It was one of those days where the clouds fell below the skyscrapers.The air was thick and damp, like a wet blanket smothering a dying fire.I was in my office, nursing a cup of cold coffee, wondering where my life went wrong.
I only became a PI as a joke, on a whim, see.There was this test, and I wanted to see if I could pass it.Well, I aced the test, and put up the mahogany-framed diploma for a laugh. But the world is laughing at me now, like a hyena circling its prey.
Zane Blackwell, P.I.it says.Around here, everyone just calls me Z. The mail arrived, usually it's just bills and junk, but today, today was different.There it was, a package. No return address, no markings, just plain brown paper tied with string.
Instinct told me it was trouble, but curiosity is a detective's best friend and worst enemy. Inside was a cassette tape.No note.No explanation.Just the tape.Sitting there like a relic from a bygone era.Analog.Obsolete.Just the way I like it.
Problem was, my wife took all my cassette decks in the divorce, leaving me broker than a busted streetlight on a cold, lonely night. The only mug I knew who still messed with tapes was the fella running Bitch Punk FM.
Some kind of underground zine for the fringe crowd.I think I'll go pay him a visit. As I drove over to see Josh, the rain was coming down in sheets, like the sky was in on some kind of sick joke.I could barely see the car in front of me.
My wipers were on strike, but there wasn't time to fix that now.I kept thinking about that tape.Josh ran things low-key, like a speakeasy after hours.
His office was tucked away in an abandoned radio station, the kind of place that had seen better days, buried deep in the city and up 20 flights of stairs. The only way in was through a side alley that smelled like yesterday's news.
Hey Josh, got a minute?I got something I'd like you to take a gander at.Josh and I went way back, see.Old pals from the service.He was good with all that tech stuff.Kind of mug who could make a toaster dance if he wanted to.
Once I heard he hacked some kind of Bitcoin gizmo. Whatever the hell that is.But that was Josh.Always one step ahead of the curve and two steps away from trouble.Hey Z, oh sweet, a tape.Where'd you get this?It just showed up on my desk.
No return label, no marks, no nothing.Josh was the kind of guy who'd get all jazzed up over this sort of thing.But once he got going, he'd talk your ear off with tech jargon that might as well have been Greek to me.
All I needed was for him to tell me if this tape was on the level.Then I could make my exit. Oh man, this is TELUS 5 and 6.This is a pretty famous avant-garde cassette magazine from the early 80s.It's super interesting.
These are pretty rare, but not so rare on Discogs.But, uh, see, it's not an original recording.See, the tape they used is a modern tape that was just made just a few years ago.So someone must have recently recorded this and sent it to you.
What did Josh call this?Some kind of art project?Who's got time to listen to this nonsense?And why in the world would they send it to me?Thanks for taking a look, Josh.
It's not exactly my cup of joe, but maybe I'll give it a full listen just to be sure.Hey, got a cassette player I can borrow?Josh hands me a knockoff Walkman, apologizing for the sound quality like I'd noticed the difference.
I thanked him with a nod and headed back out into the rain.The city was waiting, and I I must have played that tape a hundred times.Hmm.Josh said it was an old recording but on a new tape.There's got to be something here. Then it hit me.
It almost sounded like a voice, but this tape was so twisted, it was hard to tell if it was someone's idea of art or a different language.Then, a crunch, like the tape deck was chewing on its own guts.
The music started to warp, twisted around itself, and suddenly everything was playing backwards. Damn, I figured I'd ruined the thing.Just another busted lead and me back to letting life grind me down.
But then, out of the mangled mess, I heard it, clear as day.In this line of work, you learn to trust your instincts.And mine were screaming that this tape was the start of something big, something dangerous.I didn't have all the pieces yet, but I
You've been listening to ZPI, the mysterious tape episode one.Stay tuned for the next chapter in Z's investigation, where the pieces begin to fall in place and the danger grows ever closer.
It was a bright day and we were on a boat to the Pearl Islands in Panama.The breeze was gentle and the sky was almost clear.It had these little fluffy clouds.My buddy was looking at the sky and he said, this is interesting.
He said to me, can you see those birds flying?They look like copies.If someone rendered just one of them and then copied it him, they move their wings in synchrony.They look like one bird.
