Ha ha ha. Yes, that was literally my very short pitch to Steven about Tim Jenkin's story!
The actual DM: "I think this has the makings of a hell of a story: https://blog.jgc.org/2024/09/cracking-old-zip-file-to-help-o... If you want I can connect you with Tim Jenkin. One time pads! 8-bit computers! Flights attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!"
https://github.com/Vulacode/Articles/blob/main/Talking%20To%...
I also ended up sponsoring the bkcrack project because the maintainer added a new option for me: https://github.com/kimci86/bkcrack/pull/126
What an amazing story!
My understanding is Mandela was a respected leader who was willing to play ball and facilitate a peaceful transition where the white leadership got to keep all their property. That's why there's still massive economic inequality in SA today. Not to say Mandela wasn't admirable or that he didn't suffer, but it was a conscious choice to avoid outright military conflict at the cost of preserving an implicit racial hierarchy.
You're quoted at the end as saying, "The code itself is a historical document". That sort of electrified me as I began thinking about what other historical code is out there in need of preservation. I'm fascinated with stuff like this, toolkits meant to be used in the field with little room for incremental development. Tracking this kind of stuff down seems like a fun hobby.
Take North Korea, say, another extremely nasty rogue nuclear-armed state. Even if there was a level of pressure that the international community could put on North Korea that would collapse it (it's already pretty far down the 'autarky' route), you can see that countries would be unwilling to go quite _that_ far, because there's no viable opposition and it would likely collapse in a very dangerous and ugly way.
bkcrack.exe -k 98e0f009 48a0b11a c70f8499 -r 1..18 ?p bkcrack 1.7.0 - 2024-05-26 [11:07:33] Recovering password length 0-6... length 7... length 8... length 9... length 10... length 11... length 12... length 13...
We could have had a very different history if they'd used DES or RC2 for encryption!
To me, the peaceful transition is the achievement. It is the amazing part of it.
Though to be fair none of these had happened prior to apartheid.
So much of symmetric key cryptography is just trying to find creative ways of creating and recreating 'one time pads' so we can distribute the key material instead of the pads themselves.
Similar connotation to "decrypt" which would be exhumation.
The one thing that stood out to me with the original blog post and a quick glance at the code was that it appeared as if the pad was certainly not actually random.
Could anyone that has actually understood it a bit more confirm or reject this?
Edit: It seems that the random generation can be found starting here https://github.com/Vulacode/RANDOM/blob/d6a1a1d694b22e6a115b... With three methods, one (RAND2) seems to use the basic interpreter rng more or less directly and the other two seem to be fairly simple prngs seeded from the basic interpreter's rng.
I don't actually know what the state of basic interpreter rngs was in the early '80s but I would be fairly surprised if they're anything that is secure.
Also the fact that so many in the US claim they remember he died in prison should say something about the media landscape.
From the European perspective I recall the concerts that were held to free him and then also the concert that was held after he was free. Simple Minds even made a famous song for it [1]. I don't know if those concets were a big show in the US, we only had a few TV stations and this was always a big thing.
They have been effective for millenia, even before democracy. The only thing ineffective now is people saying so. With all the evidence in the world that protest works, people bizarrely disarm themselves.
The targets of the protests take great pains to convince you of it; that should tell you something. They'll bluff until they lose.
It has been ineffective. We've seen peaceful protestors smeared, and beaten and harassed by the police. We've seen counter terror laws abused to smear and arrest leaders. We've seen clampdowns on what protests are allowed to go ahead, and at least on the UK they are pushing and pushing for "tougher" laws to crush protests.
But since you insist, nobody is just 'making it so by saying it' - indeed, saying it's not happening, in spite of the abundance of evidence, does not mean it's not!
I've Norwegian friends who have seen it first hand and we're aghast, but of course that's just a personal anecdote that just happens to agree with the ICJ, Human Rights Watch, and even Israel's own B’Tselem[0].
And no - I absolutely will not try to see "both sides" of apartheid. That's a really heinous thing to say.
[0] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/07/19/world-court-finds-israel...
https://www.londonrecruits.org.uk/index.php/items-received-s...
about the “London Recruits” in the 70s and 80s who smuggled books, leaflets, etc into apartheid SA on behalf of the ANC, doing so in such secrecy they didn’t know each others identity until 29 years after the apartheid regime fell.
Joy Leman, one of the recruits, was my late father-in-law’s colleague.
