Submitted 1 year ago by AnarchistsForDemocracy@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
That’s stupid, any cypher you can keep in your head is easily cracked.
If you want privacy, look towards encryption. Get a cheap laptop without internet access, install whatever Linux distribution, then keep everything encrypted.
So all you need to keep in your head is your master password.
That’s stupid, any cypher
I wasn’t talking about a cypher but rather a full on language. I got the idea off of native american languages being used in the war to prevent decription of secret communication.
If it’s an existing language then it’s not secure.
If you make up your own language you’ll waste a thousand hours and someone might use the notes you used to learn it.
Just use damn encryption, it’s easy and fast. Also has additional benefits. If someone wants to force you to give them/translate your notes you can’t do much (they’ll know when your translation is inconsistent).
With encryption you can hide a volume inside another one. If you enter the weaker password you can put decoy files there, with just your run of the mill notes. While behind a stronger password you hide your actual diary.
Using a foreign language only delays the “enemy”, which might be tactically valuable depending on the situation but the message will eventually get cracked, have no doubt about that. It’s not a secure way of hiding your information and it’s foolish to even consider it. Some forensic dude’s gonna analyze your shit and it’s all going to become 100% transparent in no time at all.
Encryption, on the other hand, can be mathematically proven to be EXTREMELY unlikely to be cracked even by the best efforts of well funded experts, when properly implemented and used.
Do you speak more than one language? Fluently? I speak 3 languages fluently, and know a few others to certain degrees. How long do you think it takes to learn a language fluently enough that you can use it for most stuff you might want to write? And even if you choose a weird or obscure language that will make it harder for you to learn, and if someone wants to read it all they need to do is pay any person who also speaks it.
If on the other hand you want to invent your own language and writing system there won’t be any other speakers to consult, however inventing your own language will take you thousands of hours, and if you only speak english languages your created will likely just be code words for everything because you don’t know about things like declinations or gender. As for the writing it’s easier to create a hard to crack writing system, however at the end of the day your system will either be semantic or phonetic, i.e. a symbol will represent either a meaning or a sound, if each symbol is a meaning you’ll need thousands of them which means thousands of hours to create and learn just a basic setup, if on the other hand you use phonetic symbols it’s almost a guarantee your language will be cracked simply because of repeating patterns. So the best case scenario is that you spend the next 5 years developing and learning a new language, and it would take a couple of months, best case scenario some years for someone to break it.
Let’s compare that with cryptography, you only need to remember a master key, if that master key is complex enough, e.g. 12 random dictionary words (which you can use several tools to generate), it would take all of the computer power in the world a couple of billion years to crack. Quantum computers might speed that up, but there are algorithms that work around that. How long does it take you to memorize 12 words? A couple of hours maybe, and you have something which is, in any meaningful use of the word, unbreakable. That seems like a much, much better deal.
And this comes back to an idea in computer science which is “don’t reinvent the wheel”, whatever you think is your great idea to encrypt your messages is likely already been thought of and discarded by the people who understand the most advanced cryptography algorithms today, and if you understood them you wouldn’t need to think on writing foreign languages.
As an older person, I would take a somewhat different path for myself, if only because I know for a fact that the first-level people that are doing the spying are anything but your regime’s very best.
What you want is something that you can have in the open, looks worthless, shitty even; something that invites mockery as opposed to suspicion. Something in your own language and handwriting that the bottom-feeding impatient, intellectually challenged thugs who will actually be doing the searching open up, laugh incredulously, mock you for writing while you stand there silent, embarrassed and ashamed – and then toss aside as worthless.
You’re right that pen and paper are the way to go, IMO, and if English were your native tongue I’d simply recommend that you learn cursive and then enshittify it: in the US, for example, most older people read and still write in cursive, but very few under the age of 40 or so, and even then they don’t see enough of it to be able to read shitty cursive. It’s the same for a number of languages: handwriting will always invite slop, and manual slop will never truly be machine readable. It’s often not even human readable except to its creator, and not always then. So you’d want to look at your own language and its handwriting traditions.
Me, I’d go back to writing in English cursive, but now with a system of added hooks and slight errors that, on the surface, just make me look more sloppy and stupid (not hard, lol) but which mean something to me, and me only. Cursive is incredibly easy to fuck up in such a way that it is unintelligible to everyone but you; doctors do it all the time, and most people after a decade or two of signing their own name in it. You can easily fuck up your own in the same exact way, in whatever archaic but lingering handwriting system your native language uses, and that’s the writing part done.
