Category Archives: Poetry

DeCSS in Haiku

Not exactly what I would call haiku in spirit or form, but this work on Dave Touretzky’s site is at least mathematically correct as it follows the 575 pattern:

How to decrypt a
DVD: in haiku form.
(Thanks, Prof. D. S. T.)
————————

(I abandon my
exclusive rights to make or
perform copies of

this work, U. S. Code
Title Seventeen, section
One Hundred and Six.)

Muse! When we learned to
count, little did we know all
the things we could do

some day by shuffling
those numbers: Pythagoras
said “All is number”

long before he saw
computers and their effects,
or what they could do

by computation,
naive and mechanical
fast arithmetic.

It changed the world, it
changed our consciousness and lives
to have such fast math

available to
us and anyone who cared
to learn programming.

Now help me, Muse, for
I wish to tell a piece of
controversial math,

for which the lawyers
of DVD CCA
don’t forbear to sue:

that they alone should
know or have the right to teach
these skills and these rules.

(Do they understand
the content, or is it just
the effects they see?)

And all mathematics
is full of stories (just read
Eric Temple Bell);

and CSS is
no exception to this rule.
Sing, Muse, decryption

once secret, as all
knowledge, once unknown: how to
decrypt DVDs.

Snarkles Sneak

Instead of translating your communication using something like babelfish, why not use sneak by snarkles and amuse your friends.

Here’s Matsuo Basho most famous poem in one-way DES:

CRAY67ihTYSbg

or perhaps you would prefer MD5:

bb5180417075141a9b354e24c066e3bf

and then there’s HEX:

41 6e 20 6f 6c 64 20 70 6f 6e 64 21 0d 0a 41 20 66 72 6f 67 20 6a 75 6d 70 73 20 69 6e 2d 0d 0a 54 68 65 20 73 6f 75 6e 64 20 6f 66 20 77 61 74 65 72 2e

Just worry about who snarkles really is and what s/he does with all the input…