FACTORALY - E3 CODES

Episode Date: September 14, 2023

Do you know any Morse code (apart from if you need help at sea)? Actually, you do - you just don't know that you do. And there are loads of other codes, too. Once again, Bruce and Simon take the mundane and make a mountain out of it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, and welcome to another thrilling episode of Fact Orally. I am one of your two co-hosts. My name is Simon Wells, and joining me here remotely is... Bruce Fielding of your two co-hosts. My name is Simon Wells and joining me here remotely is... Bruce Fielding, the other co-host. Hello, Bruce. How are you? Hello, Simon. I'm very well. I'm completely coded out. Thank you very much. That could be a new euphemism. We'll start using that in a different way. Coded. I guess, yes. Lots of coded language going on in this one i guess because this one's all about codes it is it's all about codes codes are everywhere aren't they

really um i don't think either of us realized how much material we would find when we started started poking at this subject well i guess even language itself is is a kind of a code because it's a way of expressing something. So like, you know, what is a bottle? The word bottle means that thing over there that's got water in it. Yes, you're right. Something that represents something else. Yes. So I looked up the definition of code according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

A code is a system of words, letters, figures or symbols used to represent others especially for the purposes of secrecy. So that really does just fit into the definition of language as you've said, something that represents something else. Yes, and I guess there are different sorts of codes as well. I mean we sort of think of codes as being things like Morse code or something like that. But actually Morse code isn't actually a code, because a code represents

a whole thing or a word or a point of view. Whereas a cipher, which is actually what Morse code is, it's kind of like replacing one letter with a different letter. That's a better explanation than any I found online. I was desperately trying to find the difference between a code and a cipher, and I thought, nah, forget it, Bruce will know. Yeah, I mean, it's like, you know, the most famous cipher, I guess, was the Enigma machine, which was, do you know who found,

who actually captured the first Enigma machine? I would love to say the British. Well, see, the British think it was the British. The Americans made a movie, didn't they, about a submarine that captured the first Enigma machine. Yes. Well, actually, it was the Poles who captured the first one. Oh, good on them.

Yeah, they kind of boarded a, I think they boarded a submarine and one of the guys saw this strange box in the corner and went, I wonder what that is? Just a total fluke finding. Yeah, absolutely. Brilliant, brilliant. So what can you tell us about the Enigma machine?

It's a bit of an enigma to me, so tell us more. So I've actually been to Bletchley Park. I was taken there as a birthday present. Oh, nice. And I mean, you know, when you're a nerd, that's the kind of birthday present you get. That's the kind of place we hang out. Geeks assemble. Absolutely. And so, yeah, I've actually seen an Enigma machine. Wonderful.

The way they work is, it's a very similar, there's a thing called, I think it's a Caesar cipher or something like that, which is a very old form of, like if you imagine a wheel, a cardboard wheel with like two sets of letters on it. And sort of when you move it one way, you can substitute one letter for the different letter. Okay, yes.

So what the Enigma machine did was, it did that kind of substituting one letter with another letter on wheels there were five wheels and it changed the setup of it every single day so it was was a really tricky thing to crack and um you know bletchley park was formed to to crack it and and what what's fun is that actually they they they worked out that the easiest way to crack it was not by trying you know really hard maths but psychology all right because um what would happen is that the the operators before they actually started sending the message would kind of go like hey dude how's it hanging in in 1940s german and uh the And the British would see this every day,

and they could kind of work out from that at least some of what the wheel settings were. Wow. And they did a lot of research into, like, you know, what's your dog's name and girlfriend, and as much information as they possibly could from wherever they got it from spies about the personal circumstances of the

operators. Oh, wonderful. So if one person is sending an encoded message and they're using wheels number one, six, seven, and nine, presumably the person on the receiving end has to know exactly which wheels the sender is using so that they can decode it or decipher it accurately. Yes, that's right. I think they actually had books that told them which day they could use what wheels on. So as long as you didn't have a machine, you were fine. There's that lovely letter from Churchill

where he visited Bletchley Park and they were asking for outrageous things. You know, we need more kit, more this, more that. And after Churchill had seen it, he sent this very short letter to the head of Bletchley Park and said, give them whatever they want. Oh, fantastic. And that's like a blank check from Churchill. And so they just got on with it.