Protest movements are only effective when they present a viable alternative to a more radical movement with a will to violence at their flank. We saw this clearly in the indian independence & american civil rights movements, and the fall of apartheid. Iraq war and climate movement are what you get without the credible threat of violence behind or beside your peaceful protests.
One important lesson of the iraq war protests now that we can see with hindsight: we were right, and we were justified in using much more radical tactics than we actually did. Those horrors lay partially at our coward feet so let's not allow ourselves to be convinced to repeat it with palestine.
It's only ineffective if your measure is immediate, complete victory. You don't win everything, you face defeat, and you quit? Then I agree, your protest is useless. You think you are somehow entitled to results? Yes, your protest is worthless, a pantomime. Protest isn't a ritual you perform - a raindance that you do - and then the gods respond with whatever it is you asked for. Protest compels results - it's embracing that you are the agent, you are the power, you make it happen; the enemy will give you nothing. If you don't understand that, if you aren't planning for it, if you have no strategy that will compel victory, then you're just entitled. (I think the latter is the problem with most of the protests now - they're doing raindances.)
And you go around telling people how hopeless it is? Have you ever accomplished anything? Has anyone who has ever said those things? People saying those things are the first problem - if they were on my team, I'd tell them to never say that again or simply don't come back.
Regardless, the protests have altered behavior, including by European leaders and by the most powerful person in the world (POTUS) and a candidate for that office (Harris). They may cost Harris the election by denying her enough votes in Michigan. And though nobody can say for sure, they arguably have altered the Israeli government's behavior, though the protestors will certainly and understandably say, not nearly enough.
Finally, to evaluate protest, compare it to the alternative: silence. Imagine horrors went on and society responded with silence. Imagine how demoralizing that would be to the ordinary person, who does have a moral conscience. Imagine how crushing to public morality if nobody said anything. Protestors are essential.
[0] There was some research, I think from 10-20 years ago, that showed that it succeeds at a high rate. But I don't recall what kind of protest, etc., so I hope someone else knows about it.
You are your opponents' dream. They couldn't write a better script for you - quitting and self-defeating, at the same time!
If people are going to quit, then quit! Stop coming to the meeting and talking about you've quit!
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/nelson-mandelas-support-f...
While Euro countries tend to be a tiny bit better than the US on the issues, they are generally much more restrictive in terms of protected speech.
I mean bombing government buildings (which is what landed Mandela in prison) is definitely what most people would consider terrorism, or treason, or similar things. Now you can argue that Mandela's actions were justified because Apartheid was evil (and I agree that it was evil) but that's entirely different than arguing that he was just a poor victim of the racist SA government who was imprisoned because he wanted to end Apartheid.
The problem is that people feel morally uncomfortable arguing that it's ok to bomb government buildings (and similar actions) when your cause is just, because that raises all sorts of other moral quandaries that most people don't want to (or refuse to) face. So they pretend like Mandela and his party were perfect angels practicing non-violent resistance like MLK so they can avoid the moral quandaries raised by suggesting that terrorism is ok for a just cause.
Why do you think it should be illegal to make documentaries critical of Hillary Clinton?
South Africa also has affirmative action.
In fact, there are more race based laws in South Africa currently than during Apartheid.
https://freemarketfoundation.com/race-law-in-south-africa-30...
Now maybe you're talking about violent wealth redistribution. That generally doesn't work. It results in collapse and everyone gets poorer.
Zimbabwe bring the prime most recent example.
The whole world sees who the barbarians are. You keep believing in fairy tales in your echo chamber.
[1] British doctor: „IDF deliberately shoots 5-12 year old children in the head“ https://youtu.be/0jlT-NRx-u4
[2] Footage of Israeli soldiers gang-raping a Palestinian hostage at Sde Teiman published by Israel's Ch12 https://x.com/EsheruKwaku/status/1821043507152195751
The story reads like _The Cuckoo's Egg_ in a way. Spies, intrigue, covert comms, action, revolution!
I loved that the code is still around, and works.
Kudos!!
> To me, the peaceful transition is the achievement. It is the amazing part of it.
Apartheid was "peaceful" enough. The problem is the lack of "transition." The same people are still living in the shacks their parents lived in.
> that's why non-South Africans look on Mandela so fondly.
