To Crack This Code Took Sega

In today's column - in a regular series in which Sordel draws upon extensive experience in the shadowy world of Internet hacking to decrypt the private communications of the hactivists - I shall break a code that has defied even our most august media outlet.

This, from Alexi Mostrous (surely not her real name) in today's Times:

"If the police want to stop these groups, they will have to penetrate murky online chatrooms and learn the hackers' language, which seems, at least to an outsider, often inexplicable. "Current Target: store.playstation.com || Status: FIRING NOW!" one member wrote during an attack on Sony."

While I am sure that Bletchley Park would have scratched its collective head at this code, and - at this moment - GCHQ has thirty supercomputers running permutational algorithms in the hope of cracking the private key with brute force, to Sordel this code is as simple as if it had been written in perfectly comprehensible English.

First one must work back from the known fact: that this was written during an attack upon Sony. Although this is not widely known, secret corporate documents reveal that the brand name Playstation was registered as a brand by Sony some years ago. This is just the sort of arcane commercial information that is prized by Anonymous.

Revisiting our code, we can therefore see that the string "store.playstation.com" is possibly a location of some sort.

Now examine the structure of the secret message. There are two binary pairs in the syntax, each separated by a colon. Since we now believe the second string in the first pair to be some sort of target, it is credible that the first binary pair represents some sort of targeting function. Indeed, the first part of the dyad does seem to include the word "target", so we may be thinking along the right lines.

Again, it will not be widely appreciated outside the group itself, but attacks of the sort mounted by modern anarcho-techno-rebels require both a target and some sort of temporal coordination. The word "status" is a little-known marker, used at the start of the second binary pair, to indicate the situation at the time that the message is issued.

Many of these hackers play computer games such as "shooters" in which words such as "fragging" are used as oblique references to attack. "Firing", presumably imported by analogy from the world of employment to which so many young IT amateurs have been excluded, is one of these, representing "attack, as with a laser pistol".

Finally, "now" is used to indicate the time of the firing. In order to encode this information, it has been converted to upper case. Without information as to the time that the message was sent, it is impossible to identify the actual date and time represented by the "Now Function", but it would certainly have been expressed in UTC in defiance of state borders.

I hope that nothing in today's edition will compromise similar codes currently in use by the CIA and MI5. After all, it's all fun & games until someone gets extradited to the U.S.

Some Blood for No Oil

The pro-war media (and I don't mean those media pro- the Libyan war but those media who would happily line up behind any war whatsoever) are very fond of telling our government to "hold its nerve". This instruction was trademarked some years ago by The Economist, but today's leader in The Times, which was presumably written some weeks ago in the expectation of civilian deaths, trots it out with equal confidence.

Don't stop bombing Tripoli now, just as things are going so well.

Sordel veers towards pacifism, appeasement and running away screaming like a small girl at the first sign of trouble, but even I must admit that to get this far into a war without significant civilian deaths or (to the best of my knowledge) any NATO military casualties, is a remarkable success. It's rather like going into a bar, shooting the place up with a shotgun, but doing so with the care and attention required to leave its clientele largely unmolested.

Unfortunately, this display of scrupulous vandalism is not entirely cheering.

For a start, Danny Alexander announced over the weekend that the Libyan War was costing tens of millions of pounds and would likely run to hundreds of millions. That's a bit like shooting up a bar with a shotgun and having to pay for repairs. While living under threat of having your house repossessed.

Secondly, the rebels aren't advancing, and a report in today's Times paints a sorry picture of their condition. After their last advance failed due to indiscipline, they have retrenched in Misrata and claim to be facing a more effective government assault. They have also run out of money.

Thirdly, although the coalition has done a very creditable job of preventing civilian deaths and injuries, it does occasionally bomb the rebels themselves, which is ... embarrassing for us, and fatal for them.

And fourthly, while shooting up a bar without killing someone is an achievement of sorts, shooting up a bar several times a night for three months is hardly a kindness to the people unable to leave that bar in whose interests one claims to be doing it. The bombing raids themselves inflict terror on the people of Tripoli.

So "holding its nerve" is not really going to be enough for the British government. What The Times really needs to do - in the fashion of Lady Macbeth - is taunt the government on to do something bloodier and yet more ruinous.

Because this isn't a war that is going to be won on its current rules of engagement.

