Warning

You might be interested to know that your browser is infected with adware/spyware/trojan diallers.  The adware and spyware may be collecting personal information or be responsible for unwanted popups, and announces itself to web sites allowing unscrupulous sites to abuse your browser and your machine.  The trojan diallers cause dial-up users to connect unsuspectingly to premium rate modem numbers.  If you are experiencing excessive or offensive pop-ups or drastic slow-downs in your web browsing this is almost certainly why, and you need to get it removed.  This is a genuine warning and most definitely not a joke.  Nor is it an advert, but you are strongly advised to clean up the problem or get the advice of someone who can.

The 2 infections your browser is announcing are:

  1. Sgrunt|V109|1727|S-396886427|dial (dialler)
  2. snprtz|S04060317362522 (dialler)

Home RSS

Musings of a Madman

Blog Indexes

Article: 20051213

Order of the Crypt

One of my favourite e-comics, as listed on my main home page is Order of the Stick.  Recently there has been a running gag in a series of pages (starting with panel number 247) in which one of the characters has started speaking cryptographically following a traumatic experience.  The joke is that it actually is a genuine cipher, and not just random garbage, and to get the full impact of the humour, it needs to be decrypted.  It's a simple enough substitution cipher, but not everyone is able or can be bothered to crack these things.  For those people I present the substitution table for the first panel below.

Order of the Stick, panel 247
A B C D E F G H I J K L M
m ? u l b i ? y o v p ? t
N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
r ? e h a f c n s g w d k

You will note that there are 4 letters with no substitutions.  Unsurprisingly, the letters not yet represnted (because as yet, they have not yet appeared in the dialogue) are "j", "q", "x", and "z".  Statistically, these are the letters least likely to appear in any (English) text.

Epilogue

It turns out that the cryptogram is different for each panel.  You're on your own for the rest...