On Fri, 20 Mar 2009, Elliott Hird wrote:
> On 2009-03-20, Kerim Aydin <ke...@u.washington.edu> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, 19 Mar 2009, comex wrote:
>>> On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 5:04 PM, Warrigal <ihope12...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> ih...@normish:~$ echo 'SGVsbG8sIHdvcmxkIQ==' | base64 -d; echo
>>>> Hello, world!
>>>> ih...@normish:~$ echo 'Q0ZKOiB7VGhpcyBDRkogZXhpc3RzLn0=' | base64 -d;
>>>> echo
>>>> CFJ: {This CFJ exists.}
>>>> ih...@normish:~$
>>>>
>>>> Gratuitous arguments: I consider these encoded messages to be
>>>> practically unambiguous, as this seemed like the obvious way to decode
>>>> them,
>>>
>>> Gratuitous: So did I, but Goethe evidently didn't understand the
>>> message, prima facie evidence for it being insufficient for players in
>>> general to understand. On the other hand, the message most likely
>>> /is/ understandable by Murphy, the only officer responsible for acting
>>> in response to the purported CFJ.
>>
>> I figured it might be a fairly easy encoding to "break", but only glanced
>> in passing. It would be interesting to see what "reasonable effort" in
>> terms of decyphering. As I mentioned before, the previous cases that
>> worked were either automatic via "most" readers, or natural-lanugage
>> "close to english" obvious. -G.
>
> Base64 is ridiculously well known.
So is AOL! (at least that was extraordinarily clear to me and many at the
time it was judged unclear).