This Just In: People Lie On The Internet

Let's just clear this up straight away: Sordel is not [repeat: not] a gay half-American girl called Amina Abdullah who lives in Damascus.

And neither is Tom McMaster, who posed as a Syrian political blogger for as long as people were credulous enough to believe him. Score: one for the Blogosponge; zero for anyone still sitting at home waiting for their ten million dollars to arrive from Nigeria.

McMaster is, so says Yahoo, "a Middle East activist, while his wife is studying at Scotland's St Andrews University for a doctorate in Syrian economic development". This may, however, be wrong, if their fact-checking is as dismal as that of Pink News, who were among the media outlets entirely taken in by what is now evidently to be considered a "hoax" rather than a piece of imaginitive fiction.

Oh, and if you think that the only people deluded by this were the Lesbian and Gay virtual community, here is Time: "Inspiring the Syrian protest movement is an honest and reflective voice of the revolution: a half-American citizen journalist who, in illustrating her country's plight, risks death herself."

Every day Sordel is surprised to hear tales of young girls persuaded to strip off in front of a webcam by sexual predators using tools of deception no more sophisticated than a fake Facebook account and six lines of leetspeak. Yet seemingly that girl's parents have been downstairs at the same moment in earnest discussion about the fate of Amina and how to check for the market value of those shares in the Brooklyn Bridge that they bought.

The really worrying thing about this (other than the fact that Sordel could evidently have been mounting a successful Ponzi scheme for the last few months rather than wasting time writing these vignettes) is that the media are so desperate for tales of repression that they will accept them from any source, however disreputable.

Fittingly, a book is about to be published about the truth behind Robinson Crusoe, which was also published as plain fact despite being (as we would now infer) a cruel hoax sneering in the face of maritime safety and the plight of shipwreck victims.

Don't look now, First Tier Media, your flies are undone.

Separating the Sheepish from the Goats

People sometimes say that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, but Sordel heard a longer version of that which makes rather more sense. "Which is better: a stopped clock or a clock that is slow by five minutes?" The paradoxical answer, the clearly incorrect answer, is that the better clock is the one that is stopped because it is right twice a day.

People going around celebrating the purported accuracy of a stopped clock are missing the point.

Doubtless (in some sense or another, one day) the world will end, and there's a chance (since there are many churches) that a small band of devoted religious followers will on that day be celebrating the arrival of "The Rapture" or somesuch. Should a Pythonesque hand descend on that day from a fluffy cloud and gather up God's True Believers, they might feel entirely vindicated.

The correct division is not, however, between those who happened to be right and those who happened to be wrong, and in this those atheists delighted at the conspicuous humiliation this weekend of Family Radio Worldwide are just as mistaken as the ardent followers of Harold Camping.

The correct division is between those who are sort of muddling through but inaccurate and those who, while accurate, are totally broken.

There is no rational eschatology under which the people who are saved are those who happen to adhere to a religion in which salvation is accorded to those either a) born into the right race/religion or b) able to calculate a correct date based on conjectural dates of events in the Old Testament.

If God's hand is going to descend from a fluffy cloud and gather up Jews, or Jehovah's Witnesses, or Harold Camping, then the god running the system really hasn't given the rest of us much to go on.

It's true that God might not play into human ideas of fairness, but being saved by an unfair god is not really much different from being damned by it. Salvation should not be like buying a lottery ticket.

Broadly speaking: if a religion only functions accurately at one moment of history, you'd be better off with one that is somewhat helpful whatever the day, date and time.

Those Nine Preferences In Full

Under the Alternative Vote system, voters would get (would have got) the ability to register up to nine voting preferences, which is all very well and good, but I got to the Voting Station this morning and made a disturbing discovery.

I don't even have a first preference.

While certainly I have been an undecided voter in earlier elections, this is the first time that I have looked at the voting form without having given any real thought for which party I would like to support with the mickle might of my vote.

Moreover, this was not just a "Lib Dems or Labour" thing. Even David Cameron - a man who probably used to wear a morning suit to buy his morning newspaper but now makes much show of not being able to put his hands on one for a Royal Wedding - was in with a chance of the Sordellian imprimatur.

Nick Clegg, aka the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, could well have swung it for the Lib Dems. Ediband The Unknown could have taken it for Labour. It was certainly not unthinkable that the Greens would stand secure beneath the impregnable aegis of my cross.

