CW: snuff, cannibalism, béchamel.

He set down the whetstone and balanced a 10” Damascus steel chef knife between his two index fingers, aligning it with the unblinking industrial lighting. The edge of the blade was a vector so very straight it seemed atomically perfect. The mirror polish on the metal was interrupted by the warm fog of shuddering breath. His eyes glazed over in the blistering lamps imagining the possibilities. A Twitch & A Throb. The cellar kitchen was windowless, featureless and clinical – most are. The austerity of the setting was a deprivation of ceremony, and thus the heart and soul that one typically puts into preparing a dish, but the blankness of the canvas invited infinite potential too. It was Total Silence, save for the rhythmic entrancement of water droplets splashing and dropping into the sink...interrupted by the shuffling of clothes. He exited his euphoric trance and locked eyes on the counter, donning a subdued navy pair of latex gloves. The sound of well-worn Oxfords clicked in step towards the kitchen counter. The harsh white lightning gleamed onto the silver cloche as he removed it. There on a silver platter amidst parsley garnish lay a white lab rat specimen adorned intricately in a scarlet rope web, gagged and blinded. Her body squished under the pressure of the ropes, and it abraded and burned her. With his thumb and his index finger, he pulled away her slobbery gag. Rather than panic or fear, her immediate reaction was utter indignity. “Do you have any idea who you've just kidnapped? I'm insured for this! When the philharmonic director finds out” etc. etc. etc. and I watched her do that for about 5 minutes, which was when the gravity struck that she was going to be murdered for sexual gratification, and then I watched her have a panic attack and cry for another 5 minutes. It would be impolite and unprofessional to play with one's food, and theatricality comes with a cost – if the meat knows that it's going to be killed, it will release too many stress hormones and lose any appetizing qualities. A proper home cooked meal always needs to be made with love. So I reassured her and spoke to her in a soft voice and relieved her manually and repeatedly. And once she was assured that it was all an elaborate roleplay that she must have set up months in advance, she became comfortable and began to babble on about how she was the world's smallest little micro pianist, and she began to saying something about the tragedy of the commons as I sliced open her belly and cracked her ribs open. She screamed terribly and died in visceral pain after about 2 minutes, and she spent her final agonizing moments enraptured in pleasure, thinking about the proportional gallons of her own murderer's hot steamy jizm still dripping out of her, mixing on the floor with her own sputum and plasma. I watched her exposed heart stop beating. He ran his tongue all over her corpse and knife, then shaved her limp slumped body delicately with a cheap disposable razor. He stuffed her torso with chopped thyme, chives, mushrooms, cranberries, cloves, and a torn up loaf of sourdough bread he soaked in red wine vinegar. He incised a needle into her flesh and sewed her tummy back together. He put her in an enamel black pot with white speckles and made a pot liquor of her blood with carrots, potatoes, celery, onions, garlic, herbs, goose fat and sherry. Her tiny lifeless corpse simmered in the oven for two hours at a low heat, before she was taken out of the furnace’s fires and served upon a clean white plate on a silver platter, with buttered broccoli and a cold crisp glass of blanc by candlelight. He took a saucière and poured piping hot roux over her body, expertly roasted and still tied presenting and assuming the position as he showered her with salt and cracked peppercorns. And as his knife carved into her flank and he tore away a morsel of her sinew, the silver fork passed his lips and her flesh played a symphony of notes in his saliva and on the taste buds of his tongue. Not bad – kinda like her music was; tasteless!

An interactive SSH tab can outlive the transport underneath it. The window is still open, the scrollback is still useful, and the user still thinks of it as the same terminal. But the TCP connection may have disappeared during sleep, a network change, a server restart, or an idle timeout.

The obvious recovery behavior is to reconnect when the user presses a key. The less obvious question is what to do with that key.

Replaying it into the new shell feels convenient. It is also surprisingly dangerous.

A tab and a transport are different lifetimes

The terminal tab is a logical session owned by the user interface. The SSH process or in-process protocol session is only the current transport handle feeding that tab.

Keeping those identities separate makes recovery possible. When a transport exits, the tab does not need to disappear. Its scrollback, title, server association, saved dimensions, and session log can remain. Only the mapping from the logical tab to the dead transport is removed.

That distinction also prevents stale callbacks from damaging a newer connection. A disconnect callback must identify the handle that died and clear state only if the tab still points to that handle. Otherwise, a delayed callback from the old process can arrive after reconnection and accidentally tear down the replacement.

Why the triggering key should not be replayed

Suppose a disconnected tab receives Enter. The client notices that no live handle exists and starts a new SSH connection. If it buffers and replays Enter after authentication, the fresh shell receives an empty command immediately after drawing its first prompt.

That is mostly cosmetic. Other keys are not.

A terminal can emit several input events before reconnection finishes. A user may type part of a command while the interface still looks connected. Replaying those bytes into a newly authenticated shell changes their context. The old remote process is gone, the working directory may have changed, and the prompt may now belong to a different login environment.

