NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Tupac Shakur Resurrected At Coachella, May Go On Tour

Despite being dead for over 15 years, rapper Tupac Shakur was resurrected over the weekend at the Coachella music festival in Indio, Calif.

DNEWS VIDEO: IS IT FUTURE YET?

BLOG: Vibrating Tattoo Alerts Of Phone Call

Gunned down on the Las Vegas strip in 1996, 2Pac, as he was also known, resurfaced at the music fest Sunday night and gave a beyond-the-grave performance with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre.

No, this doesn't confirm all of the Makavelian conspiracy theories, it just goes to show how technology can resuscitate the dead. It wasn't a zombie on stage, nor was it live-in-the-flesh Pac. It was a 2-D computer generated image, and an eerily realistic one to boot.

According to the Wall Street Journal, there might be an encore performance in store for virtual 2Pac.

"Representatives for Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg plan to discuss logistics for a tour involving the two performers and the virtual Tupac, according to a person familiar with the discussions," wrote Ethan Smith.

Virtual 2Pac was created by Digital Domain Media Group who were also won an Academy Award for creating special effects for the movie "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

The image was first created on a computer and then projected onto a swath of Mylar stretched onto a clear frame. Advances in graphics and video projection allowed the illusion to appear far more realistic than similar stunts.

Digital Domain's chief creative officer, Ed Ulbrich, told the Wall Street Journal that 2Pac's virtual performance was not simply an old video.

BLOG: Behold The World's Most Surreal Hotel

"This is not found footage," he said. "This is not archival footage. This is an illusion."

Ulbrich added: "This is just the beginning. Dre has a massive vision for this."

via Pitchfork

credit: YouTube screen grab

---

Email:

---

Finally! Mysterious Cipher Code Cracked

An international team of computer scientists has cracked a manuscript detailing rituals of an 18th-century German secret society.

The text, known as the Copiale Cipher, is a 105-page book that was written in a combination of elaborate symbols and Roman letters. Previous attempts to decode it had failed, and it was clear that the cipher being used was more sophisticated than most. It is located in the former East Germany and was signed by a “Philipp” in 1866.

SCIENCE CHANNEL VIDEO: CIA Mind Control

Kevin Knight, a computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, collaborated with two colleagues, Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden. They found that the text was in a sophisticated substitution cipher, which means that the letters one would expect were replaced with symbols.

Such ciphers are common in children’s games –- you might remember the “pigpen cipher” or shifting letters (making an "A" into a "C," a "B" into a "D" and so on) from grade school. The Copiale manuscript was a step above that. Knight and his team originally thought –- as had many others –- that the visible Roman letters in the text were the coded message. But when they tried replacing those letters with others, all they got was nonsense.

DNEWS VIDEO: GET BEHIND THE SCENES OF AVATAR, TRON, CADDYSHACK AND MORE

That meant the symbols, or at least some of them, had to be what they were looking for. They tried the same thing on the unknown symbols. Again, they got nonsense, but the nonsense seemed to point to German as the original language.

NEWS: New Spy Tricks Hide Messages in Plain Sight

Knight and his team assumed they were starting with German, as the book is from Germany and “Philipp” is a German spelling. They then looked at the frequency of different symbols and where they occurred together. This technique is centuries old and depends on the fact that different languages have combinations of letters that are allowed (or not). For example, in English, “q” is followed by a “u” in all but a few very rare words (and those are all foreign borrowings). That gave the linguists a few letters, which in turn allowed them to pick out more. Eventually they were able to transcribe the whole text.

The team has only translated the first 16 pages, but what the Copiale cipher revealed was a set of rules and initiation rites for a secret society. Such societies were more common in the 18th and 19th centuries, both as political and social organizations. (Yale’s Skull and Bones society was one of these).

The technique used in the Copiale manuscript, however, has more serious uses than plumbing the secrets of a clandestine society that has long since disbanded. Knight notes that many of his algorithms can be used in machine translation (and often are) and can be applied to other unknown texts and languages.

BLOG: Spies Can Hide Secret Messages In Bacteria

Knight also said he has been very interested in one of the most famous coded texts: the Voynich manuscript, which has also stumped cryptographers and linguists for nearly a century. The Voynich is similar to the Copiale in that it is clearly in a coded text, but nobody is sure what the original language was or about the nature of the cipher.

Via: Kevin Knight, Beáta Megyesi, Christiane Schaefer, New York Times

Image: Kevin Knight

---

Email:

---