Bacon's Cipher

en.wikipedia.org

80 points·drdee··9 comments

What a great binary connection. The follow-on story about the cipher being used on the Friedman tombstone is also really cool.

https://elonka.com/friedman/index.html

Not just text, you can add a bacon cipher to anything where there are two states in-band. Here is a famous group photograph of code breakers.

https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/40/sherman.php

There was an interesting variation of this theme in old french tv series "Operation Mozart": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0253415/. They used upper part of letters as dot and dashes of Morse code. say MTTAI equals to ..--..

Slightly off topic, I wonder how they handled different writing styles.

E.g. in letter "W", in most fonts the the middle part touches the top (So: "..."). But in monospace fonts, like the one used in HN's comment reply text area, the middle part is lower (So: ".."?). And in wikipedia's logo the "W" is stylised as overlapping VVs (So: "...."??).

they used a standard french typewriter AFAIR in the movie.

If anyone has any idea of where to find that series online, please share.

I've been dying to watch it again since I was 10 years old or so but it's such a niche series that I don't think it has had any later distribution in the digital era.

yep, exactly, such a great series, and unobtainable unforunately.

I like articles like these because they lead you down a rabbit hole of genuine learning.

The Wikipedia article was unsatisfying so I googled to learn a bit more.

In that adventure I learned basic algorithms for decrypting substitute ciphers which in turn has led me down another rabbit hole.

Great stuff, thank you!

I think you could also use a similar like of Bacon cipher steganography even with codes other than Bacon's code, e.g. using Baudot code instead.

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