The conservative rule is simple:

1. The first input event may trigger reconnection.
2. Every input event received while that reconnect is in flight is consumed.
3. Input resumes only after the new transport is established.

This makes the boundary visible. The user gets a new prompt and can decide what to run, instead of having stale input executed automatically.

It also keeps input tracking honest. The triggering Enter is not a command character and should not appear in command history or session metadata.

Coalesce reconnect attempts per logical tab

Input events can arrive faster than an SSH handshake completes. Without an in-flight marker, each event can observe the missing handle and start another connection.

The result is not merely wasted work. Two PTYs may authenticate successfully, both may attach output callbacks, and input can be routed to one while output comes from the other. A multiplexing layer can make the race even harder to notice because both processes may share one underlying TCP connection while still representing different interactive shells.

We keep a set of logical session identifiers currently reconnecting. The marker is installed before the first suspension point. Later input joins the existing attempt and waits for its result instead of starting another one.

There is a second race during initial connection. Opening a tab may launch the handshake in a separate task, so the session can be marked as connecting before its handle is stored. Input arriving in that window waits for the in-flight connection for a bounded period. It does not interpret a temporarily missing handle as permission to create another PTY.

Bind output to a transport epoch

Each successful connection creates a new transport epoch for the logical tab. The output callback is registered against both the tab identifier and the exact transport handle.

When a new epoch replaces an old one, the old output callback is removed and the old handle is disconnected. This prevents bytes from different PTYs from being interleaved in one terminal emulator.

The visual boundary matters too. Shell prompts often have no trailing newline. If retained output from the previous epoch ends mid-line, the new prompt can be drawn over it or trigger shell-specific end-of-line markers. Before reconnecting, the client inserts a line break only when the retained output does not already end with a carriage return or newline.

Session recording should preserve the same boundary. A disconnect marker closes the old epoch, while the next successful registration becomes a reconnect marker rather than pretending the session was uninterrupted.

A local process being alive is not enough

Sleep and network changes create a particularly awkward failure mode on macOS: the local ssh process can still exist after its TCP transport has become unusable.

Checking only the process identifier is insufficient. Even ssh -O check proves mainly that the local multiplexing master is running; it does not require a round trip to the server.

For the direct-download transport, we validate an existing ControlMaster by opening a non-interactive command channel through its socket and running true. Authentication fallback is disabled with batch mode, zero password prompts, and no preferred authentication methods. If the socket is stale, the probe must fail rather than silently opening a new login connection.

The wake path waits briefly before probing because Wi-Fi may not have reassociated when the system wake notification arrives. It then checks sessions serially. Healthy multiplexed connections answer quickly, while dead connections consume the timeout. Serial validation avoids creating a burst of probes at the exact moment the network stack is recovering.

If the probe fails, the handle is invalidated. The next user input follows the normal reconnect path.

Reconnection still has security boundaries

Automatic recovery must not bypass host-key policy. Before opening the replacement transport, the client performs the same host-key trust check used by an initial connection. A changed key remains a decision point; reconnecting is not permission to accept it silently.

Authentication and reachability failures are also not retried forever. A failed reconnect records the error and leaves the session in a failed state. Repeated background retries would create noise, lock accounts, or hide a configuration problem.

A write failure on a supposedly live PTY is treated differently. It is direct evidence that the cached handle is unusable. The client removes that handle and starts one coalesced reconnect attempt immediately, so the user does not need to discover the failure and then press another key.

Protocol-specific state must be cleaned up as well. An active ZMODEM transfer cannot survive the loss of its channel, so its coordinator is stopped when the transport epoch ends. Pretending such a transfer can resume would leave the terminal parser and progress UI in inconsistent states.

What reconnection does not restore

This design preserves the local tab, not the remote process.

It cannot recover an editor, REPL, foreground job, shell variables, or working directory that existed only in the dead remote shell. Users who need process continuity should still use a remote session manager such as tmux or screen.

The client also should not automatically re-run the last command. Whether a command is safe to repeat depends on application semantics that a terminal cannot reliably infer.

The useful promise is narrower: when the transport dies, the tab remains understandable, reconnection does not create duplicate PTYs, stale input is not executed, host-key policy still applies, and the new shell begins at a clear visual and recorded boundary.

That is less magical than replaying everything. It is also much easier to trust.

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Developer disclosure: I work on Nexus Shell, a native macOS SSH client. This article describes implementation lessons from that work; it is not a comparison or benchmark against other SSH clients.

In Summary: * Between baseball games now, the Yankees having won their game against the Braves, 5 to 4. I'd really like for the Rangers to win their game against the Orioles, the opening pitch is about half an hour away.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 224.76 lbs. * bp= 140/82 (71)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:15 – 1 banana, pizza * 08:30 – spinach and mushroom omelet, fresh fruit bowl * 16:30 – bowl of ice cream

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – wake up * 05:00 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:20 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 08:30 to 10:30 – breakfast out and grocery shopping with the wife * Noon – tuned into WFAN Yankees Radio for general sports talk ahead of this afternoon's Braves / Yankees game * 16:58 – and the Yankees win this one 5 to 4. Now, on to the Rangers / Orioles game

Chess: * 16:50 – moved in all pending CC games

I'd like to take up the question at the end of the previous post: what is the point of confederation? Why do some of us want to preserve it, and others to break it up?