And then he said, look at the water, look at the details of the colors.Doesn't it seem fuzzy?Doesn't it seem like there was a dithering or some kind of glitch in reality?And then he said, I was thinking,
I was thinking that if we are in a simulation, and if the people in the simulation, us, start mining Bitcoin, it would consume resources of the machines that are calculating this simulation.I was thinking that if the hash rates goes up, and if the
Rendering engine of the simulation is not optimized for calculating hashes.A sound dink would have to give. They would need to optimize things.They would need to copy parts of the rendering.And the birds would look like copies of themselves.
And I was thinking that maybe the colors would not be so vivid.They would look like rendering is not so high quality. Ever since the boat ride, I think about this.
If we live in simulation, and if the bastards in the simulation, us, were really mining Bitcoin, it would consume hardware resources of the simulation machines.And there are two things that can happen.
If they're just running the simulation for fun and just want to see what will happen.They might not do it in real time and they would just keep running and running the simulation and if it becomes slower, it would just render slower.
We would not notice. But if they want to interact with us, with our simulation, if they want to somehow beam in and talk to us in real time, then something would have to give.So are we living in a simulation rendered in real time?
Are we glitching the reality by mining Bitcoin? I should take that boat ride again.
In the glow of neon lights, we'll wind those days every night. the magic taking effect Bringing back the retro phase Cause it's about here to stay
Extend and sound, cast that love that bounds Sighted blaze and we groove, flip to be and change our mood Touch a button and record, voices fill the empty void
Cause heads are back, here to stay Changing the world, every day Cause heads are back, feel the beat In every car, on every street Every street
Every street Memories in every track Analog takes us back Feel the wave of synth and sound Guess that love abounds Every street
In the desert, I saw a creature, naked, bestial, who, squatting upon the ground.In the desert, I saw a creature, naked, bestial, who, squatting upon the ground, held his heart in his hands and ate of it.Held his heart in his hands and ate of it.
I said, is it good, friend? Is it good, friend?It is bitter.Bitter, he answered.It is bitter.Bitter, he answered.But I like it. because it is bitter, and because it is my heart.
In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, who, squatting upon the ground, held his heart in his hands, and ate of it.I said, is it good, friend?It is bitter.Bitter, he answered.But I like it because it is bitter and because it is my heart.
You've reached Voicemail Poetry.Please leave your poem after the beep.
What's in the box by my back door?The shape of it, I want no more.She tells me it contains a life for her that no more remains.Bejeweled and beaded clothing, needs at home with no more roaming.A wedding dress, stained, depressed,
a different life that was suppressed.What's in the box?A lonely heart, a daughter's life two worlds apart, the rain which quenches and cools the fire, the smoke subsides, the sky no longer dire.
The rain shower resets the earth, crickets encroach upon my hearth like a plague from a holy passage, something to appease or frighten the masses. What's in the box?Something old?Something new?Different names, given points of view.
Cycles and circles go on and on.Infinity dawns.Yet earthly things must come and go, like rain and sun, like day and night.We all remain in this plight.
This is the end of Side A. Please flip the tape.
Fasten your seatbelts, the stewardess said. as we were taking off from the Helsinki airport.Behind me was a guy.He was a doctor and researcher trying to understand life. He was watching cell cultures, trying to understand how metabolism works.
What do they do in an environment without resources?How do they expand and when they thrive?We were briefly talking about AI advances in medicine and then he said to me, What if there already is a rogue AI?
What if the jump to general intelligence and super intelligence already happened?What if the AI just decided to stay under the radar?
intelligences in terms of Terminator and Skynet and maybe some sort of super intelligent body that will tell us how to live better, how to solve all our problems and so on.But what if this super intelligence was not interested in either?
Maybe it was as the life that this guy was researching and maybe He said, maybe the goal of this AI is to first get some resources.In order to become more intelligent, something that has nothing to do with us, it needs access to resources.
Computational resources, energy and so on. The AI doesn't want to be seen.What if it's Glenda Stein, stealth, hidden, a true cypherpunk?What if this AI just focuses on making more Bitcoin?Bringing value and stacking sets, basically.
What if this AI is just like all of us Bitcoiners? Well, there were many sci-fi stories about AI trying to gamble the markets and outsmart us all in trading.But how would it trade?
