti-federal Western ranchers (pardoned by Trump) or an infamous anti-federal posse of sheriffs.
Click to enlarge
CPAC 2021 changes all this, because they went with an explicit symbol of Nazism. They intentionally chose the villain costume.
It shows how Nazis have been fully embraced by Republicans now, having built a stage design for the very distinct Nazi “surrender arms” odal, which cannot be confused with any other use, time or affiliation other than Hitler.
CPAC went out of their way to use the exact symbol banned in Germany, used only by Nazis; one that tracks back logically to 2016 NSM announcements that Donald Trump was their man to carry Nazism into American government using the odal.
Another consideration is that the SS wearing the odal infamously rejected allegiance to constitution or government, instead pledging to follow only Hitler. Before 1934, the German pledge had this opening phrase:
I swear loyalty to the Reich’s constitution…
After 1934 in a Nazi dictatorship, the pledge was changed to this:
I swear to God this holy oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler…
When I say “their man” I mean it would be further proof of this CPAC odal significance if we see Nazis at the same event trying to emphasize worship of a single man, instead of allegiance to a constitution.
Sure enough, CPAC was trotting out bizarre and gaudy statues of Trump for people to pledge themselves his obedient follower.
Source: UpWorthy
A golden statue wearing swim trunks and flip flops represents a mish-mash collision of the extreme right-wing evangelicals, the anti-government boogaloo and Nazis, if we really must parse this idol worship.
Of course, some always will say they can’t see any rune connection (as if planned and built stages just come out naturally this particular way), or say that a connection to NSM isn’t clear enough yet (as if the NSM repeatedly taking credit isn’t an admission of anything).
Such claims of blindness is precisely why the CPAC stage was in the shape of a Nazi odal instead of a swastika, as the NSM clearly explained for us at the start of this blog post.
Nazis love to play dumb and lie about their intentions and meaning, forcing their targets to waste time trying to stop the “permanent improvisation” of tyranny. A toddler-like complete lack of responsibility for actions is a defining characteristic of Nazism (not to mention Facebook management).
Perhaps it helps to put it like this: in October of 2020 viewers of a TV show complained that a man had the obvious Nazi symbol “88” clearly tattooed on his face. The TV program confidently countered that there was no connection; in fact they claimed a very important meaning that would shame anyone criticizing the 88.
At first the channel defended Lumsden, a joiner from Bristol, stating that similarity between his tattoos and Nazi symbols was “entirely incidental” and that background checks had confirmed he had no links or affiliations to racist groups or views. It was said the number 88 referred to 1988, the year of Lumsden’s father’s death.
Death of his father must have been so traumatic, that year so deeply meaningful, he incidentally put a large 88 permanently on his face. Makes sense, right? So everyone stopped thinking it was a Nazi symbol… until someone smart called the man’s father to confirm whether he died in 1988.
The Daily Mail subsequently tracked down Lumsden’s father Trevor, who lives close to his son and who declared to a reporter: “I’m here aren’t I? I’m alive and kicking, so I’m not dead yet.”
On Wednesday, the Trump campaign placed 88 ads on Facebook — 88 is a number with Nazi connotations — that featured a symbol used by Nazis to denote political prisoners in concentration camps. The Trump campaign denied the reference to any Nazi symbols was intentional…
If you want to read more about Nazi symbolism hiding in plain sight, I have another blog post that offers even more detailed background and modern examples.
CPAC wouldn’t have used the Nazi odal if they thought they couldn’t spin lame Lumsden-like excuses and get away being irresponsible for promoting Nazism. They also wouldn’t have used the Nazi odal if it didn’t promote Nazism.
Those are the basic facts for America today, and at this point it’s clear Trump is attempting to run on nothing more than the “white grievance” platform of Nixon and Reagan — white insecurity political influence of the KKK (heavily “Nazified” by David Duke, as Trump himself admired in 2000).
The Nazis really runed CPAC this year (pun intended).
Update Feb 28: It’s been pointed out to me Russian “FSB operators love2rune“. They are linked to extremist white supremacist groups operating in foreign conflicts, adopting the Norse odal as a marker.
Source: @AliceAvizandum
This also was documented in 2014 by Ukrainian press. Alignment with symbols of Russian military foreign operations helps explains why in 2016 American Nazis announced they would be adopting the odal:
Source: EuroMaidan
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