At the risk of oversimplification, I would say that the original purpose of Confederation was twofold: one, to connect the different regions of the country and make them work together to enjoy the benefits of access to larger markets, chiefly in Europe; and two, to keep the Americans at bay. But that was then and this is now. Today, I would argue that the main reason for confederation is to pool resources to further the common interests of all Canadians. This goes against the fundamental principle of the profit-maximizing company, so perhaps inevitably there is a constant tension between the two forces, and this tension I believe is manifested in the latest instance of a referendum on separation, this time in Alberta. Let's look at how this plays out with health care, which plays a major role in the referendum questions.

Without a doubt, Canada's universal health care system would not be possible without Confederation, and vice versa. It is founded explicitly on principles of universality, accessibility, and portability. The idea is simple. The government acts as a single payer for privately supplied medical services, getting the money from taxes. The provinces manage this part, and the federal government transfers funds to the provinces to ensure that every Canadian can access the same services wherever they are. There are two relevant forms of transfers. One is specifically for health care, where each province receives a sum proportional to its population, and the other is an equalization transfer by means of which poorer provinces that don't have the same ability to tax as wealthier ones can boost their health care spending so that someone in Nova Scotia gets the same level of care as someone in British Columbia, or Alberta.

Accessibility means zero up front cost. When you need the health care system, it's available without asking you to pay a penny. That's what accessibility means. So the cost is paid for by taxes, whereby wealthier people pay more. And equalization transfers mean residents of provinces with greater ability to raise taxes transfer funds to the health care system in provinces with less ability to raise taxes. That's what equalization means.

So people who are wealthier than others and provincial governments that are wealthier than others ask why they should pay more for the same service. They see themselves as being unfairly forced to subsidize others.

And profit-maximizing insurance companies feel robbed of the opportunity to make the largest possible profits by charging premiums that wealthier people are willing to pay.

What stands in the way of both is Confederation, that enshrines in law the pursuit of equality in access to health care.

It's quite obvious who the UCP represents, and it is not surprising therefore that the UCP wants to get equalizing Confederation out of their way. But there are two approaches they can take. One is outright separation. The other avoids the considerable downsides of separation, and looks for loopholes in the structure of Confederation that can be exploited to gain the same advantages without formally separating. The latter is Danielle Smith's approach. She has contempt for the very idea of equality and therefore is quite comfortable with finding a way around the formalities of Confederation while protesting that she believes in a united Canada.

The same us-versus-them mentality pervades the immigration questions. The same sense of being taken advantage of by others.

So now it is up to all the electors of Alberta to take a stand. But let's be clear. This is not about independence or shifting the balance of power between the provinces and the Confederation. This is about equality, about looking after each other, about the idea of from each according to their means to each according to their needs. Please vote no to all the UCP's referendum questions on October 19. And as always, please and share with others. Thank you.

I think we should start keeping score of our arguments. not because i care about winning, i just want statistical evidence that im suffering, and winning. its just ridiculous to me, and everyone else, that he wasnt always like this. There was a time when he and i barely had to argue at all. we worked together. he handled the easy parts, i handled the parts nobody else wanted to touch, and somehow it worked. and we made a good pair. More than that, we were best friends. we were alike in so many ways, and completely different in others, but somehow those differences worked. we understood each other. we knew how the other person thought. there was never this constant feeling that every conversation was going to turn into an argument over something neither of us wouldve cared about five years ago. Then this incident came. im not going to write about it. thats not important here. What matters is that something changed after it. not immediately, perhaps. but eventually, i started noticing it. he became softer. more emotional. more sensitive. more concerned with feelings than i ever remember him being. the person i used to know disappeared and was replaced by someone who could disagree with me about everything. and i mean everything. we could argue about something as stupid as what to eat and somehow end up discussing morality, emotions, logic, and whether i have a functioning soul. its exhuasting. we’ve changed in complete opposite directions. i approach things with my head. he approaches them with his heart. i look at a situation and ask what makes sense, he looks at it and asks how everyone feels. we used to be so alike, we used to be different in ways that complemented each other, now we’re different in ways that collide. and i think thats what bothers me the most. i wasnt expecting us to stay the same forever. people change. i know that better than most people do. i just never expected the change to take us this far apart. there are moments when im sitting across from him during an argument and i realize i have no idea what hes talking about. not because hes unclear, No. but because i cant understand how he arrived at his conclusion in the first place. and i imagine he probably thinks the exact same thing about me. maybe thats what happens to people. you can spend years thinking someone is your closest friend, know how they think, know how they’ll react, know what they’ll say before they say it, and then one day you look at them and realize you dont recognize them anymore. or maybe thats the worst possibility, maybe i recognize him perfectly. and this is just who he became. or maybe im the one who never noticed that we were becoming strangers. its just frustrating. he used to be like me. not exactly, obviously. but close enough that i could look at him and know he understood. i taught him things. I showed him how i did things, how i thought, how to stop caring about every little consequence. he learned from me, and for a while, it felt like we were moving through the world with the same understanding of it. careless. detached. in a way. and now he has decided that being soft is the better choice. that whatever happened was supposed to change us. i regret what i did, i cant change it, and i know sitting here regretting it isnt going to undo anything. but sometimes i wonder if that was the moment everything started moving in a direction neither of us expected. he did change. he changed thats the simple answer. i just dont know what to do with the person he became. Because when i talk to him now, i dont feel like I’m talking to the person who use to stand beside me. the person who didnt care. the person i taught, worked with, trusted, and somehow managed to call my best friend. im talking to someone whos the opposite of me. and maybe thats what confuses me. i spent so much time teaching him how to be like me, only for him to decide that he didnt want to be. maybe he was always capable of becoming this person.

