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September 12, 2003

Brains are Cool

My friend Jerry Michalski sent me this really cool thing:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by ilstef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

This would be a good way to "encrypt" cleartext so that it could not be understood by Internet sniffers! All you need is a Scrambler script. You write a document normally and then your Scrambler mixes up the middles of all the words for you. It is still readable without decryption, but any Net sniffers that may intercept it in transit (via email for example) won't be able to make sense of it at all. Very cool idea...

Posted on September 12, 2003 at 09:17 PM in Technology |

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Comments

smich

I received this via e-mail 3 times on the same day last week, but each version of the e-mail was a little different, which made me think urban legend. Though I do believe it's easy to read the scrambled letters, whether the study was conducted (and where) is in question. Here's the Snopes story on it.

Posted by: smich | September 21, 2003 at 07:40 PM

Dan Brickley

I saw his a few days ago, made a little Ruby program to implement it: http://www.w3.org/2003/09/biarn/

does anyone have the citation to the original source for the claim?

Posted by: Dan Brickley | September 15, 2003 at 04:03 PM

J Woolverton

Maybe they'll start using this to "personalize" spam.

Posted by: J Woolverton | September 14, 2003 at 12:30 AM

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