Then, you’ll also want a list of acronyms and code words that mean something to you only – and for good measure, learn to write absolutely horrifying poetry about sexual partners you will never have. Make all your journals look like the condensation of self-pitying incel tears running down the pages. Put your genuine thoughts between lines of rancid, revolting “oh no one will ever love me the grocer looked at me wrong I feel so misunderstood” horseshit, but remember that you can use theme as a keyword index: for example, whenever you mention “grocer” or another frequent character in your anguished tales, you know the next line contains references to a rally; “pretty girl” is a specific contact, whatever.
Get into cheap fountain pens, and now paper and pen journaling is a legitimate hobby for you. And paper journals are easy to destroy: should you ever want to tear a page out and burn it in the kitchen sink, all you need is a lighter. You could even throw in some shit about how you were so angry (or ashamed, or depressed, or whatever) about what you’d written that you could never bear to see it again so you ripped it up and threw it away, oh woe is you. On every page, badly draw a lot of squiggles and useless illustrations and marginalia to make it visually confusing and difficult to follow. Cross out irrelevant words and underline other irrelevant words. Use different colors. Spill drinks on it every so often. Smear ink now and then.
Make it look like a ten-year old got hold of a fountain pen and some meth.
And in the middle of that shit, hide the information you want to keep, right there in the open.
There’s literally no downside to paper these days. I’m guessing that your regime expects you to write everything online, keep everything online, just for ease. But your paper journals can be kept in plain sight, as well as your cheap pens and ink and fountain pen hobby supplies. (The uglier the better, but don’t go overboard: if you’re neat and clean, then your physical journals should be as well.)
But should you ever come under suspicion, and the cops toss your home, they’re going to pick up those journals and read it and laugh at you and your truly shitty poetry, probably openly and in your face, before flinging it down and looking for your REAL digital cache of subversive info.
I have great respect for unbreakable codes, such as the Navajo language referred to elsewhere in this thread, but in real life, an unknown language will attract attention and cause low-level enforcers to seize that book and pass it up to real translators and code breakers.
Instead, if you openly make it trash to the thugs who will be doing the searching, creating journals that they just laugh at, mocking you and what they think is your sorry self-pitying life, it will never get that far. That’s where I’d put my own efforts, anyway.
I am sorry you have to take these precautions, and wish you well in your endeavors. May you be a thorn up the ass of your regime, lol. Good luck to you.
Like you said, stenography (hiding meaning in something else) is more important than cryptography. Cryptography only lasts until the lead pipe is swung at your knees.
stenography (hiding meaning in something else)
Steganography? I’m assuming your autocorrect took over here: the manual form of steganography is exactly what I am talking about. Though come to think of it, I don’t know anyone who still uses, or can even read, the various forms of shorthand (stenography) that used to be so common; it could work as a hidden language these days. I bet some of the older ladies among us who were secretaries in the 50s and 60s could, though. When I was young I saw a book about learning it; it’s actually pretty brilliant and an elegant use of sound notation.
You nailed it with the lead pipe analogy, though, IMO. Truer words were never spoken. If the people watching never find you to be of any importance, if you are dismissed as too stupid or too sorry to deserve further attention, if you are seen as a waste of resources, you’ve conquered all the tech and cryptography and AI/ML and pattern analysis and digital surveillance an entire government can throw at you before they’ve even had a chance to start.
So, people like to think that you can do something clever like invent a code to hide things, and technically, yes. And if they ever search your place and find it, they'll assume it's serious business and you'll get the XKCD Security treatment.
If it’s enough content, an AI can learn any language naturally just by training on it.
Only solution is an encrypted airgapped computer that cannot physically connect to anything. But the set up makes you suspicious enough to get in trouble just for having it probably.
There was an encryption software a while back that would open two different partitions depending on the password you put in so if someone forces you to open it under duress, they get the drive filled with naked ladyboys instead of the one with your revolution plans.
You can create a hidden volume using Veracrypt: veracrypt.eu/en/Hidden Volume.html
But personally I wouldn’t bother.
Were the partitions visible on scan?