Whatever, either way, i dont know whether im angry at him for changing, angry at myself what for happend, or simply frustrated that I can’t make sense of it. and probably all the three. i just wish i understood when we stopped being the same kind of people

Sincerely, The opposite half

Treating myself to a double-header today.

I'm listening now to WFAN Yankees Radio for general sports talk ahead of this afternoon's Braves / Yankees game, which is scheduled to start at 2:05 PM CDT. I'll stay with this station for the radio-call of that game.

And tonight I'll have game 2 of a 3-game series. The Baltimore Orioles and my Texas Rangers are scheduled to play at 6:15 PM CDT. The Rangers won last night's game by a happy score of 2 to 1.

As I usually do, I'll follow both games' scores and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

Hello I’m listening now to “Radio” by Beyonce on the boom blaster. It brings me back in time to when I was in Barrens and we were having tacos and I was a raptor riding troll shaman and life was simple.

Today we went with some raspberry pie to the neighbours and we sat on the veranda under the sun and the clouds looked like an AI rendering or something, there wasn’t much to say about them except that they looked like they were zoomed out and too many of them

Hey maybe we’re in a simulation after all

And what if the clouds was just a glitch in the matrix.

On Priorities

Current Reading: Adler is still the focus. I’m starting to realize just how short my attention span has become from years of doom scrolling. Also how difficult it is with a busy family life to find time to sit down and knock out chunks of the book. But, I’m greasing the groove. I spent a good amount of time reading it out loud to my 8 year old today.

---

My current state in life means that I have to prioritize differently to allow myself to accomplish my goals, without sacrificing the things that matter most.

Way back, when I was just married and still hadn’t had kids yet, doing the things I wanted to do was much easier. It didn’t matter if I got off work and spent two and a half hours in the gym. My wife could come hang out with me if she wanted to. Maybe do a workout of her own, or simply spend some time doing what she wanted to do at home. I could get done, get home, shower and eat, and still have time to relax with her before getting to bed at a decent time.

It also didn't matter if I spent an entire Saturday lounging around with my nose in a book…or two or three. I’ve always been a very eclectic reader, sometimes to a fault. I’ve got a lot of books with one dogeared page right in the middle and I generally make no apologies for it. I remember Scott Hahn talking about how he mines books. He has a vast personal library and I think he admits that often he’s only reading parts of the books that are relevant to what he’s researching. But none-the-less I could spend a whole day just plowing through my reading list.

All that went out the window when we had our first child. Suddenly, when I got home, there was this little person who I couldn’t wait to be around. Also a big person who desperately needed a break from said little person. Not only that, but things like lack of sleep, feeding schedules, bed time routines and extra dishes (seriously we used to keep 10 bottles for our daughter when she was first born instead of just washing one and letting it dry after it was used) all led down the same road. Less time to do the things I wanted to do because this tiny human depended on me for things she couldn’t do herself. I felt the need to be more present with my family, and honestly it was the right call. Pretty soon baby #2 came and that added a whole other layer of complexity. But we managed, and the weight room stayed dark. So did my book shelf.

It’s not like I stopped reading and lifting altogether. Just the selection of books became more… nursery themed. And workouts became how often we went for walks. I don’t regret it at all. But, by the end of most nights if we weren’t passing out immediately after getting all the chores done, I just wanted to stare blankly at the wall or numb my mind and let some show or feed do my thinking for me.

Then BOOM! Babies #3 and #4. And yes I’m quite aware of how they are made.

I’m not making excuses, well…maybe I am. And I’m sure there are lots of well disciplined people who manage to stay sharp while raising lots of little humans, but I’m not one of them. The struggle is real.

All that to say, I’m being more conscious of it now. Figuring out how to do the things that make me better. Still keeping priorities straight, just adding to the list the habits that took a proverbial back seat to the little things in the actual back seat.

