HFQ Official Snippet #6 (oopsie!)

Henry Brown wrote:

Alistair wrote:I have to say when I first saw the "oopsie" I wondered just for a second if the whole book had been snippeted!

just a second but thats not likely to happen a second time!

Me too. Do we know why it does say "oopsie?"

The reason is that he first titled this snippet 'snippet #5' and so it slipped under lots of people's radar.

The only reason I can think of for her to want to get to Zion quickly is if her operatives are about to, or close to, capturing a memeber of the Group of Four or Rayno and she wants to be there in person.

ka8wtk wrote:The only reason I can think of for her to want to get to Zion quickly is if her operatives are about to, or close to, capturing a memeber of the Group of Four or Rayno and she wants to be there in person.

Or perhaps Duchairan's conspiracy is coming to maturity and she's needing to go back and help direct traffic!

Don

I doubt very much that the Sisters of Khody are sending a significant amount of information via the semaphore.

First, the people authorised to transmit and relay messages along this route would be both well known and limited in number. Unless I have severely misread the abilities of Clyntahn, Rayno, and their cohorts, I strongly suspect that as soon as war reached the mainland (if not before), the Inquisition would demand – and get – access to all codes. If there were suddenly messages that the Inquisition could not read, it would be comparatively simple to find out who was responsible. The consequences for that individual don’t bear thinking about.

Second, the traffic is severely limited in quantity, because the average sending speed for a semaphore is about 2 words/minute. In other words, this message, up to the point you are reading now, would take over an hour for a single semaphore to send.

Added together, these two mean that any concealed messages would have to be confined to no more than three or four insignificant-looking words or symbols with a prearranged meaning, hidden in the opening of a message, its closing, or any “accidental-on-purpose” transmission errors.

That’s no way to run a resistance movement. Either they are working to a long term plan with known general objectives, so that the individual cells have considerable autonomy within a carefully defined framework and they don’t need fast communications, or there is another communications system that we’ve not been told about yet. I’m waiting with bated breath to find out which it is. I hope it’s the latter . . .

Peter2 wrote:I doubt very much that the Sisters of Khody are sending a significant amount of information via the semaphore.

First, the people authorised to transmit and relay messages along this route would be both well known and limited in number. Unless I have severely misread the abilities of Clyntahn, Rayno, and their cohorts, I strongly suspect that as soon as war reached the mainland (if not before), the Inquisition would demand – and get – access to all codes. If there were suddenly messages that the Inquisition could not read, it would be comparatively simple to find out who was responsible. The consequences for that individual don’t bear thinking about.

Second, the traffic is severely limited in quantity, because the average sending speed for a semaphore is about 2 words/minute. In other words, this message, up to the point you are reading now, would take over an hour for a single semaphore to send.

Added together, these two mean that any concealed messages would have to be confined to no more than three or four insignificant-looking words or symbols with a prearranged meaning, hidden in the opening of a message, its closing, or any “accidental-on-purpose” transmission errors.

That’s no way to run a resistance movement. Either they are working to a long term plan with known general objectives, so that the individual cells have considerable autonomy within a carefully defined framework and they don’t need fast communications, or there is another communications system that we’ve not been told about yet. I’m waiting with bated breath to find out which it is. I hope it’s the latter . . .

Hi Peter,
First of all, welcome to the the forums and I hope you enjoy the rough and tumble here.

In general terms, I agree with your point. However I would point out that I doubt that any resistance movement movement would be overly impressed with Clyntahn's demands that they turn over their codes. In fact, a properly devised code would be such that it wouldn't be recognized as a code at all to anyone not in the know. Messages could be buried in perfectly innocuous business mail and no one would be the wiser.

A more major obstacle to using the semaphore would be that the system out of Siddarmark into the Temple lands is probably cut off these days due to the war.

Don

Peter2 wrote:I doubt very much that the Sisters of Khody are sending a significant amount of information via the semaphore.

First, the people authorised to transmit and relay messages along this route would be both well known and limited in number. Unless I have severely misread the abilities of Clyntahn, Rayno, and their cohorts, I strongly suspect that as soon as war reached the mainland (if not before), the Inquisition would demand – and get – access to all codes. If there were suddenly messages that the Inquisition could not read, it would be comparatively simple to find out who was responsible. The consequences for that individual don’t bear thinking about.

Second, the traffic is severely limited in quantity, because the average sending speed for a semaphore is about 2 words/minute. In other words, this message, up to the point you are reading now, would take over an hour for a single semaphore to send.

Added together, these two mean that any concealed messages would have to be confined to no more than three or four insignificant-looking words or symbols with a prearranged meaning, hidden in the opening of a message, its closing, or any “accidental-on-purpose” transmission errors.

That’s no way to run a resistance movement. Either they are working to a long term plan with known general objectives, so that the individual cells have considerable autonomy within a carefully defined framework and they don’t need fast communications, or there is another communications system that we’ve not been told about yet. I’m waiting with bated breath to find out which it is. I hope it’s the latter . . .