No, it’s part of the normal partition if you set it up right. You just can’t write to the normal partition or it will overwrite your hidden partition
You’re seriously underestimating the governments ability to decipher a made up language. Bear in mind any government probably has entire departments dedicated to cracking codes and translation. Encryption is going to be a million times better than anything you can come up with. I’d just assume that if you can think it up, someone else can figure it out.
I think you're overestimating what governments like this have. What is more likely is that the government will just snatch up someone who knows the the made up language, torture it out of them, and then go from there. Far less resource intensive than having departments to decipher coded language.
Or bribe them with a sandwich, or simply by not being their favorite target
Wouldn’t the cost be too high to them? I understand if it is a widely used language but at some point the cost-benefit calculation just isn’t there, right?
If you’re a “person of interest”, the government is happy to spend the last taxpayer dime to find out what you are up to.
It certainly could be, especially if you’re not doing anything wrong. But if a government pries that much, you’d maybe be painting a target on your back by inventing a new language. You could also use an existing language that is hard to translate and learn, and isn’t well known. Like Ithkuil
Cockney slang exists for this reason.
Toki Pona is a constructed language that can be learned in a day, as well.
Also Esperanto.
There’s millions of examples of this. Everywhere there’s an oppressed minority group, that group eventually develops its own dialect that mutates quickly to make it easier to identify in-group members and to confuse authorities of the majority group.
That isn’t a secure comms strategy though, it’s just something that happens organically. All the oppressing group needs to do is recruit a defector from the oppressed group and they can understand everything.
Cryptography is how you do it. And cryptography exists and is easily accessible, unless you truly believe everything electronic has government spy tech in it, which is the realm of actual paranoia.
If Toki Pona and Esperanto are so easy to learn, what’s stopping the government from learning/translating it too?
Lack of need to do so to track dissidents deemed dangerous to the function of the state
The closest esperanto ever got to revolutionary usage was that some esperantists taught it to others in Gulags and Concentration camps while pretending it was another language to avoid the suspicion of Nazis and Soviets, who both regarded it as subversive because it was a language explicitly designed to be “easy” to learn and to encourage international cooperation
Toki-Pona was invented in the 2000s and achieves it’s low word count by basically just reducing itself to a pre-civilizational language without concepts for most colors and not having a proper numeral system, things that might be necessary for use in inspiring and carrying out an ideologically motivated revolution.
The closest America has to a language usable as a code language used by a dissident underclass is AAVE, which is a dialect of english that’s been trending towards american standard english as time has gone by and is even easier to learn to understand than Toki-Pona or Esperanto if a man in a suit was determined enough to spy on its speakers.
… Incompetence?
But isn’t cockney slang very easily understood due to it’s popularity? Was it at one time difficult to understand for outsiders? I had no idea about this.
This post is incredibly psychotic. But to answer, you don’t need to make a language. Just make a cypher.
This post is incredibly psychotic.
How so?
They could live in China
Two things
@AnarchistsForDemocracy when I was a kid I made up my own cypher. Any alphabet with 1:1 correlation can be easily cracked so I made up a bunch of additional rules and characters that replace common combos, and some contextual vowel changes, non-english words etc.
By the time I was an adult I could write in it fluently. It has also evolved over time.
While I'm sure experts could crack it if they really wanted to, for casual use it really does come in handy.
I admire your achievement! Has anybody ever come close to translating/understanding your language? It’d be interesting to see how long this language could withstand attempts of translation. I wonder if languages could be given a rating based on how many people-hours it takes to achieve this.
@AnarchistsForDemocracy not that I know of. But of course, I don't encourage anyone to try, because if others in my life could read it, it would not be useful to me any more.
I would like to be able to note down my thoughts without having to fear the government can read it.
What’s your opinion on this?
Take your fucking pills
Casting somebody as crazy is an easy way to dismiss them without engaging their ideas. Intellectually lazy.
Just go learn Esperanto. Nobody uses it. You’ll be the only one. Can’t get more secure and private than only.
Is it that far far fetched? Look at America you’ve got cops going through peoples personal shit to see if they’re periods track up with trips interstate for abortions.
cops going through peoples personal shit to see if they’re periods track up with trips interstate for abortions.
Damn that is a new low. Bodily autonomy is being challenged, it’s so dystopian!