On Building

Current Reading: Still working through How To Read A Book by Adler. It’s not that the information isn’t good, it’s just dry. I’ve also made the switch to a digital copy. It’s just more practical to have a copy with me all the time on my phone or tablet that I can carry and read whenever I have time. It’s kind of a bummer, because for the first time in my life I was marking up a book with margin notes and was really enjoying it. I also lose some of the ease of flipping around, but it’s not impossible with the kindle app. And I can still take notes but now they are searchable so that’s one advantage.

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I prefer building systems over using them.

I’ve spent an enormous amount of time planning what I want this journal to be. Endless lists of what should be the focus. How I will present it. Trying one format, deleting everything, starting over, keeping one thing and cutting everything else. Changing the name (it wasn’t always called The Practice). Leaving drafts in the queue for weeks just to trash them. And even though this is the first post you can see on the timeline, I promise it’s not the first “first” post that was ever here. One day, maybe I’ll write about the original idea, everything I learned in building it, and how it led me here. But suffice it to say, I’m done building and focused on creating now.

But…I figured out I really liked building it. The whole process of everything listed above was fun for me. Then the thought of actually doing it wasn’t as exciting. So much so that I started finding other projects to build. Revamping our whole homeschool curriculum. Building a whole new budgeting and finance system for our home. Building out a Saint Michaels Lent program for my parish. And sure, some of those things needed to be done, but I just kept telling myself that this wasn’t quite right yet, so no need to put any actual writing out.

Truth be told I was just nervous about publishing. Having people see (or at least the possibility of people seeing, I currently have 3 subscribers and I know all of them) me work through my thoughts in public was unnerving. So I kept finding other things to do and tweaking everything here. Seriously, I even created a whole other publication with a whole other theme in addition to this one before I had posted the second article. And that homeschool curriculum, built but we haven’t started the school year yet. Budgeting system, built but no data inputted yet. At least the Saint Michaels Lent program is off the ground and we’re getting ready to start it. But I built The Practice to write. And I’ve been avoiding it. And as fun as building systems is, they’re not worth much if you don’t actually use them.

Well, it’s done now. No more revisions. May you receive The Practice for what it is. Me working through things that have grabbed my attention for all the world (or at least the 3 people I know) to see. A public journal. Not polished but practiced.

JOURNAL 8 août 2026

Ce soir nos copains nous ont invitées à l’izakaya un menu surprise pour nous recevoir dans la bande, on est les seules filles ils sont super fiers et super contents de nous. Ils disent qu’on est faites pour le #surf 😄😄

Distance makes me feel abandoned, but true closeness makes me feel terrified that I will mess up. So I hold myself to impossible standards believing I have to be perfect to find love.

Oops! We hit the moon with rocket junk accidentally... again. lol. Those headlines made me envision the chainsaw wielding idiot owning hoards of loyal minions who have dedicated every waking second of their lives to fabricating and releasing lies about the activities of his stupid failure of a space company.

I didn't believe it at first. I treated the stories as though coming from an attention starved weirdo with too much money buying his way into the spotlight. I thought it was as fake as his trillionaire status was. But it turns out that some of their space junk actually did hit the moon. It wasn't a planned impact. Maybe they should never be allowed to launch anything into space ever again. Like what are they going to 'accidentally' hit next?

The leader of the department of health changed his stance on MMR vaccinations. The only reason he would do such a thing would be that he learned things about how they work. Perhaps in the future people in his position should already know things like that before taking on the job.

But hey, he now has a cooking show. I wonder if he will point out (with that almost angelic magical voice of his) that if he was doing his fucking job instead of trying get likes on Youtube maybe the salad he wants you to make wouldn't give you diarrhea. Omg I wish someone would make a song, or at least a montage, with him saying diarrhea.

The elderly hypocrite suddenly became mad at how oil companies are profiting too much from the war that he shouldn't have started and now can't stop. Was saying things about how it is effecting the price at the pumps. Does he even know what a gas pump is? I have doubts. I have no doubt that his soft little hands have never touched a gas pump. Oil companies have been robbing nearly everyone on the entire planet for decades. Seems weird that he is suddenly pretending to care about it.

What about all the other corporations and billionaires (himself included) that are stealing from the poor for their own profit every second of every day, and have been for decades?

Him suddenly noticing the price of gas could be just more evidence that the dementia is getting closer to the point where they will no longer be able to stuff his gelatinous tired old body into a chair, and then prop the whole mess up behind a desk in front of the cameras. The shit that spews out of his miserable old face has been hovering around 80-90% incoherent for a decade or more. There will come a tipping point when the unstoppable progression of dementia causes that typical (mostly incoherent) to become 100% gibberish. But the race is still close? He and his incompetent regime could still have total control after November?

You and me will be alone no more

I just really like that song right now, but in other news, I have my date tomorrow! It’s pretty late and I’m not super happy that I’ve stayed up but you live in you learn.

A few more pix from the archive this morning:

Second studio in Houston back in 2021.

Third studio in Houston circa 2024.

Writing space at 3rd Houston studio.

Early TSG script, written in Los Angeles around 2016, before I adopted more of a “Marvel Method” working from loose plots instead.

Have yet to come across pix from the fist Houston space, Denver studio, LA, or New York. It's all a jumbled mess.

