Simon Says – Musings of a Technology CTO

Over the holiday break an interesting story broke re a US Civil War message being finally decrypted after 147 years. The message was in a bottle that had been stored in a Virginia museum since 1896, but had never been investigated. Finally in 2010 a curious collections manager, Catherine Wright asked retired CIA codebreaker David Gaddy to crack it and see what it said.

The story of the message is interesting in itself, but what I wanted to share with you is how obscure the craft of codebreaking can be. Let’s start with a picture of the message so you know what we are dealing with here… Read more…