I tried googling for the thread which I thought mentioned scytale and got something interesting - can you techies tell me what this is?

scytale+wordsmith.org yields:

http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/cp-stats.txt

You mean besides being a list of email addresses?

mav:

Yep.

Here's your url:

http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/cp-stats.txt

One of the ways to research these things is to start at the right end of the URL and start removing expressions one at a time to see what you get when you try to open the new shorter url.

When I did that I got:

http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/

This guy is some kind of computer geek, and may be into hacking, but I'm not versed enough to be completely sure. He's definitely into cypher stuff.

Anyway, I then put my cursor on each of his links on that page and that allowed me to read the url in the box at the bottom of my screen. I found this one:

http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/cp.html

That had the "cp" that was part of your url and when I clicked on it I got this at the top of the page:

Cypherpunks posters
Back in Nov 1999 I grepped and sorted my archives and made a list of posters by number of posts up to that date. It's available here. (For people who's email addresses changed where it was obviously the same person, I merged them under the title of the last email address at that time.)

Clicking on the url link "here" got me to the page you listed. It's a compilation of posts.

Now, if you go to that page and search for scytale, you find a web page, just as you do if you search for wordsmith on that same page.

I leave it to you to figure out what the posts are all about, but that's one way to do some detective work on the web.

TEd

PS

try googling skytale also.

T

Thanks TEd. I had wondered if a geek had hacked one of Anu's lists (it didn't have any of our details obvious but).

I will try that spelling too!

Is this what you were looking for, mav?
http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=miscellany&Number=107808

Brilliant, J! hah, even if I couldn't find it, good to know that my memory wasn't completely deceiving me - thanks. :)

[hide]Behaoi,eynwr? yurel !ge[/hide]

if a geek had hacked one of Anu's list

A quick Find in Page shows that one of the email addresses has 'scytale' in it and another has 'wordorigins'.

> quick Find in Page shows that one of the email addresses has 'scytale' in it and another has 'wordorigins'.


You can just serve me up on toast points, Faldo :()>

Perhaps a couple of very thin slices of red onion would not go amiss, but DO try to keep the wine on the dry side :}>

[shame e] I'm gonna need another hint, mav; sorry...

serve me up on toast points

Wull, if you'd just of pointed out that mav got that page because it contained the strings he'd googled in EMAIL ADDRESSES instead of rambling on and on about urls and never mentioning the character strings and I get leery of reading any log post from you for fear of getting whacked in the face by the tattered remnants of whatever poor defenseless word you've been torturing anyway maybe I'd of realized that you had already (or is that all ready?) said in 300 words what I said in twenty.

Harrumph©!

> what I said in twenty

yeahbut

I unnerstood his words!

Seriously, in TEd's defence I think his was a genwhine attempt to spread the gospel re some search techniques, not just for me but for others who might benefit. Don't forget, my favourite Fong, we're not all tech-heads :) Thank you for your response too - in reality I understood most of its results, just not how to run such a search myself.

Jackie, I tried a manual scytale, ifn I got it right of course (but that would only be following Bing's noble precedent!) Not that it has any relationship to the diameter of my rod, you understand...

Attually®, I was trying to calm your fears that someone had hacked Anu.

yep, thanks, I got that part :)

So now we know Anu's interested in codes - what a surprise!