But, yeah, it was so effective that after the war, we didn't tell anybody that we'd cracked it. And our allies started to use Enigma machines to send confidential information to each other. And we just quietly sat there going, yeah, we can read this. Our spies spying on our own spies. Yeah, or our mates' spies. You know, it was, yeah, we just didn't tell anyone that we'd done it.

Oh, that's so British. Just keep it to ourselves. Use it for our own nefarious means. means but i mean ciphers you know the modern world really wouldn't exist without ciphers because ciphers is what um cryptography and and and all that sort of yeah stuff that that makes the internet secure yes is actually very similar yes what i didn't realize is you know you hear about this like 32-bit encryption and 500 what it is it's it's two to the power of yes how difficult it is and i didn't realize that oh interesting so i i spent um in a former life i i spent a bit of time studying electronics and computing um so whenever we sort of talk about 32 bits or binary code which is a code or is it a

cipher interesting um all of that that makes sense to me you know sort of the using a piece of code where you you take a numerical value usually in decimal you convert it through a series of binary or hexadecimal or whatever it might be, and it produces a letter or a word or an image or whatever. All of that roughly makes sense to me. Do you know what a bit is? Do you know how it gets its name? No, I don't. A bit is a binary digit.

The B from binary and the it from the end of digit. So a bit is either a one or a zero. Those are the only two digits that exist in binary. And bits hang out in clusters of eight, which Sunbright Spark decided to call a byte. Because it sounds a bit like a bit. So eight bits are a byte. And that's how we get bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, etc.

And I understand that to code stuff, you need very big numbers. So I guess a very big number in binary is very, very, very big. Yeah, so if you think about the decimal number system, you sort of go through each of the digits in a whatever a four digit number this this digit is worth one that digit's worth 10 that digit's worth 100 and so on and so on in binary each of those digits is just worth double the one before in order to make the number six in binary you would write zero one one zero yeah is that Yeah, I think that's correct. Yeah, it's 2 and 4.

Yeah, 2 and 4. There you go. Good maths. So yes, the binary numbers end up looking fantastically long and complicated compared to just a good old-fashioned decimal number. But that's what the computers speak. The computers speak in ones and zeros. Those ones and zeros are represented as positive or negative charge or magnetic pulses on a disk or whatever it is.

So it's simply an on-off. One equals on, zero equals off. But that encryption, I understand that that sort of encryption is sort of on its last legs because what used to take weeks and weeks and weeks to decrypt using normal computers takes about 10 minutes or even 10 seconds with a quantum computer. Oh, goody, quantum computers. That's a whole other episode. It's some form of magic. I think somebody said to me that once quantum computing actually rises,

security will be completely irrelevant. Really? Yeah. Wow. Wow. Fantastic. Well, that's something to look forward to, isn't it? Now, the word code, we both like a bit of etymology. Where do these words and phrases come from? The word code code actually written as code first appeared in the 1300s as long ago as that and it originally comes from the latin word codex which meant a systematic compilation of laws and then even earlier than that the word

codex simply meant a book right so that that goes all the way back to that somewhere along the lines to you know it's it's become morphed and changed and now means what it is um didn't look into where cypher came from it's probably greek probably greek it sounds greek it's all greek to me um now you mentioned earlier morse code which we will now be forced to refer to as Morse cipher, which doesn't have quite the same ring, does it? But there we go. Morse code was created by an American inventor called Samuel F.B. Morse, hence the name. And he developed it along with a chap called Alfred Vail during the 1830s. And they created this thing for sending messages through electrical wires.

So this series of pulses, these series of dots and dashes, bips and blahs, as the Americans call them. Do they still? Well, in some circles. Bips and blahs. And again, so someone starts off with a message in English. They convert each letter into a series of dots and dashes. They transmit it over a wire.

Someone picks it up at the other end, translates it back into English. Or whichever language it happens to be. Or whichever it is that they're using. I made an assumption there. So a dot is one unit of time, a short unit of time, and a dash is worth three units. And then there are different lengths of units in between those dots and dashes to show that that's either the end of a letter, the end of a word, or the end of a sentence. But all of this happens at lightning speed,

so the person really has to know their Morse cipher in order to make it work. Do you have any examples of Morse code being used in popular culture by any chance? I do, actually. I mean, the obvious one, I guess, is the TV series Morse. The other one that I found out very recently is that the theme tune for Mission Impossible, the bit that goes da-da-da-da-da-da--duh-duh-duh-duh-duh. That is actually M-I in Morse. Is it?