#archive #TSG

There is a single encryption algorithm that mathematics declares unbreakable. Not “hard”: “impossible”, with a proof to back it up. And yet every time someone has tried to actually use it, it has fallen – not through a flaw in the mathematics, but through a banal human error. This is the story of a fascinating perfection that turns imperfect.

Almost all the cryptography we use every day – the kind that protects your bank account, your messages, your connection to this very site – rests on a bet: that certain mathematical problems are too slow or too hard to solve. Factoring six-hundred-digit numbers, computing discrete logarithms over elliptic curves: nobody today knows how to do it fast enough, and so we sleep soundly. But it's a peace with an expiry date, because “hard” is never “impossible”. The hardware changes, a cleverer algorithm comes along, quantum computing looms on the horizon, and the bet has to be renegotiated from scratch.

There is one, single exception. A cipher that isn't hard to break: it's impossible, and not in the advertising sense of the word. There's a proof, a theorem in the full sense. It's called the one-time pad, the single-use notebook. In a world full of threats to privacy and of governments playing “big brother” without knowing the basics of modern cryptography, it's worth telling the story of this cipher and of how, for a century, the real world has found a way to sidestep it every single time without ever scratching it.

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An invention from 1917

It all begins in a room at AT&T.

In 1917 Gilbert Vernam, an engineer at Bell Labs, invents a cipher to protect teleprinter communications. Vernam's idea is elegant and simple: electrically combine each character of the message with a character read from a punched paper tape – what we can call “the key”. The combination is a reversible operation: whoever holds the same tape undoes it by running it backwards and recovers the message; whoever doesn't have it sees only noise. If the tape says one thing and the message says another, what comes out on the wire is a sum of the two, unreadable to anyone without that tape.

The structure is already very solid, but the conceptual leap is made by a soldier. Captain Joseph Mauborgne, of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, realises that if the sequence on the tape were completely random, cryptanalysis would become enormously harder. It's the intuition that turns Vernam's cipher into the true one-time pad: not just “any” key, repeated or derived from a phrase, but a truly random key, as long as the message and used only once. Hence the name: a notebook of sheets, each sheet a key, each sheet torn off and destroyed after use.

The intuition is right, but it hangs unproven. For a quarter of a century no one manages to explain why it works so well: the proof is missing that the system is not merely very robust, but mathematically unassailable.

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Two lines running in the same year

Here the story forks, and the two lines that set off run in parallel for the rest of the tale. On one side there's the theory, which between 1941 and 1949 arrives at locking down the cipher with a proof. On the other there's the practice, which in those very same years begins to sabotage it. It's worth keeping both in view, because the whole point of the affair lies precisely in the distance between the two.

The line of the proof. The proof comes from the man who, in those same years, is inventing the entire theory of information from scratch: Claude Shannon. The special status of the Vernam-Mauborgne pad is established by him, about twenty-five years after its invention. In his Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems – circulated as a classified report in 1945 and published openly in 1949 – Shannon proves that the one-time pad is unassailable because every possible plaintext is equally probable given any ciphertext. This property is called perfect secrecy.

But Shannon isn't the first to get there. The Soviet mathematician Vladimir Kotelnikov – the same one behind the sampling theorem – had independently proved the absolute security of the one-time pad as early as 1941, in the very months of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, in a report that, as far as anyone can tell, remains classified to this day. Unable to share it with the Allies, Shannon would have to rediscover the same properties on his own a few years later. The USSR, then, possesses the mathematical proof that its own code is unbreakable earlier and better than anyone else.

The line of the sabotage. In the very same span of time in which it deposits that proof, the Soviet apparatus begins to demolish it with its own hands. Between late 1943 and the end of the conflict, the surge in communications traffic and the relocation of Soviet industry towards the Urals push the personnel to reuse the cipher notebooks. To this is added the often-cited hypothesis of a more concentrated episode: with German troops just outside Moscow between 1941 and 1942, staff at the Centre are said to have printed more than one copy of the same key material. Immediate contributing cause or prolonged drift, the result is the same – and fatal, namely: the moment the same key enciphers two different messages, the one-time pad ceases to exist and becomes an ordinary cipher, attackable with statistics.

Let's stop a moment, because this is the crack that everything else passes through, and it's worth seeing up close. Call M₁ and M₂ two plaintexts, K the reused key, and let's use XOR (addition without carry, the operation the pad uses to combine key and text). The two ciphertexts are C₁ = M₁ ⊕ K and C₂ = M₂ ⊕ K. An attacker knows neither the messages nor the key: they know only C₁ and C₂, fished out of the ether. But if they combine them with each other, something remarkable happens:

C₁ ⊕ C₂ = (M₁ ⊕ K) ⊕ (M₂ ⊕ K) = M₁ ⊕ M₂

The key cancels out. It vanishes, because K ⊕ K is zero. What's left to the attacker is the XOR of the two plaintexts, with no trace of the secret remaining: and from there, knowing the structure of the underlying code and the statistics of the language – which letters and words recur, where the spaces fall – one begins to separate the two messages and reconstruct them. The perfection of the one-time pad lies entirely in the “one“: one key, one message. Reusing it a second time doesn't weaken it a little. It cancels it.

