Friday 2 December 2011

Code Cracking...

Here we go. Starting at the Guardian's post, this is my pathetic attempt to crack the code created by GCHQ to attract high quality candidates for jobs in the security services.


Well to me that looks like hex code (base 16) from what I remember about computer tech courses way back. Our normal counting system is base 10 (0 units of '1' and 1 unit of '10' make the number 10) and binary is base 2.

No, I don't think they'll give me a job yet.

So, the first pair of characters above is eb. In hex, that gives me (14 x 16 ttp1) + (11 x 16 ttp0) where ttp = "to the power of", such are the limitations of blogger.

Any number ttp0 =1, so that gives us (14x16)+11 = 235.

No, I still don't think they'll give me a job.

I could go through the whole screen of hex and convert each character pair to its equivalent number. Then what? Presumably the base 10 numbers themselves are a code?

Just as well I never wanted a job in MI5. I'll stick to re-runs of Spooks on tv instead!

Oh, and feel free to correct my calculations if I'm wrong, which wouldn't surprise me in the least. It's a long, long time since I used to reconstruct deleted computer files by pulling bits of hex code together!

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