Oh, that's amazing. I'm now playing that in my head. That's fantastic. I think a lot of people, a lot of composers probably think, how am I going to get a rhythm out of this? And then maybe think about... They either think about the words of it, like the words of the uh you know like the

words of the title of the film which give you in like to like yes uh the adventures of robin hood i think is one of the early ones where the the adventures of robin hood it's kind of like you get that that thing yes but i think the morse code um definitely gives you a good beat that's a lovely idea we're digressing slightly but there are quite a few movie themes that work on that premise. John Williams was a great one for using that idea of basing a theme tune around the title. So you'd have Star

Wars, you'd have Superman, Indiana, etc. Yeah, that's true actually. I hadn't noticed he did it, but yeah. So you mentioned the TV series Morse, so those opening dots and dashes in the theme tune of Morse Code

actually spell the word Morse. Barrington Falun. Bless you. Who now? What? The composer was a chap called Barrington Falun. Is that right? Yeah, who's a cellist. What a name.

I actually was in the middle of absolutely nowhere in the Scottish Highlands and I noticed that at the church hall there was a sign saying the Barrington Falun Quartet will be performing here on Saturday. And I went, that I've got to see. And it was basically in a little sort of like a school room yeah with the four of them up sort of like 10 yards away from the rest of us and there's the rest of us was about 30 people and they they gave a they gave a gig which was amazing that's brilliant how impromptu um another example of Morse code being used in in again in places that people don't necessarily

recognize it um the old nokia text message notification which as we all know goes when you get a text message yeah that is morse code for sms ah which is short messaging service which is what a text message is officially called. So your phone is literally telling you you've got a text message. Isn't that great? Yes. Yes. So looking around at other codes, I mean, this, like I said before, this is a massive topic and we'll never cover them all, but a few codes that, or ciphers, that stuck out to me that I never knew existed, which I'm just going to mention a couple. Have you heard of hobo codes?

I think I have, but remind me. Okay. So hobo codes are little chalk inscriptions written on the walls in public places by members of the homeless community. And they're trying to let each other know whether this is a good spot to stay in one form or another, essentially. This started in 1930s America during the Great Depression. Because of the great job shortages, people would travel from place to place. And once they'd found a good spot or a bad spot, they would put a chalk mark on the pavement or on the wall to tell other people whether it was safe to be there so they have little pictures usually little um little representations of a house or a an x sort of marking a no safe zone or whatever

and they they contained messages such as this is a friendly place there's a strong police presence nearby there are guard dogs nearby this is an unoccupied, there's a strong police presence nearby, there are guard dogs nearby, this is an unoccupied building, there's a soup kitchen around the corner, things like this. Oh, wow. And they still exist today in America and even in parts of London, usually around knee height, so they're not obvious to the average passerby. But yes, there are all these little codes. You've reminded me.

I seem to remember that when homeless people went door to door asking for money or food or whatever, they would put a sign saying, you know, there's a complete bastard lives here. Or, you know, this is a soft touch. Interesting. Yeah, hobo codes. The other place that I love the idea of codes is in medicine.

I don't know whether you ever see, I've never seen my own doctor's notes. No, you probably wouldn't be able to read them. Well, exactly. I mean, my handwriting is far too good to be a doctor. But there used to be things like when somebody would come into a doctor's office with like you know with a head trauma or something like that and smelling slightly of whiskey they would put on the on the notes d-a-f-o which is drunk and fell over or or if somebody you know somebody brought in a weird-looking child,

they would put FLK on the notes, like funny-looking kid. There are some cracking ones. One of the best-known ones was TTFO, which is when you go to the doctor and the doctor says, there's nothing wrong with you, just go. And TTFO means told to f*** off. But I was told that there was one called Ratfo,

which is reassured and told to f*** off. This is very different to Tigger's TTFN then, ta-ta for now. Well, exactly. Yes. My other favourite one is, you can imagine what this person looks like who's just

walked into the doctor's office. She's sat down and she's explained how her crystals aren't working and that she probably needs some sort of proper medicine. And he writes on her notes, Grollies. G-R-O-L-I-E-S.

Grollies. Which stands for Guardian Reader of Low Intelligence in Ethnic Skirt. Oh my goodness. That's incredibly precise. It's just great. I mean, they also have things like L-O-B-N-H. Lights on,

but nobody home. Or when somebody's really stupid, they put CNS-QNS, which means central nervous system, quantity not sufficient. Oh, that's great. Wonderful. This is kind of reminding me of all the abbreviations we have in text messages and, you know, social media chat and so on. Yes, lols. Lols and ruffles and lmaos and pumzles and things.