The Semaphore is not the kind of system you are thinking about - it is much more complicated and higher bandwidth and extensively uses codes for message compression increasing bandwidth further. The church controls it but every big merchant house and bank on Safehold uses it for messages so
access will be easy. See http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Safehold/229/1

The kind of code to use on this system is not the kind which scrambles every word but one which uses indicators or keywords to pass the Message. when they sent Earl Coris the wyverns from Safehold they were accompanied by a message containing references to the Writ. The chapter and verse numbers were pointers to the page and word numbers, in a previously agreed novel, of the words of the actual message. That kind of code is unbreakable without the 'decoding pad' and is not readily detectable if used wisely.

Randomiser wrote:

Peter2 wrote:I doubt very much that the Sisters of Khody are sending a significant amount of information via the semaphore.

First, the people authorised to transmit and relay messages along this route would be both well known and limited in number. Unless I have severely misread the abilities of Clyntahn, Rayno, and their cohorts, I strongly suspect that as soon as war reached the mainland (if not before), the Inquisition would demand – and get – access to all codes. If there were suddenly messages that the Inquisition could not read, it would be comparatively simple to find out who was responsible. The consequences for that individual don’t bear thinking about.

Second, the traffic is severely limited in quantity, because the average sending speed for a semaphore is about 2 words/minute. In other words, this message, up to the point you are reading now, would take over an hour for a single semaphore to send.

Added together, these two mean that any concealed messages would have to be confined to no more than three or four insignificant-looking words or symbols with a prearranged meaning, hidden in the opening of a message, its closing, or any “accidental-on-purpose” transmission errors.

That’s no way to run a resistance movement. Either they are working to a long term plan with known general objectives, so that the individual cells have considerable autonomy within a carefully defined framework and they don’t need fast communications, or there is another communications system that we’ve not been told about yet. I’m waiting with bated breath to find out which it is. I hope it’s the latter . . .

The Semaphore is not the kind of system you are thinking about - it is much more complicated and higher bandwidth and extensively uses codes for message compression increasing bandwidth further. The church controls it but every big merchant house and bank on Safehold uses it for messages so
access will be easy. See http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Safehold/229/1

The kind of code to use on this system is not the kind which scrambles every word but one which uses indicators or keywords to pass the Message. when they sent Earl Coris the wyverns from Safehold they were accompanied by a message containing references to the Writ. The chapter and verse numbers were pointers to the page and word numbers, in a previously agreed novel, of the words of the actual message. That kind of code is unbreakable without the 'decoding pad' and is not readily detectable if used wisely.

indeed. just send financial figures which are in fact references to verses in the writ.
Without the start point, it is undetectable and undecipherable when banks and commercial users are the main customers of the semaphore system.
Nynian has strong ties in this community. Still, Sidarmak-Zion liaison is broken now, so she has probably an alternate, and Merlin would have detected the use of wyverns I think

n7axw wrote:...

Hi Peter,
First of all, welcome to the the forums and I hope you enjoy the rough and tumble here.

In general terms, I agree with your point. However I would point out that I doubt that any resistance movement movement would be overly impressed with Clyntahn's demands that they turn over their codes. In fact, a properly devised code would be such that it wouldn't be recognized as a code at all to anyone not in the know. Messages could be buried in perfectly innocuous business mail and no one would be the wiser.

A more major obstacle to using the semaphore would be that the system out of Siddarmark into the Temple lands is probably cut off these days due to the war.

Don

This sort of steganography is not as secure as you might think. See The Codebreakers by David Kahn. First off, code books will be severely limited to only a few which all must use. Second, codebreakers are not stupid. They examine price lists to see if they make sense. They ban word puzzles or solve them. They do everything they can to make sure that there is no such thing as an innocuous looking msg that is not in fact innocuous.

Randomiser wrote:...
The kind of code to use on this system is not the kind which scrambles every word but one which uses indicators or keywords to pass the Message. when they sent Earl Coris the wyverns from Safehold they were accompanied by a message containing references to the Writ. The chapter and verse numbers were pointers to the page and word numbers, in a previously agreed novel, of the words of the actual message. That kind of code is unbreakable without the 'decoding pad' and is not readily detectable if used wisely.

In our real world these codes were tried a lot. Friedman's wife (Freidman led the effort to break Purple) broke such book codes by hand in the rum running/anarchist era of the 20s and 30s only identifying the book after the fact! And again, simply sending such thing brings attention to yourself as the first measure of the authorities is to limit users to one or a few code books.

alj_sf wrote:...

indeed. just send financial figures which are in fact references to verses in the writ.
Without the start point, it is undetectable and undecipherable when banks and commercial users are the main customers of the semaphore system.
Nynian has strong ties in this community. Still, Sidarmak-Zion liaison is broken now, so she has probably an alternate, and Merlin would have detected the use of wyverns I think

Such msgs were routinely caught in the 20th century (see Kahn The Codebreakers) and almost certainly before. Prices have to make financial sense, for example, or they leap out as something fishy. Being identified with something fishy gets you hauled in by the Inquisition from which point things go rapidly downward. Like downward to Hell!

It is very, very difficult to make an innocuous communication that actually means 2 different things. That violates the basic tenets of language itself.

It's been a while since I've read his book, but as I remember Kahn reports about a spy in WW1 who ended up in front of a firing squad for using the price list dodge and being found out.