Re: VMs: Can one "prove" a hoax?

[Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 21 Feb 2003 12:49 pm, Rene Zandbergen wrote:
> Mr. X takes the diary of his young daughter, and
> converts it using a clever scheme into a text that
[...]

> Obviously, this is a hoax.
> However, for me it is something that we could
> decipher and the plaintext could be more or less
> meaningful.

I think that there are two extremes for the meaning of a hoax.
One is a document which is not authentic or true in content or authorship but 
still could be read. (Should we call this a "contents" hoax?)

The other is something that looks like a document but *cannot* be read because 
it is not conveying any information at all. For example a randomly generated 
text. (This would become "structure" hoax as the text has no structure).

One could still generate text that is somewhat readable but still does not 
convey information. 

The irritating thing is that it seems extremely difficult to tell whether the 
vms is a structure hoax or an coded/cipher document. We have to allow the 
possiblity that the author may have intended to convey information, but:

a) encoded the text and we cannot realise the method, (no solution *yet*) or, 
 
b) because it lost the information due to a lossy encoding scheme (there is no 
possible solution).

I can't see a possibility to differentiate (at the moment) between a) and b)
and between any of these and a structure hoax.

Cheers,
Gabriel



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