Posts by MeanMrMustard

369

So are Republicans now openly terrorists?

by Simon in

they seem determined to undermine the us democracy and shut the government down hurting employees and veterans.. what a despicable bunch, hope they get their asses kicked for what they are doing..

MeanMrMustard

designs,

The GOP want to derail the economic recovery.

GOP members want to keep their seats in Congress, whether the House or Senate. As do the Democrats. You are a fool to think that anyone is really there fighting for your best interest.

The Bond Market is now signaling higher rates and inflation.

It is going to happen sooner or later, and there is no way out of it. When it does happen, and things go very far south, are you going to look for the real cause, or are you going to blame a political party? Or worse yet, are you going to blame capitalism?

Like in the last market crash caused by the GOP led Congress, how many elected officials are using their insider knowledge to change their stock holdings.

I agree that Congress should not have special rules reguarding inside information. I disagree that the GOP caused the "last market crash". It was the GOP, and Dems, and Bush, and Clinton, and Carter, and especially the FED.

MMM

223

Comprehensive NWT Comparison Project (calling all technically skilled members)

by Apognophos in

is anyone aware if this project is already being done by someone?

if not, perhaps we can brainstorm how to go about this, now that the pdf for the revised nwt is out.

a couple initial impressions:.

MeanMrMustard

Simon,

Perhaps I'll try to find an encoding/decoding forum to post it on. You are right, it really looks like an encoding and not an encryption. I've tried a lot of different encodings, in SQLite and outside (.NET and java), attempting to convert the hex string into characters. And like I said, I've even tried to see if endian-ness has anything to do with it. SQLite has encoding support for utf-8 and utf-16. So one of the first things I tried was to cast the binary data to a text field with different encodings.

(I highlighted the SQL query in red to make it easier on your eyes to parse through the prompt)

As you can see, nothing came out.

MMM

223

Comprehensive NWT Comparison Project (calling all technically skilled members)

by Apognophos in

is anyone aware if this project is already being done by someone?

if not, perhaps we can brainstorm how to go about this, now that the pdf for the revised nwt is out.

a couple initial impressions:.

MeanMrMustard

slimboyfat,

The quick translation - In the WT DB, they have the entire bible encoded as a binary blob of data. It is probably MEPS, but I don't know for sure. I don't think it is any of the standard way of encoding text. I may fuss with it some more, or try to pull it out of the PDF next. Can I do it? Probably. Time table? We'll have to see what else comes up in the PDF parse.

MMM

223

Comprehensive NWT Comparison Project (calling all technically skilled members)

by Apognophos in

is anyone aware if this project is already being done by someone?

if not, perhaps we can brainstorm how to go about this, now that the pdf for the revised nwt is out.

a couple initial impressions:.

MeanMrMustard

castthefirststone,

Yes, I have the database, and I can see all the tables and structures there. A lot of the tables and fields are exactly what I would expect to find in a DB for any bible. But the actual content is a different story. The content field on the bible_book and bible_verse tables is just a binary BLOB field. The question is how to interpret that field. It is interesting that the hex length (display the field as hex, and then take the length) is always an even number. It would suggest that each character is 2 hex digits, or just a byte (encode each char as UTF-8, plus some for markup of some sort?). That would make sense too because the length of the hex string is often 25% larger than actual character count of any verse. But alas, it doesn't seem to be encoded in any standard way... I've even tried changing the endianness of each byte (just in case they did a casting or something during the display process).

I wonder - and I don't know for sure, but I'm leaning toward it - if this field is actually meant to be a binary MEPS blob. That is, it's the WT's proprietary MEPS format, and I don't know how they encode the data with that format. I don't even know if anyone outside the WT knows how to decode MEPS.

MMM

223

Comprehensive NWT Comparison Project (calling all technically skilled members)

by Apognophos in

is anyone aware if this project is already being done by someone?

if not, perhaps we can brainstorm how to go about this, now that the pdf for the revised nwt is out.

a couple initial impressions:.

MeanMrMustard

castthefirststone,

Thanks! I have the DB now. I'll parse through it tonight. I sent back another PM - I have some family business to attend to.

MMM

223

Comprehensive NWT Comparison Project (calling all technically skilled members)

by Apognophos in

is anyone aware if this project is already being done by someone?

if not, perhaps we can brainstorm how to go about this, now that the pdf for the revised nwt is out.

a couple initial impressions:.

MeanMrMustard

@castthefirststone:

That line of text that you have there really really looks like a hex encoding for unicode... but its not decoding with the standard decode functions.

MMM

223

Comprehensive NWT Comparison Project (calling all technically skilled members)

by Apognophos in

is anyone aware if this project is already being done by someone?

if not, perhaps we can brainstorm how to go about this, now that the pdf for the revised nwt is out.

a couple initial impressions:.

MeanMrMustard

Why not just publish the document via a torrent... They couldn't do anything even if they wanted to.

223

Comprehensive NWT Comparison Project (calling all technically skilled members)

by Apognophos in

is anyone aware if this project is already being done by someone?

if not, perhaps we can brainstorm how to go about this, now that the pdf for the revised nwt is out.

a couple initial impressions:.

MeanMrMustard

@castthefirststone:

I will send the hex as soon as I can but the hex I sent was the last verse of the Bible (Rev 22:21) but I think without the key it's difficult to decipher. Most of my work is stored on another computer so I need to copy it over when I get a chance and then I'll send more text.

I believe I'm getting closer (I didn't stop looking at it) as I believe the key is stored somewhere in a table (found some code that reference it). The app needs to decrypt it, so the key must be stored somewhere either in the xml files, the code or the database. I don't understand why they tried to encrypt it as it's not worth the effort, eventually someone with enough perseverance will figure it out.

Oh and about phoning the bethel boys club, they will just tell me to chat to the elders again. Sorry but I'd rather run around in the decipher hamster wheel than the circular logic wheel, thank you very much.

What I was suggesting was right along with your thinking - there is no reason to encrypt it. They might want to encode those special characters though. One way to do that is just encode the two bytes as "hex" (two ASCII characters). There are standard ways of doing this, and to decode the text, you don't need any sort of key. You might be looking for a key and never find one because you don't need one at all.

Let me take that text you posted and see if I can decode it.

MMM

223

Comprehensive NWT Comparison Project (calling all technically skilled members)

by Apognophos in

is anyone aware if this project is already being done by someone?

if not, perhaps we can brainstorm how to go about this, now that the pdf for the revised nwt is out.

a couple initial impressions:.

MeanMrMustard

Apognophos,

Exactly. I was throwing it out there for anyone else - if you can think of something that should be tracked or something that would be interesting, then let us know.

:)

I am going to hold off on the PDF parse until we eliminate the method that castthefirststone described. If that works out, it will be highly preferable to a PDF parse.

MMM

369

So are Republicans now openly terrorists?

by Simon in

they seem determined to undermine the us democracy and shut the government down hurting employees and veterans.. what a despicable bunch, hope they get their asses kicked for what they are doing..

MeanMrMustard

@Pterist:

Oh, I see. By DC, you mean Dick Cheney. Deficits do matter. This is one reason why the Republicans are loosing support, and its one of the reason the Tea Party came into existence - not with BO's term, but prior to that, as a response to Bush's spending.

Another quote from 2006:

Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘‘the buck stops here.’’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.

:)

That's the problem with DC..... Washington, not Cheney.

MMM