I just happen to be a part of a particular discord server that is essentially a fan development group for a long-closed MMORPG. There’s been a fan project to revive it ongoing for many years now (original source code is lost at this point) and there is a playable version of the client, but it’s little more than a glorified chat room with some clothing/animations for your avatar.
Someone just happened to ask about game/chat encryption in the discord server and the response was that there was a form of encryption for chat messages, but more importantly, it was an obscure game that nobody would think to monitor for traffic in the first place.
That got me thinking… there have already been things like the Minecraft Uncensored Library where you can download a map that has banned literature stored on it that would normally be flagged by surveillance states, but since it’s all contained within a file that runs on a game program, it’s impossible to track. The game itself is a form of obfuscation.
Theoretically, one could log on to a game service that has one foot in the grave (or set up a private server, if the service is no longer running) and you would have plausible cover from anyone who would be spying on your traffic (they’d just see you as logged into a game, sending packets back and forth) with the added benefit of encrypted private messages that you find in just about every modern multiplayer game.
I think your idea is good too, but I don’t know enough about linguistics to be able to say how difficult this would be, but I imagine anyone determined enough could figure it out. The last time I remember hearing about a “language” being built from scratch was the Phyrexian language from Magic: The Gathering, which is getting more fleshed out over time as hints and clues about the syntax and phonics are revealed via known/confirmed English translations.
I mean, just use encryption? A language would be security through obscurity at best, anyway.
Write on paper. An attacker would need physical access to read it.
physical access is not that difficult no lock can keep bad people out.
So the question is what you’re trying to hide and how much effort the adversary is willing to put into getting at what you’re hiding.
The more effort and resources an adversary is willing to dedicate to learning what you’re saying and hiding, the harder you’ll have to work to remain unseen.
In a modern surveillance state, you’ll need quantum proof encrypted chat, self hosted servers with intrusion defense protocols scaled to adamantine toughness, and in all likelihood, strong physical security as well, and also strong password policy, I’d recommend a master password document containing only strings of randomly generated characters of twenty four or more characters in length, protected by a master passphrase in the form of a sentence you can easily remember with the spaces replaced with dots dashes, capitalizing the first letter of every word, or some other distinguisher to make it easier to remember.
Even better would be a password vault service that offers the additional benefit of being able to detect a leaked password from a website side data breach, and then inform you and give you the option to change it right there in the application.
IMO to write down your thoughts just for your own usage, you can either encrypt your data if it is legal to do so, or you can write your thoughts on paper. Otherwise, check out this evergreen CrimethInc article about security culture.
I wouldn’t choose Elven Tongue or Klingon or similar fictional languages as a basis for a secret code because the people who code break are probably aware that those languages exist. Additionally, if I were a data scientist trying to sift through your communications trying to find coded text, the first thing I would classify is what languages are present. If Elven Tongue showed up, that is probably what I would look at first.
On that note, if I was trying to hide something, I would probably use a whole-word replacement scheme in a way that makes a whole sentence look normal. Even if the government collects all my data, do they really have the time to manually review all of it? Probably not; they’re probably going to use some kind of machine learning algorithm to search for “problematic” strings in their dataset and then flag whoever said them for further manual surveillance. If you think you are already an active surveillance target, then you might need to go with cyphers.
It’s probably a good idea to learn some code breaking. Lastly, Lemmy is a public social network. I wouldn’t put any plans that you ever intend to execute on this website or any of its instances in any form. It’s just not what it’s designed for. Best of luck.
thanks for your input, I am not planning anything just wondering.
I was thinking of creating a new language more, rather than using Elven Tongue. I only wanted to use it as an example.
In my opinion, cryptography is so advanced now that any language/alphabet you’d create wouldn’t stand up to any real attempts to crack it.
Better to focus on digital encryption and secure communication channels, and other good OSPEC practices.
If they find your coded diary, they are just going to torture you until you reveal how to decipher it if they have even a remote reason to suspect you. Everyone thinks they're a tough guy until they're waterboarded or they have their fingernails or teeth pulled out with a pair of channel locks. Everyone breaks under torture. The idea that someone can last until they're killed is a Hollywood fantasy for action films.
The idea that governments are going to expend valuable resources like learned individuals or AI to crack some individual's code is just Hollywood thinking. If you're a suspect, the government will monitor you. If you do anything to make them up their suspicion, they will bring you in. They aren't going to spend untold amounts of money deciphering every suspect's diaries or writings. They'll just torture it out of you, either physically(fastest) or mentally.