Non-South Africans had a lot of cognitive dissonance because they did business with South Africa and they didn't like what that said about themselves morally. The end of Apartheid gave them the license to continue that business guilt-free. It's like how sharecropping debt peonage to the same plantations that people were enslaved in and the leasing of convicts who had been sentenced to decade-long sentences for the crime of vagrancy let Americans feel better about how much they benefited from slavery.
Showing restraint with atomic weapons is hardly a pass for lesser violence
We still have no meaningful movement on climate change, an antidemocratic political system, no social safety net, Palestine, etc.
Can you give any examples?
There wasn't any international pressure. There was a withdrawal of the continual and embarrassing support from Britain and the US, the only people other than Israel who hadn't been overly troubled by Apartheid. First from Britain, because as bad as she was, Thatcher was nauseated by Apartheid, then from the US who would have had to actively intervene (as they are right now in a similar context) in order to preserve Apartheid. This was only 25 years after the US had ended its own legal Apartheid.
The US political class was largely indifferent to Apartheid (aside from periodic expressions of mild disapproval of both sides and condemnation of Communist-backed terrorism), so when they saw how the wind was blowing within SA ("fear of a civil war"), and that individual domestic politicians could be damaged or gain politically through their actions towards SA, the US supported the "coup" (as always) so they could keep doing business without interruption.
So I'd instead say popular pressure among citizens of the US and Britain against their own politicians, and the resulting withdrawal of Anglo-American support. Everything else but "international pressure" I agree with totally.
First, there was significant pressure on de Klerk from Western governments. Thatcher told him to release Mandela, for example. The reason she did not support sanctions is because they would likely harm South Africans for no reason...this was justified by later events. As pressure on de Klerk would have made it a lot harder to negotiate with Mandela freely.
Two, de Klerk became leader and his first action was to try to form a path to reconciliation. Mandela played his part by abandoning terrorism (I am not sure why this is disputed...this is what Mandela said about himself). de Klerk's position was, however, not particularly easy because whilst everyone acknowledged that the system had to change, it wasn't clear how to get to that point.
Three, the article implies all white South Africans were racist...this is not true. This assumption is not why apartheid happened either. de Klerk was not Botha. The US experience dominates the world, the assumption that everyone in the NP was racist is not accurate...let alone saying everyone of a certain race must have been racist.
Four, there has been massive upheaval. The economy of South Africa has collapsed, and the ANC did seize property under the auspices of BEE. Large companies were told they had to hand shares to ANC members or they would be shut down, these companies then took out loans to buy back their shares. The current President was a friend of Mandela, union leader, he was then gifted hundreds of millions in shares...that is how he became wealthy (and, if you can believe it, he is the "anti-corruption" guy).
Five, the reason there wasn't bloodshed because there was a transitional period. This was agreed by both parties, this is why Mandela wins plaudits for recognizing that NP had legitimate concerns that had to be taken into account to move forward. But...this still hasn't stopped the country collapsing.
Six, the argument that there must still be racism because of economic inequality is a uniquely US take. The ANC expropriated wealth en masse, the majority went to party insiders, and there has been almost no interest in serious economic policy-making because...the country is majority black, and the ANC are the black party. The reason people are poor is because there is no education and so they have no skills, crime is also out of control...this doesn't have anything to do with someone else not being poor (and btw, almost everyone in South Africa is now poor, the currency has collapsed, everything has collapsed, there is so much corruption that electricity cuts frequently...yes, those white people again though...this is why Malema is popular).
Seven, it was reasonable for de Klerk to be wary. What happened to Rhodesia? Everyone has this idea that everything would be fine, just trust Mandela...okay, there is a country next door where you saw whites being slaughtered en masse when Zanu-PF took power. The country has still been ruined, but that didn't happen at least.
If you say that you are going to take large amounts of other people's assets, there is no way to run that process and not have huge amounts of corruption.
The problem has been: very high crime, heavily mismanaged infrastructure (Eskom is collapsing due to corruption, ANC politicians were taking tons of money from contracts), no investment in education, and so a population with no skills. I am not sure what wealth redistribution fixes...it has been tried repeatedly. It is like people thinking that a $1m loan from your father turns you into a different person...no, most people will end up wasting that money too.
I think it was the ANC and its activists organizing the coalition of other countries to sanction and isolate the government that ultimately caused it to yield power, which is the necessary condition for any revolution- it requires allies to be in place to support it for when it succeeds. On the ground, you only really need a few dozen people to seize some buildings and bank accounts, it's coordinating the external trade links to keep everyone paid and in their jobs while the top of the regime changes to new hands that's difficult. The opsec for that ground force just has to get most of them to their X day, where they're going to take casulties anyway.
