Just as I wrote about the outage of the British Library's online services the other day, another important source, Internet Archive, went down about 10 October because of a DDoS attack. It's a sad realization that online services we take for grated may be attacked anytime and the attackers may have success sometimes.
Thankfully, it seems Internet Archive (at least archive.org that I need) appears to be working now.
Thus, I could access Wits Interpreter (1, 2), attributed to John Cotgrave (Wikipedia), which I learned printed Richelieu's cipher the other day. (Somehow, at that time, before the attack on Internet Archive, my search could not find this on Internet Archive.)
The cipher attributed to Richelieu (p.491) is a Porta-like pairing-based cipher. But the other ciphers following this all seem to be taken from Porta's book. So, a more reliable source is needed to confirm Richelieu really used this cipher. (After writing this, I noticed the section on Richelieu in "French Ciphers during the Reign of Louis XIII" already mentions Wits Interpreter from a secondary source.)
No comments:
Post a Comment