And let's just put this out there - if some desperate person fingered you for being whatever, having anything written in code is as good as being guilty to them. You will not return to your previous life. At best you'll be released and monitored till the government tires of you or it falls. The latter is no guarantee it will end. Just because the government might be replaced doesn't mean that those taking over will view any more favorably. After all, if you were deemed to be a security threat before, what makes you think they won't take that to heart. Once deemed a security threat you will always be a security threat, even to those who you may identify with.
security threat
I am specifically talking about not posing a security or any otherwise threat. I am only talking about free speech/thought/and so forth in line with basically any constitution.
Just because you are innocent doesn’t protect you from punishment
Everyone thinks they’re a tough guy
I’m no tough guy.
However as far as I know torture does not yield results. Torture just leads the victims to tell the perpetrators what they want to hear.
Let’s hope that your government has policies restricting the use of torture.
But if they are engaged in indiscriminate mass surveillance and are a heavily authoritarian police state… they might not care.
You are climbing the Tower of Babel.
It is not helpful for anybody.
I’m not familiar with the metaphor, if it isn’t too much too ask could you explain what the phrase “climbing the tower of babel” means? It is phrase of religious origin?
It is a story from the bible. People from Babel built a super high tower. They wanted to reach heaven with it. The tower failed and came down, and then suddenly everybody was speaking in a different language than everybody else, and so they were in serious trouble.
I figure I’m already on a list because I’m a Statesian, so if I just push that default level of grossness up a touch they’ll stop looking. All the spy cams in the house are pointed at anuses 24/7. And not the good anuses either. Not the ones we serve to guests.
As others have said, encryption is far safer and easier, please consider that path instead if you’re truly in danger of having your ideas read and being punished for it.
However, if you insist, there are tools for what you are seeking. Conlangs (constructed languages) have been used by spies in the CIA and other agencies to converse in plaintext environments in the past. Usually it’s a last ditch effort to communicate in an emergency, but there was that one website that the CIA was using for years before they were finally discovered.
Anyway, there’s sites like this: forgottenlanguages-full.forgottenlanguages.org/?m… It’s weird a fuck, right? Yeah, that site has a lot of conspiracy around it, but the generally accepted thought around that site is it’s a conlang and linguistic hobbyist site. Unfortunately, due to how weird it is, it’s attracted a lot of alien/UFO folk who’ve started shoveling their ideas into the website, so be aware there will be some posts on there that are pretty out there.
Just look up conlang generators and tools, I believe the administrator of that website has emails discussing how they generate a lot of the far out there languages on the site. Think they mention using some python tools, but my memory is rusty.
Good luck. Also, again, please consider using encryption instead.
CherenkovBlue@iusearchlinux.fyi 1 year ago
Any unencrypted language is crackable; if you are simply using an alphabet to obscure English, it will be immediately broken simply due to frequency analysis of the the letters and word lengths. A whole unencrypted language is harder but there will be plenty of context clues to crack it. Encryption is by far the best way to ensure privacy.
AnarchistsForDemocracy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
thanks for your reply. Do you know if there are any ancient languages that (so far) withstood attempts of translation?
CherenkovBlue@iusearchlinux.fyi 1 year ago
Not definitivy. Ancient Egyptian hyroglyphics withstood it for a while but the Rosetta Stone cracked it (also I suspect modern computing would have done so by now anyway). The Voynich Manuscript is uncracked but there is a hypothesis that it gibberish, an uncracked natural language, or a ciphertext (encrypted).
niartenyaw@midwest.social 1 year ago
Not quite what you’re asking for, but during WW2 the US employed Navajo speakers to use their language for certain verbal communications because it was so different from popular languages and hard to decipher. There’s a lot written about them out there. I would also recommend checking out The Code Book by Simon Singh, it’s a great recap of the history of secret codes and breaking them.
solidgrue@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The Voynich Manuscript (Wikipedia, YouTube) has been challenging to decipher. The video covers some of the be axons as to why, as well as discusses some of the analytical methods used to attack such codices.
In short, natural languages tend to leave fingerprints which can be used to attack crypto. It seems a mix of constructed language plus cryptography to obscure it is strongest.
Volkditty@kbin.social 1 year ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undeciphered_writing_systems