Aaron Toponce

You may have noticed some tweets from me that look.... strange. Probably something like these:

First, let me provide some background. When Twitter was announced, a couple Free Software developers got together to create a self-hosted Free Software alternative. They called that alternative "Identica", because it was hosted in Canada, and a way to establish your social identity. It made sense, and the Free Software and Open Source ecosystem ate it up. Within no time, it was a thriving online social network, involving mostly those from the Free Software and Open Source world, with all sorts of very influential developers and people creating accounts.

One account that seemed to catch the eye of many was @key. It posted what appeared to be MD5 checksums every 2 hours, regularly and consistently. Plenty of people were following the account, yet it wasn't following anyone. People replied to the tweets, asking what it was posting, who it was, why it was doing what it was doing, if it was a government account, etc. No one could figure it out, and if there were MD5 checksums, no one could reproduce them. It was a social enigma, and it kept people enthralled and engaged.

I thought this was exceptionally creative, and I was quite jealous that I didn't think of it first. The best I figured was that it was posting the timestamp of the tweet with a custom salt. At least, that is what I would have done. It couldn't be an MD5 of random data, otherwise, why not just post the random data? Or is that exactly what it is? So, instead, I decided to play with the Identica API and roll my own, using my own account. I had already setup the "Identica-Twitter bridge", so anything I posted to my Identica account would get posted to Twitter automatically.

But, I have to be different. So rather than a random digest that no one could figure out (I'm sure it's a timestamp), I wanted something a little more transparent. I started with taking the SHA-1 of the Unix epoch (the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970 00:00.00) at 13:37 local time, because it's leet. This was easily accomplished with a bit of shell code:

$ EPOCH=$(date --date="today 13:37" +%s); printf "$EPOCH: "; printf "$EPOCH" | sha1sum - | cut -d ' ' -f 1

This was the first tweet:

Later however, I wanted something even more creative. I go by the online nick "eightyeight" on IRC, because I play the piano. However, some Asian cultures see the number "8" as lucky. With "Chinese" fortune cookies, I figured I would "encrypt" a fortune at 08:08 local time. Again, I decided to do this with a bit of shell code:

$ fortune -s -n 70 | gzip -c | base64 | rot13 | paste -sd ''

The first tweet to hit that was (testing the API, so this one actually wasn't on 08:08):

However, Identica started going downhill. First, we had big challenges fighting bot spam. Despite repeated bug reports and discussion on the network, very little change was happening in the code to combat the spam (for future reference, just use Hashcash tokens as a proof-of-work for form submissions). Then getting venture capital, and attempting to appeal to the mass market, things started changing. First it rebranded itself as "Status.Net", then we lost threaded replies. The API was no longer Twitter compatible (at least some things were different), and branding got real weird. Then it rebranded itself again under a completely new code rewrite as "pump.io", and that is the status today. At this last rebranding, the API was no longer functional, and my scripts stopped. I didn't want to work with the Twitter API, so I didn't bother setting it up again.

It wasn't until some time ago I decided to resurrect my cryptic tweets. However, I made some changes. Instead of using SHA-1, I decided to use RIPEMD-160. Although it hasn't had the mountains of analysis SHA-1 has had, RIPEMD-160 is still considered secure, although with its 160-bit digest size, the security margin might be a bit too slim for some. However, I stuck with the same Unix epoch timestamp automated at 13:37 local time.

Then, after developing my own playing card cipher, and refining it with the help of @timshadel, I decided to actually attempt a legitimate (if still insecure) cipher with Talon. It's still a fortune (BOFH style) and it's still published at 08:08 local time for the same reasons. If you want a crack at decrypting it, check out my playing card cipher repository at https://github.com/atoponce/cardciphers. There should be a new one every day, but it may be possible that the fortune is 1 character too long, and as a result, it doesn't get posted (I've accounted for this, but I'm sure I've missed something).

What's the point? Nothing more than just a bit of fun. It's probably not something you're interested in seeing on your timeline, and I don't blame you. Granted, there will be one of each every day. If you don't have a busy timeline, I guess it could get a bit old. But, I don't plan on stopping, nor using a separate account.