This Will ROT13 Your Brain

ROT13 is an encryption cipher belonging to a class called Caesar Ciphers in which each letter in the source message is exchanged with the letter X number of letters away in the alphabet. It has become a technical shorthand for using the Caesar Cipher with a distance of 13. For instance:

source: “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!”
ROT13: “N zna, n cyna, n pnany: Cnanzn!”

source: “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.”
ROT13: “Gur dhvpx oebja sbk whzcrq bire gur ynml qbtf.”

ROT13 came into moderate use during the height of Usenet as a way to obscure profanity, dirty talk, movie spoilers, open secrets, anything the message poster wants to say with a cupped mouth out of kindness to the other readers. Due to its popularity, some Usenet client software had ROT13 capabilities built-in as a convenience to the user. It is easily breakable, as are all of the Caesar ciphers, because the letter frequencies in the message are maintained, e.g. since “E” is the most common letter used in English writing, then any Caesar ciphertext that has “H” as the most common letter likely has a distance of 3, and the message can be decrypted. The capitalization, punctuation, and numbers are unencrypted.

A few months ago, I went to Slashdot to check the day’s tech news. They have a fortune cookie at the bottom of their page that changes daily. It’s usually some sharp quip or a random joke. This one day, it was a long, long string of garbage text that went on for pages. I saved the text for analysis later, and looked at it this morning. Here is a sample of the text:
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Some Thoughts to Occupy Your Mind

  1. The Internet is the worst place to go if you have something to say.
  2. Activity is not motion, but motion is an activity.
  3. Don’t bring signs to a battle of words. They are inflexible and can be used against you.
  4. If you’re fighting on two fronts, you’ll have to watch your own back.
  5. Keep off the grass, especially when requested. When asked twice, doubly so.
  6. Just because you’re seated does not mean you are immobile.
  7. Educate yourself about the enemy, but resist the urge to use that knowledge to become the enemy once he is vanquished.

Roundup Kills Weed

I’ve been thinking. If the federal government were to ever legalize marijuana, that would open the market for legal farming. It would be another cash crop farmers could consider to sustain their livelihood. Moral and legal entanglements aside, there’s a major caveat to this.

Once it’s legal and proven profitable on the market, and once boards of directors can convince their shareholders that it’s a good crop to get into, Monsanto, Cargill, and ADM will effectively take over and sue into contractual submission any farmer who doesn’t grow their patented genetically-modified seeds, just as they currently do with soy, corn, cotton, and wheat. Any independent farmer running a grow-op with heritage seeds will have a planeload of relentless, deeply-pocketed lawyers at their door to coerce them into destroying their crops because the company’s GMO seeds are somehow mysteriously growing on their land without permission.

It’s inevitable. You know this to be true. Where there is money to be made, there will be multinationals there to consume it, no matter who suffers.

Next you know, the nation is smoking Roundup-Ready weed stock, but everybody will be too stoned to care.

Occupied

People are talking about this Occupy Wall Street thing. How it’s the first true grass-roots, decentralized, Internet-based movement of the people. Is it? I don’t know. It’s too big to see all the component parts and to locate the strings being pulled. Follow the money, I say.

Thing is, not even people who are in the movement know what the movement stands for. There’s been no central voice, no unifying rally cry other than to bring down the greed and redistribute the big money to everybody. Sure, that sounds great. The 1% at the top are taking and conniving and twisting their ways into higher profits. Bigger is better, right? Isn’t that the American way?

I don’t know how I feel about this whole thing. On the one idealist hand, I’d like to see a little more equality between the classes and a redistribution of power, and maybe even some accountability for those at the top. But my realist hand reminds me that I work for a Fortune 500 company whose profits are affected greatly by the rumblings on the market. What is a corporation? It’s a body of people in the business of making money, feeding their own greed to accumulate more than they need for survival. Without greed, there’s little impetus to exceed our horizons.

Things in this country suck; I’ll admit that. It’s tough to make a living without making serious sacrifices on quality of life. But imagine how bad it would be if Occupy Wall Street actually manages to bring down the top 1%.