VMs: Follow-up

["surfing t" <surf17@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

thanks for your replies and suggestions everyone! I'm now studying EVA so I can ask more intelligent questions in the future. I have found a need for the availability of a program that can assist one in the effort of understanding the document. As soon as I'm done with my exams, I will write such a program. The features I need right now are:

  * Capability to convert between foil names and Benecke page numbers - and with capability to download & display images in a window upon request.
  * Capability to convert between the various alphabets (EVA/FGS/etc.) and a GUI so the user can type in strings by a point-and-click interface where each character from the VM is represented as an icon.

Other features might include: Notebook/journal-feature, capability to invoke outside tools (grep etc.), store the output along with notes and store scripts. Todolist-feature. 
Preferably the program should contain various machine-readable transcriptions (if that's not legal, it could contain links to the transcriptions and download them on demand). It would be nice if the program could parse them and make the info available through a niec GUI. For example, it would be nice to have a feature that would open the image of a page and the transcription-text of that page "side-by-side".

If you have any suggestions for more features, please let me know. I would rather limit the feature-set to a small set for the first version so there is something that works soon and then add new features as needed.

I plan to write the software in Java so as many people as possible can use it.

As for the introduction of myself: I'm studying math and computer science and I have a part-time job in cryptography. I'm very interested in the VM. Of course, I wouldn't be so interested if it turns out to be a hoax. So right now I'm trying to decide for myself if I think its a hoax or not. I don't want to spend a lot of time on the VM if chances are its a hoax, so I'm looking for indicators that it isn't. 

I think the easiest attack point would be the images and their relation to the text, particularly the text labels. One would expect the labels of images to be distributed in certain ways throughout the text. I also think that one-word-image labels should be easier to crack cryptographicaly because the ciphertext - at least "CBC-like ciphers" - doesn't make much sense because the single word doesn't occur in connection to any other sentence or words (unless, of course, some weird scheme is used to make this connection). Of course there's a chance the labels have no meaning in relation to the text and was simply added to add confusion.
 By examining some of the one-word-labels and seeing how they are distributed in the document (there should be more occurences close to the picture) and by collecting repetitions among the same labels in multiple images, one could get hints on the degree to which this document is ciphered. If I find the expected distributions my guess is this isn't ciphered but is simply written in an odd language. It's also possible it's a hoax, but the more stuff we find that is as we would expect, the less likely this becomes. If anyone has done research in this direction please let me know.


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