In the case of SA, it seemed like a matter of convincing other countries to do nothing, by persuading the world the govt were just racist villains, and convincing the National Party in government that nobody would intervene to save them if there were a civil revolt. That part was organized in plain view. Opsec is interesting and mysterious, but often less important than the stories we tell about it afterwards.
In particular:
- There's no racial segregation laws; an Arab-Israeli can travel anywhere a Jewish-Israeli can. In fact, Arabic is an officially recognized language by the state of Israel, and throughout the country, every public service has signs in Arabic alongside Hebrew.
- Jews are not a minority in Israel, they comprise 78% of the population.
The indiscriminate killing that Israel is doing in Gaza and Lebanon is unprecedented since the second World War. Justifying it will normalize civilian casualties in future wars that with be disastrous for everyone.
That is a method though and it's basically what stream ciphers are doing, translating a key into a random stream that's then applies to the plaintext. One benefit of the true OTP though is you don't have to transfer the software and ensure it's generating the same key stream on both ends.
They were far from it, then again, the ANC campaign killed less than 100 people (excluding their sorta-civil-war with Zulu which isn't what people think about) and ultimately played no role in their victory.
“ Walk around Hebron, look at the streets. Streets where Arabs are no longer allowed to go on, only Jews.” - says Amiram Levin, former head of the Israeli army’s Northern Command.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-08-13/ty-article/ex....
That’s within the internationally recognized boundaries of Israel. A separate issue is that Israel enjoys full control over 60% of the West Bank (Area C), which is ever expanding, and various degrees of defects control over the rest of it. Within the West Bank Israeli settlers have more freedom of movement and less restrictions on their day to day lives. So any characterization of the West Bank as an independent country or polity is completely missing the point.
That is simply not true. E.g. The city of Hebron is segregated by religion - see https://youtu.be/Z42HhaywhGQ?si=bTBhEFi5lgBJQX9v
According to Human Rights Watch[1], Amnesty International[2], and many other human rights organizations, the regime in Israel today is in fact recognized as a system of apartheid. Mandela himself shown a lot of solidarity to the palestinian cause[3].
[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/isra...
[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2022/02/qa-israel...
[3] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/nelson-mandela-30-years-p...
That's actually a really good insight. It explains why quite a few successful revolutions – e.g. Russia and China – happened in countries _without_ an established administrative bureaucracy, and patted themselves on the based on their apparent competence in building one.
Not according to the Red Cross:
https://www.icrc.org/en/document/protection-hospitals-during...
Otherwise protected targets like hospitals lose their protected status if they're used as a base of military operations or for other similar purposes.
And the US didn't send a spec ops team to get Bin Laden because they were worried about the Geneva Conventions. They sent one because they wanted to make absolutely certain that they got their target (see Bin Laden's escape at Tora Bora in 2001 for an example of this) and because they were operating in Pakistan so showing up with a whole brigade or carpet bombing the compound wouldn't have gone over well with the Pakistani government. It already didn't go over well with just a surgical strike by spec ops, it would have been much worse if it was done by a larger show of force.
Only if you ignore the distinctions between what was essentially a civil war fought by insurgents (like in Apartheid South Africa) and a war between two sovereign powers.
it's essentially demesquita's "logic of political survival," also distilled into the well made cartoon, "rules for rulers" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
Erm.... Whut? China was (and is) _the_ example of a country held together by a civil bureaucracy. Ditto for Russia.
It's hard to stress how normal _anything_ can seem when you grow up with it. I often wonder whether, if we'd stayed (we moved to the US permanently in 1992) and if apartheid had continued, whether I'd have woken up to the reality of what was going on and become more politically active in my college years. I have no confidence my sense of right and wrong would have been strong enough to escape the stifling blanket feeling of "Well, yes, it's not right, but let's not go tooooo crazy" that pervaded political feeling in those days.
Thanks for doing this, JGC. (And now that I think of it, you might enjoy the historical spelunking in the "Georg Nees" entries on my blog at zellyn.com. Code archeology is tremendously satisfying, and getting an email from one of his sons out of the blue was a delight!)