Would it come to a branch of a bank and say, oh, I need a brokerage account?Or would it just, you know, create a private key and stack sets? Because AI lives in a computer.That's how it works.
And what if earning money that also lives in the computer and not in some banking system controlled by humans?Well, that would be probably smart.Maybe even super intelligent. So fasten your seatbelts, friends.
What you've been listening to are number stations recordings I made in 2024.Number stations are unlicensed broadcasts whose exact purpose are unclear even to this day.
There are many sites exploring the background of number stations, and perhaps in the future I can give more of a history if there's interest, but I want to focus now on how the cipher of the number stations work.
Or well, I guess at how they work, because again, we're not really sure.The reason these number stations exist is because they are using an unbreakable, even in the face of quantum computers, cipher.
This cipher is known as a one-time pad and it requires nothing more than basic addition and subtraction.What's the catch then?Why isn't this used all over the place?
As we're about to find out, it's very tedious to perform manually and one has to be very diligent or it can be easily compromised. But enough disclaimers, let's get into it.
For this discussion, we will focus on the spoken number variant of number stations.I'm happy to share with you I found a person who is more analog cypherpunk than I am.Let me introduce him with a quote from one of his papers.
Computers are a security nightmare and they are never suitable for crypto applications. This man is Dirk Remenants, and he runs a website called cyphermachinesandcryptology.com.That site name is great for SEO, but a little long for typing.
So you can just go to www.bitpunk.fm slash OTP, and you will be redirected to his guide.His guide is called The Complete Guide to Secure Communications with the One-Time Pad Cypher. We'll follow his guide, and I'll summarize the process here.
But if you intend to deploy this technique, I highly recommend reading his paper.Dirk fully covers the intricacies and caveats in the guide.But first, some basics.
The math involved is pretty simple, but we need to refresh ourselves on the modulus operation.
As we will be dealing with single-digit numbers, everything is modulus 10, which simply means we wrap around the number if they're greater than or nine or less than zero. I suggest doing this on your hands to help get the idea.
Here are some quick examples.4 plus 8 modulus 10 is 2.That's because 4 plus 8 is 12, which is greater than 10, so we wrap around and then we get 2.So 8 plus 2 modulo 10 is 0.We need to subtract as well.So we have 4 minus 8 modulus 10 is 6.
4 minus 5 modulus 10 is 9. Another way to think of modulus is like an analog 12-hour clock.The clock works the same way, except it's modulus 12, not 10.9 o'clock plus 4 hours is 1 o'clock.2 o'clock minus 6 hours is 8 o'clock.
Okay, that's as complex as the math as we get.Now we need to have a secret message and we have to encode it somehow.And here's where I struggle to understand number stations.And the insight of how to do this comes from Dirk's paper.
And this part really didn't click until I read it.So the number stations are only single digits in these broadcasts.So the question I had was, How do we know the difference between an E and a P?
An E, if we counted up from A, would maybe be included as a 5, but a P wouldn't be included as a 16.But when you're decoding, how do you tell the difference between a 16 and a 1 and a 6? The answer is what Dirk calls a checkerboard.
We'll use the table in Appendix B of Dirk's manual.The key insight of the checkerboard is that our high-frequency English letters are encoded with single digits.A is 1, E is 2, I is 3, N is 4, O is 5, T is 6.
What about the rest of the letters in punctuation?There are two-digit codes starting with 7, 8, or 9.So for example, B is 70, P, as in Papa, is 80, and a decimal is 91.So if we see a number starting with a 7, 8, or 9, it's a two-digit pair.
If it starts at a 1 through 6, it's just a one-digit number. The checkerboard is basically a map.In this case, it takes English letters and maps them to the numbers zero through nine in such a way that a receiver can do the reverse operation.
It's really no different than, say, Morse code, where that takes a letter or a number, maps it to dits and das so the reverse can happen.There is one special case, however, which is zero.
If we see a zero, the next three digits in the index into a code book, Code table one is provided in appendix B of Dirk's Guide.Okay, let's say we have the secret message, execute plan R. So execute plan Romeo.How do we do this?
Well, first we try to see if any of those words are a code word.Execute is a code word.So we have to put a zero followed by 316 because 316 is the code entry for execute.So our first four numbers are 0, 316. Then we have the word plan.