Theory and sabotage, the proof and its demolition, in the same country and in the same years. It's the irony on which the entire story of VENONA rests.

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VENONA: forty years inside a crack

On the other side of the ocean, someone finds that crack. In 1943 the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service launches an ultra-secret project against Soviet diplomatic traffic, believed impregnable precisely because it was enciphered with a one-time pad. It changes name a couple of times – JADE, then BRIDE – before settling on a word chosen at random, with no meaning: VENONA.

For a year, near-total darkness. The first breach is opened, in late 1943, by Lieutenant Richard Hallock, who works on Soviet commercial traffic – the so-called “Trade”, the messages dealing with matters of exchange – and notices that the Soviets are reusing the pad pages. Hallock and his colleagues recover a significant quantity of key tables, but it's only the outer layer of an onion. The messages aren't enciphered with the pad alone: they are first converted into numbers via a complex code, and then super-enciphered by adding the numerical stream of the one-time pad. With the pad broken, there remains the codebook to reconstruct, the one that turns words into figures.

To that work sets a young analyst, Meredith Gardner – a linguist, a veteran of breaking Japanese diplomatic codes, who after the war taught himself Russian. It's he who penetrates what will turn out to be NKVD traffic, and later GRU, reconstructing the code piece by piece. The first reconstructions of the codebook he owes, by his own admission, to the linguist Marie Meyer; and it's worth recalling, against a certain spy-novel imagery, that most of the cryptanalysts were young women. The dates of the breakthrough are precise and close together: on 13 December 1946 Gardner reads a KGB message discussing the 1944 American presidential campaign; a week later, on 20 December 1946, he breaks another – sent to Moscow two years earlier – containing the list of the leading scientists working on the Manhattan Project. The proof that the atomic bomb had been infiltrated.

As early as 1945 the very existence of VENONA had been revealed to the USSR by Bill Weisband, a Soviet agent embedded in the U.S. Army's SIGINT. The Soviets, that is, knew they could be read. But the mathematics of the pad offers no retroactive remedy: the messages already intercepted and enciphered with reused keys remained vulnerable regardless, whatever Moscow knew. There was no flaw to close; there was only an error already committed, frozen in the ether, that the Americans would go on squeezing for decades.

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Putting a name to the ghosts

From there the work is slow and stubborn. In the summer of 1947 Gardner produces enough results to write a “Special Report” laying out the project's potential to the intelligence leadership: it's that document which triggers the long collaboration between cryptanalysts and the FBI to put names to the spies. Because even with the pad broken and the code reconstructed, one last layer remains: the people hidden behind the cryptonyms, the code names. New York is TYRE, Washington CARTHAGE, San Francisco BABYLON, in an imagery drawn from classical antiquity. Some cryptonyms appear dozens of times and are fairly transparent; others once or twice only, and remain unknown to this day. The system, after all, betrays the same vice as the pad: sometimes the KGB reused the same covername for different people, untangled only by context or geography. Reuse as the recurring sin, at every level.

When the cryptonyms find a face, the history of the Cold War is rewritten. Twenty-one decrypted cables, all from 1944-45, concern Julius Rosenberg, first “Antenna” and then “Liberal”. The Britons Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess of the Cambridge Five fall, and with them dozens of other Soviet sources inside the American and British governments. And yet, in proportion, the haul is tiny: the Venona Papers are some 3,000 cables, forced slowly over a project lasting nearly forty years, from 1943 to 1980 – three thousand messages out of several hundred thousand intercepted, a laughable fraction, made possible only by the reuse of the keys.

Important note: the cipher was not broken. The mathematics of Shannon and Kotelnikov held perfectly. No one “solved” the one-time pad. It was the wartime logistics of the Soviet apparatus – notebooks reprinted under pressure, keys reused to save time – that handed Moscow's secrets to the Americans for the next forty years. The theory was perfect. The hand that applied it was not.

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The numbers still floating in the ether today

You might think a technique of teleprinters and paper notebooks is archaeology. It isn't. The one-time pad, precisely because it's the only system that requires no computer and fears no amount of the enemy's computing power, is still today the tool of whoever must communicate with an agent in the field without leaving a trace. All it takes is a radio.

Anyone with a shortwave receiver can stumble into them: synthetic voices, often female, reciting endless sequences of numbers in groups of five, sometimes preceded by a little tune or a signature melody. They're called number stations, they've been transmitting for almost a century and for decades were an officially non-existent mystery. They aren't an urban legend: several espionage trials have confirmed their use, and the messages are typically enciphered with a one-time pad. Those groups of five digits are exactly the method of the cipher notebooks: the services have long converted words and phrases into groups of digits via a codebook, and then combine secret numbers with them by modular addition – the same carry-less sum we saw cancel out in VENONA, only done by hand on paper instead of electrically on tape.

