
Pedantry
"It plays at 33rpm " I bet it also plays at 45rpm and 78rpm.
The correct speed would be thirty-three and one third revolutions per minute. It's Imperial.
Attending the DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas is always an unusual experience, but among the most celebrated features of the event are its unusual attendee badges. Reg man Iain Thomson attended this year's event – the 23rd – and we at Vulture Annex in San Francisco got a kick out of scratching our heads at the mystery …
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I reckon the first part is probably a traditional substitution cipher. Replacing the numbers with the corresponding letters in the alphabet gives:
ZRJNUEQMQSVVTSVVHGHVLYANXLTBXLXJGGFNRBVYRCFXGYKIPNVLAXIYBQVIZXEETXGWQRDMBKVWXKAGBKSF
to June 18th Two Thousand Twenty Four
MLZIRMPXNLRE
If this is a substitution cipher, it should yield to frequency analysis (for example, V probably corresponds to E or T). I don't have the time right now to have a crack at it - any takers?
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"It's much more likely to be 'elcome to defcon...' and it's missing a leading '9' for 'w'"
Agreed, bear in mind that this is audio from an analogue source (record) piped into a PC and run through the DTMF software, its possible that some info has been lost due to not using monster gold plated cables. :)
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Good spot. I actually installed a font that does Shavian Unicode glyphs [1] so I could compare the photo and the text. I think the correct (and more meaningful) transcription is
if hes not
one thing hes
another
The Shavian is a bit random, though. As written, the first word ought to rhyme with 'leaf', the word "thing" ought to have been written with the Shavian 'hung' glyph instead of 'n+g', and there's a character for 'th', too, without using 't+h'. So it's like a transliteration of English words with 1:1 character mapping. I've got no idea what the significance of the phrase is, though. It doesn't seem to have a well-known provenance, if a search engine can be trusted. Could it be a passphrase? That would be a good reason to be character-mapped rather than written in proper shorthand.
[1] MPH2BDamase
There are three (3) degrees in Freemasonry, not 33. A full Master Mason is one who has been "raised" to the "sublime" Third Degree. That's all that's required to become a Master Mason and participate in a local lodge.
There are concordant Masonic bodies, such as the Scottish Rite, who award additional degrees. Scottish Rite has degrees 4-33. Degrees 4 through 32 are earned, whereas the 33rd degree is attained by acclamation (you are voted in, there are limits on the number of 33rd degree Scottish Rite masons wandering around smartly.) York Rite has a similar, albeit, smaller degree structure.