[ExI] internet privacy

[spike]

From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg



 

​>>…I am not convinced.  A completely new language, not akin to Indo European or anything else, is just a jumble of meaningless letters without a key.​

 

​>>…How could you figure out the context?  It could be a car manual or poems on death for all you know. 

 

>…Have you looked at elementary cryptoanalysis, like cracking substitution cyphers? Once you see statistical regularities you can start deducing a lot of things if you are clever. And human languages do have a fairly complex statistical structure - Zipf laws, entropy distributions, recursion etc. You can of course invent something utterly dissimilar (just check out some of the really weird conlangs like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C4%93len), but then using it becomes extremely hard. If "The enemy is attacking by air on tuesday" has to be expressed as a superposition of emotion-states with no nouns and spelling looking like cartoon swearing, then usage will be weak. Even Klingon is just a lot of unusual options found in human languages strung together to make a kind of linguist-in-joke (and even linguists find it hard to learn to use), but still likely very decypherable to a motivated opponent. Anders Sandberg…

 

 

The letter for letter encryption carries a number of assumptions that might not apply to languages which predated the notion of a small set of characters each representing a sound.  That development was the breakthrough which enabled practical modern written languages.  Some languages predate that notion, such as Mandarin and the other Asian languages, resulting in their having a hell of a time porting over to a keyboard.  The Rosetta stone unlocked those earlier languages.

 

Consider an alternative, where you collect your single syllable words, such as sun, sea, ball, and foot, then derive simplified symbols for them.  (English has about 6000 single syllable words, or about 3k if you eliminate homonyms.)  Then the person who knows the spoken language could understand this:  

 

 

http://www.clker.com/cliparts/z/D/0/I/i/n/pink-l-foot-hi.png

http://hakeme.com/images/tutorials/3283/head-1.jpg

http://www.freevector.com/site_media/preview_images/FreeVector-Sea-Water.jpg

 

 http://images.clipartpanda.com/clipart-sun-sun2.jpg

 

I am told that Asian symbolic languages kinda sorta did something like this, but now that approach is at a dead end for so many reasons.  It is really interesting to hear the perspective of the local Vietnamese and Chinese kids struggling to learn Mandarin, kids who grew up in Mandarin-speaking homes.  They often give up in frustration after years of diligent effort, long after they have successfully mastered English. 

 

Anders’ deciphering notion assumes the language post-dates the invention of letting symbols represent consonants and vowels rather than syllables.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

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