And if the number stations are the voice that calls the agent, at the other end of the line there was hardware built precisely to answer without being found: devices like the Soviet R-353 “Proton” (below), which pre-encoded the message onto a magnetic tape and then fired it off in Morse at very high speed – up to 250 words per minute – so as not to leave whoever was listening the time to locate the transmitter with radio direction finding. It's the same principle as the pad, but on the physical plane: if the one-time pad makes the content unassailable, the burst transmission makes the position of the sender unassailable. Two ways of vanishing, both perfect as long as the human link holds.

The case that brought them to court is Cuban. The station nicknamed “¡Atención!” – catalogued by radio listeners as HM01 – becomes the first in the world to be officially and publicly accused of transmitting to spies, at the centre of a federal trial after the FBI, on 12 September 1998, dismantles the Cuban Wasp Network. The arrests number ten; the five who go to trial will go down in history as the “Cuban Five”.

And here the lesson repeats itself. The one-time pad is mathematically perfect, and indeed the FBI doesn't break it. It doesn't need to: when it arrests the network, it recovers the pad software, the shortwave receivers and the decryption keys on floppy disk. Not only that. The enciphered messages found in the apartments matched the transmissions the FBI had recorded from the ether during surveillance. No one forced anything: the prosecution had in hand both the intercepted signal and the key taken from the drawer, and simply overlaid them – the two things every tradecraft manual insists you never keep together. The mathematically unbreakable secret defeated by a lock.

And it's precisely here that the system's residual strength lies, when used well: the transmissions leave no digital trace, receiving a signal is not in itself proof of a crime, and the moment the pad is used and destroyed the cryptographic trail is cut. Nothing to intercept, nothing to decrypt after the fact. It's not archive theory: ¡Atención! is transmitting to this day, nearly thirty years on from those arrests. Provided, always, that no one forgets a floppy in a drawer.

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The perfect cipher lives only on the blackboard

Line up the pieces of this story: the one-time pad is, literally, the only encryption method humanity has ever conceived whose unbreakability we can prove. Used correctly, it remains among the most solid ever invented. And in a century it has never been beaten on its own ground – mathematics. It has always been beaten on ours.

VENONA doesn't stem from a weakness of the cipher, but from the logistics of an apparatus under wartime pressure. The Wasp Network doesn't fall because someone decrypted its numbers, but because it leaves the disks in a drawer. The weak point is never the algorithm. It's the key to be distributed, the randomness hard to produce, the discipline impossible to maintain, the physical medium that survives and accuses. It's always the friction of the real world against an idea born frictionless.

On the blackboard, in the clean abstraction where keys are random by definition, distribute themselves by magic and destroy themselves without leaving ash. But we live elsewhere: a world of approximate generators, of reprinted notebooks, of forgotten floppies, of exhausted people who at three in the morning cut a corner. The only mathematically unbreakable cipher we possess works perfectly everywhere – except in reality.

And perhaps this is the most honest thing cryptography can teach us, well beyond cryptography: perfection is provable, but it is not inhabitable.

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(This article was born from a private experiment: I tried to write my own implementation of the one-time pad in Python. The code worked, but in doing it I reconstructed, without meaning to, exactly the errors you've read about here – the not-random-enough generator, the reused key, the details left in the clear. Touching with my own hands how easy it is to get it wrong was the best way to understand why, in a century, the perfect cipher has never held up on contact with us, poor imperfect human beings.)

References and further reading

The theory

• Claude E. Shannon, Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems, Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 28, no. 4, October 1949, pp. 656-715. The paper that proves perfect secrecy.
• Claude E. Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography, Memorandum MM 45-110-02, Bell Laboratories, 1 September 1945. The classified version, four years ahead of the open publication.
• Claude E. Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 27, 1948. The twin work that founds information theory.
• Vladimir A. Kotelnikov, report on the absolute security of the Vernam cipher, 1941 (still classified). Independent proof, earlier than Shannon's.

The history (VENONA)

• National Security Agency, VENONA: An Overview (Cryptologic Almanac, 50th Anniversary Series) – declassified official document.
• National Security Agency, The Venona Story – official monograph on the cryptonyms and Gardner's decryptions.
• NSA-CIA, Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939-1957, ed. R. L. Benson and M. Warner, 1996. The collection of the roughly 2,900 messages translated and made public from July 1995.
• John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press, 1999. The reference work on the identifications.
• Chronology of Gardner's decryptions (13 and 20 December 1946), the roles of Marie Meyer, Genevieve Feinstein, Cecil Phillips and Richard Hallock, pad reuse and the revelation of VENONA to the USSR by Bill Weisband (1945).

The number stations

• Records of the Wasp Network / Cuban Five trial (arrests 12 September 1998; trial material declassified from 2001), on the use of the “¡Atención!” / HM01 station as evidence.
• Crypto Museum, technical page on the Soviet R-353 “Proton” spy transceiver.
• Priyom.org and ENIGMA 2000 – communities of radio listeners who catalogue and still monitor shortwave transmissions.

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