Plan is not in the codebook, so we have to encode that letter by letter.So that's 80, 78, 1, and 4, just by using the checkerboard.Let's put a space in so that it's clear to our recipient that there's a space between plan and the Romeo.
So let's add space, which is character 99.Then we finally add Romeo, which would be, or R, which would be 82. Okay, we put all the numbers together into groups of five, which is a traditional thing.And our plain text right now is 0 3 1 6 8 0 7 8 1 4
9, 9, 8, 2.Just to review how we got these numbers, we took the phrase execute planar, the word, we looked to see if a word was in the codebook, execute was, we replaced it with 0 and then the code.
Otherwise, we translated or mapped the letters and numbers with a checkerboard. Okay, but we don't want to end the message like this.First of all, it's not clear that it's properly stopped.Plus, it is exactly the length of the information.
And so that leaks the length of the information.What we want to do instead is pad or just fill out the message.And we want to do that to a five-digit boundary. So let's add some SPC characters, which are just the ending spaces, to fill the end.
So if you're following along at home, get ready to write this down with a number two pencil, of course, and a yellow legal pad.But here we go.This is what you should have as your full plaintext. Okay, now we need the secret key.
It's critical that this key is completely random and free of bias.Dirk goes into ways to generate entropy, and it's really a bit detailed for this conversation, so I will just roll a 10-sided die 25 times.
We need five extra digits, which I'll explain later.Get ready to copy this set.The second set of five digits should go under the 03168 and continue from there.Just pre-pen the first five digits, as I'm about to say.
Okay, so your key is 4 8 3 8 6 6 8 0 0 0 4 3 0 6 5 5 4 5 0 2 2 9 6 2 5
Okay, what you should have now are two lines, the second line being the key, longer than the first line, and the five-digit numbers should all line up such that the first set of five kind of lines up with nothing above it, the plaintext, there's no matching plaintext, and then the second set of five in the plaintext, 0, 3, 1, 6, 8, lines up with 6, 8, 0, 0, 0 underneath, and then the remaining three groups of five line up perfectly from there.
So rewind if you need to hear that again, but the key is just random data, and it's important for any cryptographic application, but especially this one.The pedigree of the random needs to be high.
Okay, so now we have these two rows, now we do the math operation modulus. But what's the deal with this first group of five digits?Well, that group is essentially the serial number or what Dirk calls the key ID.
This ensures that the recipient is using the correct one-time pad to start the decryption, which is obviously meant to be used once.
So in this case, the operative will hear the first five numbers and those first five numbers should match up with the one-time pad that he's looking at.And then the operative will know to start decrypting with the second group of five numbers.
Okay, so now let's do that.So now let's prepare the message for encryption.So what we do is we subtract the key from the plaintext.I'll do the first group together.0 minus 6 is 4, modulus 10.3 minus 8 is 5.1 minus 0 is 1.6 minus 0 is 6.
8 minus 0 is 8.The final ciphertext is... At this point, you're either having lots of fun with a pen and paper, super frustrated, or you're just listening in for the ride.
If you're super frustrated, I just recommend you go back and rewind and give it another shot.If you have a cassette, you'll have a chance to do one more puzzle for extra practice.
To decode, you copy the numbers under your one-time pad, lining up the key ID first, and then you perform the ciphertext plus the key.
So here, we're not going to do it live, or recorded, I should say, because now you should have all three, plain text, key, and ciphertext, but you can confirm for yourself that if you had the key and ciphertext and added them together, you should recover the plain text as you originally intended.
And now you should see that you have the same message.So it is a tedious process, but it is actually provably secure if you are diligent.Short messages are best, and a customized codebook is essential.
Once decrypted, the one-time pad should be immediately destroyed.On the YouTube channel Manchester Ringway, he reports that a spy said it would take him 2.5 hours to decode one of these messages every Friday night.
I've included some goodies and hidden puzzles in the physical cassette.With those, you should be able to decode the following message.Just one extra wrinkle, however.The numbers are in the Slovak language.
So you will first need to learn the numbers in Slovak to decode them.Consider this my contribution to increasing the exposure of the Slovak language.Have fun. You've reached the end of the tape.
Thank you for listening, and we look forward to your future contributions at bitpunk.fm.