So demanding that settlers who illegally occupied land is “ethnic cleansing”? And you seem to be ceding my point and agreeing that it is apartheid, but justified.
> The Israeli government is obviously not perfect, but Arab citizens of Israel are generally treated way better than Jewish citizens of Muslim countries.
Whataboutism and irrelevant.
One comment ago you were saying it’s “”Palestinian apartheid”, now you are saying that it may be apartheid but it’s justified and so what, other countries are worse. I’m sorry but this I’m not going to engage any further with this type of discourse.
I’m not sure if that would be an ethical course of action outside the country where the oppression is actually happening.
You haven't achieved more because you and all these other people quit. Of course you're not achieving anything.
I mean, what you are describing is just war theory, and pretty much every government in the world subscribes to it.
I don't think anybody has any moral quandaries about it when it is THEIR cause. Only when it is someone else's cause. Name one freedom fighter/revolutionary (even a perfectly non-violent one) who is not a 'terrorist' to the regime theyre trying to overthrow. I don't think anyone 'pretends' Mandela was a 'perfect angel' anymore than anyone pretends the founding fathers were beacons of unblemished moral rectitude.
[edit] ...
This is addressed in the article. In fact the zip contained a zip and this helped!
> He realized the zip file contained another zip file, and that since all he needed was the right original text for a specific part of the scrambled text, his best chance was using the first file name mentioned in the zip within the zip.
The difference is in the nature of the security guarantees. Almost every cryptographic primitive is "computationally secure", which means the best-known attack is to try every key, and that would take beyond the heat death of the universe. One-time pads have "information-theoretical security", which is that even if you try every possible key, you don't learn the contents of the message, because every possible message has a corresponding decryption key that will produce it from the ciphertext you are trying to break.
The reason why this is the case is because the size of the message space is equal to the size of the key space. In every other cryptosystem, you have a key space that is much smaller than the message space - say, 256 bit AES keys, or 512 bit SHA-2 hashes, for messages that can have many billions of bits in them. It's unlikely for something that wasn't the key to happen to decrypt to a valid-looking message under this scenario. But with a one-time pad, you are actually brute-forcing the message space by brute-forcing the key space. Even if you knew the hash of the plaintext, it wouldn't help. You'd just be brute-forcing whatever hash you used to find collisions.
This property goes away if you start repeating key stream bits by any deterministic process. Hence why just sending a PRNG seed is a bad one-time pad. This is also the difference between /dev/random and /dev/urandom. Linux generates randomness from a PRNG, but it's seeded by unpredictable hardware events and other sources of entropy, and there's a bunch of logic to estimate how much entropy is available. /dev/random specifically blocks until that estimate is positive, so that one-time pads and the like don't repeat bits. (In fact, this is basically the only time you should be using /dev/random! /dev/urandom is perfectly acceptable for all other cryptographic use cases!)
And to sprinkle some "whataboutism" - just a reminder that most of the muslim world is an apartheid based on gender, and even men who don't suffer from it usually have way less human rights than arab israelis.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/isra...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICJ_case_on_Israel%27s_occupat...
While the situation in Israel differs from that in the West Bank, there are still significant elements of systemic discrimination against Arab citizens. The 2018 Nation-State Law is a prime example, as it:
1. Removedd Arabic as an offical language 2. Defined Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people exclusively 3. Declared Jewish settlements a national value
This law effectively codified the second-class status of Arab citizens, who make up about 20% of Israel's population. Additionally, Arab Israelis face ongoing disparities in areas such as education, employment, and housing. They are underrepresented in government and leadership positions.
While Arab citizens have legal rights on paper, the reality is a system of de facto segregation and institutional discrimination. The Nation-State Law and other policies create a two-tiered system that privileges Jewish citizens over Arab citizens, meeting key criteria of apartheid even within Israel proper.
[1] What to Know About the Arab Citizens of Israel https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-know-about-arab-citize... [2] Israel's controversial new “Jewish nation-state” law, explained | Vox https://www.vox.com/world/2018/7/31/17623978/israel-jewish-n... [3] Israel: New Laws Marginalize Palestinian Arab Citizens https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/03/30/israel-new-laws-marginal... [4] The argument that Israel practices apartheid, explained https://www.vox.com/23924319/israel-palestine-apartheid-mean... [5] Israel - Minority Rights Group https://minorityrights.org/country/israel/ [6] Q&A: Israel's Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of ... https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2022/02/qa-israel...