What's a punzel? Pumzel, P-M-S-L. P, myself laughing. Yes. My mother still sends emails to me writing LOL at the end, which she still thinks stands for lots of love. Hello, dear, just want to let you know that your father isn't doing too well.

Lol. Yes, yes. Your cat's dying, lol. Now, another system of coding, it's one of those things that you've always noticed, you've never really paid it any attention, but it has a deeper meaning. I think this is the essence of how codes work. To the people who know them, they're critical. To everyone else, you just walk past them every day. Have you ever noticed colourful squiggles on the pavement when you're walking around town?

I've never known what those mean. I've assumed it was children playing with chalk. You would imagine that. It's not. So it's surveyors and civil engineers marking out what lies beneath the pavement when there's roadworks coming up. And they write lots of numbers to say how deep the items in question are or how long they are or what they intend to do with those things things that are under the ground but they're all color-coded so when you see a squiggle in red it means that there's an electrical line under the ground okay in blue means there's a water pipe under the ground makes sense yellow means a gas pipe green means cctv and cable TV network lines. And white is just a general communication saying,

you know, dig here or don't dig here or whatever. Have you got any other codes that you've been looking at lately? So any other, well, I guess there are codes. Jargon is a kind of a code, isn't it? I mean, you know, when I was in advertising, things like DPS for double page spread and all that stuff. So every industry, I guess, has a jargon, which is a kind of a code. Yes, I suppose so.

Yes, it's sort of an in-house language or whatever you want to call it that sort of, it's shorthand, isn't it? It's a way of telling other people what you mean without having to say the thing out loud. The preeminent short form now is the TLA, isn't it? The three-letter acronym. Yeah, I love the fact that TLA is a TLA. Yes, well, I actually belong to a group called the Tech London Advocates,

who are known as the TLA. Wonderful. The other code which I suppose is quite well known, you hear it every time you ring up a service provider and have to give them your address or your surname or your postcode or whatever it might be, is the phonetic alphabet. Yes.

Of which there are quite a few different alternative versions, but I think that the NATO version is the one that pretty much everyone sticks to. Apart from the Americans. Apart from the Americans, they're separate. I thought it would be fun, just for a little test of our knowledge, I haven't written this down, deliberately, just to see if you and I can go through the phonetic alphabet together, one by one. I'll start with Alpha.

Bravo. Charlie. Delta. Echo. Foxtrot. Golf. Hotel. India?

Uh, do, uh, no. Oh yeah, almost had it is it yes juliet which i only remember because of the tv cop show juliet bravo exactly yeah juliet um okay uh kilo yep lima Kilo? Yep. Lima? Mike? I've gone blank. What's N? Is it November? Yes, it is. It is November. Oscar? Papa?

Quebec? Romeo? Sierra? Tango? Uniform? Victor? Whiskey? Why France? Victor. Whiskey. Y-fronts?

X comes after whiskey. Oh, right. X-ray. I assume that would make sense. Yankee. Yankee. And zebra. Or Zulu.

Zebra or Zulu. Yeah. Okay. Interchangeable. So the whole point of that is that none of those words sound particularly like any other word. Ah. So it's highly unlikely that if you... My postcode begins with TW17. And every time I try to say that to someone over the phone, they say,

sorry, was that PW? No, no, TW. CW? No, no, TW. So the point of this phonetic alphabet is that all of those words sound unique enough that the other person shouldn't really be able to muddle it up. Yeah, mine's much easier. I mean, I could go November whiskey, but frankly, Northwest is probably easier for NW. They're fairly easily identifiable, aren't they?

Before we started, we were talking about passwords. Yes, yes we were. You know, passwords are almost a mixture of ciphers and codes, really, aren't they? Don't tell anybody, but my password is... No one's listening, it's okay. ...is password 1234. Classic. I can remember that one.

We have so many logins to different websites these days. And you don't really want to just have one password because as soon as that's cracked, you know, you've lost everything. But trying to remember which password you've allocated to which website and then the whole thing of your memorable words or things like that, it gets very confusing these days. Yes, it's very unfortunate if your mother's maiden name was something like Fox. And they say, what's your mother's maiden name? And you go, Fox. So no, it has to be four letters and a number. Yes, that's something now, isn't it?