The problem, though, was not a lack of interest, but a genuine lack of what for want of a better word one must call an Alternative. If it's true that the Eskimos have an unusually large number of words for snow (and according to Wikipedia it isn't) then we had better start working on a larger vocabulary for the otherwise indistinguishable shades of political platform upon which we are invited to lavish our electoral enthusiasm.

It's a sad day for something-or-other when one has a more decided preference on what socks to wear than one does for which party should govern, but that seems to be my predicament.

(Admittedly, Sordel is unusually attached to socks, like a recently-liberated house elf.)

Still, it's comforting to think that despite my near-complete aporia, my vote will have been registered with the same vanishing significance as someone who actually cares.

Abbottabad-a-Bing

At a time when the moral compass for international affairs seems to be having significant difficulties pointing steadily in any direction, let alone North, Sordel would like to take a moment (with all due deference to Buffy) to suggest a new doctrine:

"What would Michael Corleone do?"

Much as the Obama administration chooses to say that justice was served on Osama Bin Laden by U.S. Special Forces, our ideas of what is just, proper and "right" don't really embrace murder.

Sordel is not being squeamish or scrupulous though. We all love it when bad things happen to worse people, and this is what makes Corleone justice so compelling. Helicopters, assassins dropping through the darkness ... sure, it's a bit "Part Three", but Michael would assent, just as long as he could brood over a Catholic rite while it was taking place.

Pilotless drones firing rockets into a meeting of the Five Families? If the shadows are suggestive of chiaroscuro and a snatch of Italian opera is played, why not?

Risible Whack-a-Mole while trying to kill Qaddafi in the ruins of Tripoli? The Don demurs.

Michael Corleone's guiding principle was not morality, but effectiveness, and it wouldn't be hard to be on the side of democratic governments were they more effective. Protecting civilians, for example, is such a laudable aspiration, but there comes a point when an incompetently attempted good deed is even less welcome than a boldly effected crime.

Unfortunately, there is an admitted flaw with this new guiding light.

The event most typical of the Corleone approach is not the raid on Osama Bin Laden that took place in 2011, but the attack on the World Trade Center that took place in 2001. Ultimately, an ethical system that is enamoured of effectiveness to the exclusion of all other attributes owes its existence to the man who has now become its latest and most prominent victim.

Justice has been served all right, but only the poetic variety.

M in Masterpiece or F in Fraud?

On 5 April, The Bolton News carried a headline that for once was inaccurate in a wholly informative way: "Fake Art by Banksy and Tracey Emin on display at museum."

The headline was inaccurate in the sense that the fakes were not by Banksy and Emin at all: they were fakes of Banksy and Emin by people with an ability to copy. It is notable, however, that Emin herself has not the ability to copy, or even, seemingly, trace, as her portrait of William and Kate's balcony kiss rather demonstrates.

"What's this, Sordel?" I hear you demand: "are you really going to devote an entire nutshell to championing outmoded bourgeois theories of art?"

Well, yes, actually.

The Independent, one must admit, has scored another hit. It is comparatively rare for a newspaper's front page to become a genuine subject of discussion, and only The Sun has been better at it than the UK's foremost contrarian chip-wrapping. On a day when every other paper was running colour pictures of the prince in his red tunic, it is perhaps unsurprising that The Independent would go with sober black & white.

What is less to be expected is that they would have selected (perhaps even commissioned) a work that falls so short of any minimal standard. There is a taste test to art. First we must recognise it: as something meriting attention as a piece of art. Hard though it may be to judge art, I wouldn't recommend any aspiring 15-year-olds to supply work of Emin's standard as part of their G.C.S.E coursework.

In Emin's "The Kiss" (to dignify it with a title) the most persuasive piece of draughtsmanship is the actual words "THE KISS" printed in block-capitals (though admittedly on a slant) beneath Kate's veil. Were one required to defend it, one could applaud the focus on the military trappings of the jacket, the baldness of William's head and the emptiness of his face, as pointed statements by a master portraitist, but this would be playing along too much. It would be to supply as the viewer an effort of creation that is missing in the artist.

Go peruse Google images for Tracey Emin and be amazed by the paucity of her oeuvre. What, to rephrase the old drummer joke, do you call someone who hangs around with artists?