At the end of the day it's quite clear why jewish people want a jewish country, so yes, some discrimination around immigration will always be "built-in" into israel.
Now do I think israel is trending in the wrong direction? 100% yes. Do I wish for a two state solution and achieving as equal rights as possible while maintaining the status of israel as a jewish state? also 100% yes.
Do I think that calling israel proper an apartheid is just leading to people on both sides to become even more extreme? also yes.
If you'd try to force a one state solution in the near/medium term you'd just end up with another divided failed state similar to lebanon (and probably much worse), the population would just be too divided on basically every subject, with militant/religious extremists on both sides making the keg especially explosive.
So ask yourself what is better for the people, trying to achieve some ideal for the sake of that ideal or actually trying to achieve something that could work? If this were an engineering project, would you do a full refactor with an extremely high chance of failure or go through an intermediate step that would bring a lot of the benefits with a much higher chance of success?
In BASIC, the word "RANDOMIZE" sets the seed for the RND function, and you'll find it's initially dependant on time (including the typing speed of the user):
https://github.com/Vulacode/RANDOM/blob/main/RANDOM.BAS#L295
It then is reinitialised periodically by mixing in run time (which is highly variable due to microprocessor limitations) and checksums of previous parts of the stream:
https://github.com/Vulacode/RANDOM/blob/main/RANDOM.BAS#L319
The RAND[123] appears to be Bennett Fox's Algorithm 647, which was designed for simulation purposes (statistical randomness), and is based on Lewis-Goodman-Miller's construction from 1969, so it had a great deal of scrutiny.
I think this would have been state of the art in the late 1980s.
I'm relying on whatever Synod counted the ages of people in the talks and arrived at a creation date of 4004 BC, of course
If we grant that Italy is Rome, which is a separate conversation, then we're still left with Roman conquest, which we don't consider legitimate today, and a long period of documented Jewish inhabitation.
I don't take a position on the legitimacy or otherwise of Israel, because there are already plenty of indignant westerners with insufficient information. But I will say: that written history is weighty evidence.
Will the balance of power change a few decades from now? Maybe, who knows, but for now Iran is in a tough spot.
But please feel free to provide a trustworthy news source backing your claim.
https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/site/q/03lv03445...
All it would take is for the US to stop giving them weapons. That's literally it.
Their military, the IDF, is in extremely poor state. This isn't the same military that made history in the six day war. Under the same sort of conditions today the IDF would have their asses handed to them.
When I say "extremely poor state" I am referring to their discipline, precision, and ability to move under fire. The current IDF operates more like the Russian army who are absolutely having their asses handed to them by a vastly inferior force. These are just my personal opinions from my own 27 years of military experience.
To be honest, I was prepared to see all white South Africans as evil oppressors, and it took me a while to see that there was a spectrum -- many of whom I met -- from oppressors to opportunists to passive enablers to freedom/justice fighters.
One of my distant relatives in South Africa was decidedly racist, but mourned how his son had gone from playing with the children of black farmworkers to, after a stint in the South African Defence Forces, being a vicious white supremacist.
For example, "Tora, Tora, Tora" was a code that had no intrinsic meaning, but was the signal to proceed with the Pearl Harbor attack. No way to reverse that.
Meanwhile, "THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG" can be transformed with a Caesar cipher to "QEB NRFZH YOLTK CLU GRJMP LSBO QEB IXWV ALD". It can easily be reversed.
It seems to me like it's should be extremely easy to distinguish the two, there's more than enough earthquake data - and that fact that there is no such report says it all. For starters i'd even take an amateur analysis, but just some dude on twitter saying "there was seismic activity - must be a nuclear test" - nah.
Also, and I don't want to take a position here, my advocacy is for learning as much about the history and current state of affairs as possible in order to form an informed position, because not only is there fog of war going on right now, but there is a decades long conflict with lots of narratives and propaganda.
I say that to offer a counter narrative in pursuit of objectivity: if you ask an Israeli, there are many areas in the West Bank that are deemed "no go zones" for for Jews, but there are none that apply to non-Jews.
And as for the security and the "check points", those are applied equally to everyone who is there, regardless of citizenship or ethnicity or any other considerations. So even if it's a shitty situation, it's not targeted at any specific ethnic group.
So given that a) Israel does not govern Hebron and b) the security check points are not specific to any ethnic group, how is Hebron a data point that supports the "apartheid" charge?
