Fergie's Tech Blog

Still cracking Kryptos

I shamelessly grabbed this snippet that David Pescovitz posted over on Boing Boing:

Activity surrounding Kryptos, the cryptographic puzzle at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, continues to surge. Elonka Dunin who runs a comprehensive Kryptos site, told The Guardian that she used to see 500 visitors a day but recently got 30,000 visits in 24 hours. Of course, interest in cracking Kryptos skyrocketed once it was revealed that The Da Vinci Code dustjacket references the puzzle and that it's part of the plot of Dan Brown's next bestseller, The Solomon Key. (Previous post on Kryptos here.)

From The Guardian: No one is more amazed at the sudden excitement than Kryptos's creator, Jim Sanborn, who was hired in 1989 by the CIA director at the time, William Webster.

Mr Sanborn worked with a CIA cryptographer, Ed Scheidt, to produce the coded sculpture, consisting of the S-shaped copper scroll, a petrified tree, a water-filled basin and stones marked with fragments of Morse code and a compass. Placing it in the thick of many of the best code-breakers in the world, they never thought it would take this long.

"These were events I thought would take months not years," Mr Sanborn, a Washington-based sculptor, told the Guardian...

Some of the "addicts" are going to remarkable lengths to solve Kryptos.

Gary Phillips, 27, told the Guardian he had abandoned his software company so that he could devote more time to the code puzzle.

"I can see how some might perceive that I made a sacrifice by closing my business and pursuing Kryptos," Mr Phillips, a Michigan programmer, said.

But he added: "Kryptos brought me back to my first love. Like my childhood programming days, I was once again free to pursue a challenge that didn't have the limitations of 'this is how to do it'."

Link to Guardian article (via Fortean Times), Link to National Public Radio story on Kryptos.

posted by Fergie @ 6/15/2005 11:31:00 AM