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this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
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That feats of cryptography can be done using any material. Or rather I'd expect it to be a common conclusion. When you look at quipu, braille, or morse code, does nobody ever think "I wonder what random randomly assorted things might also be an embodied utterance"? Nobody looks to the colors of flowers or the patterns in sounds, they always wait until the mind seizes upon letters and numbers before they go into expect-a-message mode.
What a precocious child you must have been
Not particularly, I was slower than the average child but who happened to have a unique epiphany like every answerer here. I never understood though how people limit their expectations when it comes to communication. If the word "cryptography" here is what throws anyone off, it's not some advanced field of study, it just refers to the physical manifestation of messaging, which a child can get behind. A child will learn any form of communication you provide, from sign language, to flagging, to anything that exists that can be called "patterned" (involving any usage of any of the human senses), just not "top percentage" cryptographers in our writing-centric culture for some reason.
Just be aware, to everyone else that word does mean the field of study, which is fairly advanced.
All the examples are specifically constructed by humans to carry, but not hide, meaning - Morse, Braille and Quipu "encode" information, but for transmission/accessibility/storage. Cryptography roughly translates to "hiding-writing" and is more or less specifically intended to keep secrets. An encoding is just a different representation of whatever underlying message, assuming one is there. As a result, they can only roughly be interpreted as encryption. Actual encryption means you can know which "format" it's in and still only get the original message if you have the proper key (or whatever).
All of this seems unrelated to seeing "messages" in mundane things. If you look at a flower and think "fuck me, that looks nice" that's great. If you look at it and think "well, the arrangement of these petals is clearly a message for me," then it might be a symptom of things.
I never said anything about "hiding" meaning (versus "carrying" it), but to someone in writing-centric societies, the effect would be the same, due to the presumption that writing is the axis mundi of physical communication. I also wasn't saying cryptography as a field wasn't advanced, just that this isn't the sense of the word I was referring to (any other word seems equally problematic, e.g. "encoding" typically is tech-related).
You may anticipate it as a "symptom" of something (maybe that's why we live in a writing-centric world in the first place), but you'd be surprised where it turns up so as long as someone intends it to. Someone discovered the objects on and around the table in the last supper painting functioned as musical notes for example. Would you call that "hiding meaning" or "carrying meaning"?
No it doesn't. Cryptography is specifically encoding messages in a way that is hard for someone without the specific secret key to decode, even if they know the methodology.
So much for a non-native English speaker wanting to have some verbal legroom on Lemmy.
You provided a definition that doesn't even loosely resemble the correct one.
There's no need to use words you don't understand, especially when they're wildly unrelated to whatever you're saying. They just add confusion.
You say that like it's that big a leap. In any case, sorry I wasn't 100% linguistically perfect, even post-elaboration. Half of people say I should be concise, the other half says I should elaborate more, so I figured someone would sound unpleased.
Because it's a giant one.
There is no valid interpretation of cryptography that resembles the way you defined it in any way.
Is that based on what you see when you look it up?
cryp·tog·ra·phy
noun
the art of writing or solving codes.
That's a terrible definition, but "codes" is doing the heavy lifting.
It is not a code, in that definition, if it does not require knowledge of a key to decode.
It is literally impossible for anything that doesn't have a secret key to qualify as cryptography. That is the entire defining trait.
no. replacement cyphers are cryptography, too.
The "key" is the mapping of cipher alphabet to message alphabet.
There has to be a secret to be cryptography. The meaning has to be hidden without the secret information (though primitive/weak attempts can have a small enough search space to be brute forced). But the content being hidden without that information is the entirety of what the word means.
How so?
And what do you think I've been talking about this whole time if not forms of substitution?
So UI and design
No, nothing directly to do with technology. Just regular physical representation of otherwise unwritten ideas.
Those concepts aren't exclusive to computers. Why do you think red triangles are used in road signs, or handles are only on one side of doors that open in one direction?
I'm confused then. People do think of technology sometimes when they think of cryptography, but where does that and things like road signs and door labels fall together aside from being a part of communication? Unless I misunderstand you, the characters on an ordinary sign are typically fully ordinary English.