"God gave us the land" has nothing to do with the jewish connection to the land.
You could argue there's unfairness in the events, but saying israel is a colony is just odd, jews have come from the region.
They don't get to directly and intentionally kill and/or cause death, injury and illness to high hundreds of thousands of people very publicly and proudly, while writing "death to Arabs", "good Arab = dead Arab", "Nakba 2023", and other vile shit on the walls of their destroyed cities.
Easy to see this is not Israel+USA trying to eliminate Hamas, but some holy war to eliminate Palestinians as a whole, in the most underhanded way possible, as to not get blowback from the non-USA countries.
They'll destroy themselves, continuing doing this, provoking neighbors and inciting Palestinians for a massive revenge wave in the future. It doesn't matter when this happens, but Israel is done after this. They're not a superpower and USA backing under Trump, once he wins, will only serve to make their crimes more obvious, and self-destructive behavior more bold.
You keep oversimplifying. It's just not simple.
Btw: „God‘s chosen people, God‘s promised land, nation state law, jewish majority“. Sounds very racist to me. - If it walks like a duck, sounds like a duck, it is propably a duck?
Here's the thing about settler colonialism: it's when you're sent by an empire to settle on land you're not native to. Jews are native to Israel. Dig in the ground, you'll find coins and pots and tablets in Hebrew.
"Thousands of years ago" is not OK, but "for centuries" is. Sorry, you don't get to choose.
As for the second Nakba, October 7th really was as close to a second holocaust as the Jews experienced, one in a long line of pogroms. To do that and then hide behind and below women, children and innocent civilians you're using as human shields, that's beyond a war crime, it's a crime against humanity.
As for the idea of a Jewish majority homeland, go check the bible. It predates "polish jews in the 19th century" by a few centuries.
If we were discussing the virgin birth, I wouldn't put any stock in the Bible. The gospels were written after the fact, by people who weren't there and had a strong motivation to make shit up. We conclude that it is _unreliable_ on the topic of the Virgin birth. (It's a reliable source on the topic of Christian beliefs in Nicaea in 300AD, however.)
But the Talmud describes Jews living in Judea at _great length_, which, I'll remind you, implies many hours spent reciting oral history or copying text by hand. It's supported by the existence of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The conspiracy that you suppose is of a flat-earth scale.
I won't discuss the middle east any further. Cunningham's Law got me. if you do want to learn more, try books.
Can you provide incident details, please? I'm not doubting that stuff like this has happened, but specific (at least theoretically reliable) attestations are always helpful.
It's actually a common point of rhetoric:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-12/ty-article/is...
Then they had a kingdom that lasted about 200 years before falling apart, we can count it as almost 500 years if you want to include the kingdom of Judah time. And now it's more than 2500 years later. Jews who can't trace a single ancestor back to the Middle East for hundreds of years can somehow claim to be indigenous to the land and "return" there. And they have the right to displace or murder the people who have been living there for generations and whose genetics show their ancestors have been in that area for hundreds or thousands of years.
Clearly this is an absurd standard of 'indigenous' that nobody in their right mind should take seriously.
As for your other claims, they are irrelevant. Whether or not Hamas uses or has used human shields is completely unrelated to whether or not it is good or righteous to commit genocide on the Palestinians (indeed, there can be NO excuse for genocide). And if using human shields is so vile that the people of the same country deserve to be slaughtered I should point out that the Israeli military has a rich history of using Palestinian civilians (including children) as human shields. And if October 7th qualifies as a holocaust, then what Israel has done in Gaza is a holocaust ten times over.
The generator used at the time in BASIC seems to have reseeded the PRNG automatically based on processor time and the checksum of the last block generated by the previous seed so you'd have to use some other source of randomness because you couldn't control that on disparate machines even if you changed the clock on the decoding machine to exactly match the encoding machine at the time of generation.
Instead of just using a statistically useful rand the creator of this would have had to create their own implementation of a stream cipher and that's trusting the NSA hasn't backdoored all of them which was a fear at the time. We're honestly not certain still, though the times that people were most paranoid about like the DES standard it turns out they were actually improving the algorithms resilience.
Translation of the text behind the dancing soldiers in the first comment from B.M.
(BTW, three of these soldiers were eliminated already in Al-Zaytoun in Gaza City near the school where this was filmed - https://www.ynetnews.com/article/rylxrqpoc)