Message left in the location of the London artifiact. Our intial contact. Theo. You have our attention, and the Agonothetai have our mistrust. They were told to find space for their labyrinths. They were told to hide them in plain sight. We too have found 'space', and we too have hidden it in plain sight. Look to the source, and study it, as one in London might study the works of Shakespeare to determine their authorship. We will contact you soon. La Sekto

-Do not use the characters ` or ~ in your cover text as they are used internally to track 1 and 2 spaces respectively.
-Secret text may only contain the letters A-Z. All punctuation and numbers will be stripped off, therefore you need to spell out any numbers such as 'one' or 'two'.
-You can use the standard Bacon checkbox in combination with your secret message being one/more characters to see what the Bacon equivalent is (e.g. for lookups even if it's not a real message)

Info:

What is this page? How does it work?

This page allows for the enciphering/deciphering of a custom implementation of Bacon's Cipher. A Bacon cipher is actually a method of steganography, used to hide one message (your secret message), inside another message (your cover text). It does this by using a fixed replacement alphabet, with each letter of the alphabet represented by a 5 character code group of A's and B's. For example, the letter A is represented by AAAAA, and the letter Y is represented by BABBA.

To encode your message, a method needs to be developed to hide these A's and B's inside your cover text. Traditionally, this was done by using two different typefaces when printing the text. While looking almost identical, they were actually different and could be spotted by someone who knew what to look for.

this is an example

(encoding the letter A and Y above). Notice that there are 5 letters with one type face (AAAAA) then courier (B) then default (A) then two more courier (BB) and then default (A).

Unforuntately, in todays digital word, using typefaces is somewhat obsolete and very easy to spot. So alternate methods for delivery have to be developed.

For example, you could write a sentence in which every word with an even amount of syllables was an A, while an odd number is B.

Methods like this are very time consuming to encipher your message. With any method of delivery using Bacon, you are forced to have a large amount of cover text because you need 5 of 'something' to represent each letter you wish to hide.

Now, while some good samaritans are providing assistance of the amnesiac athletes of Find the Lost Ring (www.thelostring.com), another group of individuals are attempting to communicate with a shadow group known as Theo, and we needed a way to communicate with them, secretly. We chose to use the Bacon cipher, because early in our discoveries, Fracis Bacon's New Atlantis was prominently featured. However, we needed a method of delivery. Since we were planning on using websites and most likely forums, our ability to work with native HTML was limited. We were unlikely to be able to change fonts or something else visually, and using a method like syllables would be way too time consuming. Finally, a method was proposed using spaces. A single space would represent an 'A' and a double space would be a 'B'.

What's great about this delivery system is that the modern browser would collapse the multiple spaces so that when you viewed the page normally, you would only see one space at a time (as we wouldn't use a non-breaking space). However, if you looked at the source of the HTML page, you would see the extra spaces. Additionally, this method allows you to use cover text in any language (that reads from left to right), allowing it to be used for all the primary languages that the amnesiacs are using in their forums.

This method allowed us to input text into the game forum and leave a message. We could also develop HTML pages on public free sites and encode the message there with relative ease, and keep it hidden in plain sight.

After meeting our initial goal of a delivery method, it was still a slightly time consuming method to count the number of spaces. The easiest solution was to do a find/replace with a single space =1, and a double space=2, then list your numbers, break into groups of 5 and cross reference the codes for the alphabet. Easy to decipher, but writing a message required just as much work.

So finally, I developed this page using javascript. By entering the text you wish to hide, as well as the text you wish to hide it in, it will do the encoding for you and return HTML text with double spaces capable of being posted places. It will tell you if your cover text isn't long enough, and will make sure to convert line feeds and returns to their < br > html equivalent. Because different operating systems handle line breaks differently, the default method of using the HTML line break is the standard.

However, the problem (if you can see it as that), is that when your encoded text is returned to you, it will appear as a single line of text. It will appear properly spaced and paragraphed in your browser. It makes the fact that there is something special about this text a little more obvious though, because that one really long line may stand out in your source code (even more than the strange spacing). That being said, you may want to manually add line breaks, so the text looks a little more normal. JUST DON'T ADD ANY SPACES or you'll screw up your entire message. I would highly recommend attempting to decipher your code with the tool after manually adjusting it, to ensure that the message remains the same.

Additionally, if you provide the tool with 'spaced text' it will attempt to decipher a hidden Bacon message using our delivery system.

What's nice is that your cover text can be any length greater than your message, as the system will ignore anyspaces less than 5, and groups of 5 will always return the letter A. This means your FINALMESSAGEMAYBEPADDEDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA with extra A's at the end, which are easily removed. Padding is a standard process in cryptography, and is easily ignored.

Because of the limits of the Bacon method, you can only use characters A-Z and not letters or punctuation.

I've also recently added a checkbox which allows you to get standard Bacon encoding back (AB text) instead of the space stegged text, or to submit a Bacon AB code and get the resulting plaintext. In essense, operating like a true Bacon cipher/decipher tool, rather than our modified tool.