In 1992 cyberpunk author William Gibson wrote a short poem called Agrippa (a book of the dead) that tells about memory, loss, nature and mechanism, all framed by a Kodak photo album. The poem was bundled into a Mac System 7 application and included on a 3.5” diskette in the back of a noir art book by Dennis Ashbaugh and Kevin Begos, Jr.
Once run, the program displays Gibson’s poem just once, and encrypts itself. Never to be seen again, until now.
Based on the pioneering work of Alan Liu and his team at The Agrippa Files, working in collaboration with Matthew Kirschenbaum at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Digital Forensics Lab, a a bit-for-bit copy of this application has been recovered, along with numerous archival documents.
The challenge
The first person to successfully crack the code will win a copy of every William Gibson book ever published (except Agrippa). Every runner-up will have their name (if provided) posted on this website. To win you must submit a technical description of your cryptanalysis below, under Creative Commons usage rights (the results of which will be used to further research on Agrippa). The technical description should explain what kind of encryption is used (if any), how it functions, and how it was reversed or cracked (and what the key is, if there is one). Should there be no encryption at all (a possibility), or should the application merely “scramble” or “destroy” the data, this must be technically demonstrated or proved. Since the plain text is known, the cryptanalysis is purely for fun and academic curiosity, and thus the description should provide technical details.
AGRIPPA Challenge
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