So I have quite a systematic way of remembering my logins and passwords for various different websites, which I shan't divulge, but they keep on changing the rules, don't they? So I knew exactly what my passwords were. And then one day when I went to log in somewhere, they said, your password must now contain at least one capital letter. Yes. So, okay. I'll systematically go through and change all my passwords to include a capital letter. Now they must contain at least one number. Okay, I'll go through and change them all again. Now they must contain at least one special character. Okay, I'll go through and change them all again. I went to a website last week that said your password must be at least 16 characters. For goodness sake, how am I supposed to remember this? I just ended up writing the word 16 on the end.

Somebody once told me that a good way of doing a fairly secure password is just to look around you and pick three things. So monitor, bottle, pencil is as good a password as any other without any number. I mean, if you want to put a number in it or something or a special character. But there are websites that actually check your passwords for you and tell you how long it would take somebody to crack them.

Oh, really? It's fun to do because you kind of go, oh, you kind of put your normal password and it goes, this would take 12 seconds for somebody to crack. Oh, my goodness. Oh, I'm having a go on that later. Love that. Now, I think the last thing we want to talk about,

this was a very last-minute entry, wasn't it? We just briefly happened to mention this in passing before we pressed record. There is a website called What3Words. Yes. What experience do you have with this well my experience was i was asked to invest in it so um oh okay so that was that was that was quite quite a good experience yes um and and they explained that the the world was being divided up sort of land and sea into these um nine square meter like three meters by three meter squares.

And the way they explained it to me was in two ways. One is if you live in a favela, you live in the middle of a slum, how does the postman find which shack or which corner of a shed you're sleeping in? No road names, no house numbers. Completely nothing. So the only way that the postman can find you is if they will either have a GPS location for you,

which is very difficult to remember generally. Yes, lots of zeros and points. Yes, or just three words that they just put on the envelope, and that gets to you anywhere in the world within nine square metres, which is absolutely staggering. And they said the other thing was, you know, you're having a really good time,

you're lying out on the beach, and you think, ah, I could really do with a pizza. How do I tell the pizza guy where to deliver the pizza on this huge long crowded beach yes and if it's a what three words you just ring up or get on your app put in your what three words location and the guy with the delivery box can come and find you straight away so these these words are entirely randomly generated and each square has nothing in common with the next square so one square might be aubergine happy golf the next square might be umbrella ostrich purple yes they have absolutely nothing

to do with each other at all and they're all totally unique and the other great thing about about what three words is that if you're at sea it works exactly the same as it does if you're on land yeah i mean i know that generally people who are sailing across oceans and things tend to know where they are and have proper gps but even yeah but even if you're out for for a day's you know sailing and you kind of get a bit lost yeah you can put in your what you can check out your what three wordswords and tell people where you are. Yeah.

If they're headed out into the open sea when they were going out on a pedalo, something like that. I swear I just left Brighton Pier. But, you know, we haven't really touched on the spying aspect. Well, no, that's true aspect of codes and ciphers. I mean, the traditional spy cipher is a book cipher where you have like a page of a book or a word in a book that gives you the key to how you've altered the words in your or the the letters rather, in your message. And you have to know what book you're referencing to get the right words. Right, okay. And we all sort of are familiar with that idea of two agents meeting each other

and exchanging some kind of code to verify that they are who they say they are. Someone with a very bad Russian accent walks up and says, in Moscow it is raining heavily. And then the other person replies, you should take an umbrella. Ah, it really is you. Yeah, what's the Bond one? Which is he offers him a cigarette

from an empty cigarette case or something like that. Yes, yes, that's right. Oh, do you have a match or something like that? I find a lighter is more useful. That could get quite easily misconstrued. I mean, someone else might have exactly the same point to make about lighters versus matches. Yes, yeah, I mean, and I'm sure that has happened. But spies these days probably just use WhatsApp because it's encrypted end-to-end, so you don't actually have to worry. Oh, that's boring, isn't it? Where's the mystery? Where's the intrigue?

Right, well, I think we've pretty much exhausted this week's topic on codes. Yes. I hope all of you, our myriad listeners, have enjoyed listening to us waffle on about all of this stuff and we'll be back again soon with some more. The Easter is coming swiftly. But only on Thursdays. Have a great week. See you next week.

Bye, everyone. Bye now.