In 1992 , author William Gibson release a Holy Writ titled Agrippa ( a book of the dead ) , which played from a 3½-inch floppy on a 1992 - epoch Apple Macintosh computing machine endure the System 7 oxygen . It was a poem that ran upscreen and whose text edition was programme to vanish after its first indication , by manner of a special encryption programme that encoded each line of the full work .
Few of the original floppy disk remain , but the University of California , Santa Barbara hasan emulation of the original programand , with it , a new internet site calledCracking the Agrippa Codehopes the lustrous minds of the internet will be able to do just that .
To win you must give in a technical description of your cryptography … under Creative Commons employment rightfulness ( the result of which will be used to further research on Agrippa ) . The technological description should explain what kind of encoding is used ( if any ) , how it function , and how it was reversed or cracked ( and what the key is , if there is one ) . Should there be no encoding at all ( a possibility ) , or should the app merely “ scramble ” or “ destruct ” the information , this must be technically demonstrated or proved .
Thecontest ’s internet site provides a number of resourcesto help challenging codification - crackers get started . Whomever is first to successfully crack it will get a copy of every Gibson book eer bring out ( except Agrippa , of course ) ; runners up will have their name posted to the site , in recognition of their efforts .
So … erm , what good way to ticktock this outrageous summer heat than to stay inside , at your computer , puzzling over a X - old , yet - uncracked codification ! ? [ TheVerge ]
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