Finally, a New Clue to Solve the CIA’s Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture


Kryptos, a sculpture by American artist Jim Sanborn located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia.

Kryptos, a sculpture by American artist Jim Sanborn located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia. MAI/Landov



In 1989, the year the Berlin Wall began to fall, American artist Jim Sanborn was busy working on his Kryptos sculpture, a cryptographic puzzle wrapped in a riddle that he created for the CIA’s headquarters and that has been driving amateur and professional cryptographers mad ever since.


To honor the 25th anniversary of the Wall’s demise and the artist’s 69th birthday this year, Sanborn has decided to reveal a new clue to help solve his iconic and enigmatic artwork. It’s only the second hint he’s released since the sculpture was unveiled in 1990 and may finally help unlock the fourth and final section of the encrypted sculpture, which frustrated sleuths have been struggling to crack for more than two decades.


The 12-foot-high, verdigrised copper, granite and wood sculpture on the grounds of the CIA complex in Langley, Virginia, contains four encrypted messages carved out of the metal, three of which were solved years ago. The fourth is composed of just 97 letters, but its brevity belies its strength. Even the NSA, whose master crackers were the first to decipher other parts of the work, gave up on cracking it long ago. So four years ago, concerned that he might not live to see the mystery of Kryptos resolved, Sanborn released a clue to help things along, revealing that six of the last 97 letters when decrypted spell the word “Berlin”—a revelation that many took to be a reference to the Berlin Wall.


To that clue today, he’s adding the next word in the sequence—“clock”—that may or may not throw a wrench in this theory. Now the Kryptos sleuths just have to unscramble the remaining 86 characters to find out.


Is a Clock a Clock?


Sanborn told WIRED that he’s always been fascinated by Berlin’s many clocks but the Berlin Clock in particular has intrigued him the most. The clock, also known as the Berlin Uhr or Set Theory Clock, was designed in the 1970s by inventor and tinkerer Dieter Binninger. It displays the time through illuminated colored blocks rather than numbers and requires the viewer to calculate the time based on a complex scheme.


The Berlin Clock, or the Set Theory Clock.

The Berlin Clock, or the Set Theory Clock. John Freeman/Lonely Planet Images/Getty Images



A yellow lamp at the top of the clock blinks every two seconds while a row of red lamps beneath it represent five hours. Red lights on a second row denote one hour each, and time is calculated based on the number of lights illuminated. “So if in the first line 2 lamps are lit and in the second line 3 lamps, it’s 5+5+3=13h or 1 p.m.,” notes one description of the timepiece.

“Most people have no idea who Dieter is and all of the other people who make strange clocks in Berlin,” Sanborn says. “There’s a very interesting back story to [the Berlin Clock].”


The focus on the clock, however, may just be a bit of sly misdirection from Sanborn—who is known among Kryptos fans for his puckishness.


“Clock” could easily refer instead to a method devised by a Polish mathematician and cryptologist during World War II to crack Germany’s Enigma ciphers—a method that was expanded on by Alan Turing and his team at Bletchley Park who are credited with ultimately cracking Enigma. (It may be no coincidence that Sanborn has decided to release his new clue at the same time as The Imitation Game , a film about Turing’s work on Enigma, is opening in US theaters on Nov. 28.)


How Kryptos Has Remained Unsolved for 20 Years


Sanborn’s Kryptos sculpture was unveiled at the CIA on Nov. 3, 1990, a month that has a recurring theme in the sculpture’s ethos.


The artwork features a large block of petrified wood standing upright, with a tall copper plate scrolling out from the wood like a sheet of paper. At the sculpture’s base is a round pool with a fountain pump that sends water moving in a circular direction around the pool. Carved out of the copper plate are approximately 1,800 letters, some of them forming a cryptographic table based on a method developed by a 16th-century Frenchman named Blaise de Vigenere.


In 1995 a small group of cryptanalysts inside the NSA quietly deciphered the first three sections of the sculpture, though no one outside the agency and the CIA’s top brass knew about it. In 1998, CIA analyst David Stein cracked the same three messages using paper and pencil and about 400 lunch-time hours. Only his CIA colleagues knew of his success, however, because the agency didn’t publicize it. A year later, California computer scientist Jim Gillogly gained public notoriety when he cracked the same three messages using a Pentium II.


The first message is a poetic phrase that Sanborn composed:


“Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion.”


The second one hints at something buried:


“It was totally invisible. How’s that possible? They used the earth’s magnetic field. x The information was gathered and transmitted undergruund to an unknown location. x Does Langley know about this? They should: it’s buried out there somewhere. x Who knows the exact location? Only WW. This was his last message. x Thirty eight degrees fifty seven minutes six point five seconds north, seventy seven degrees eight minutes forty four seconds west. x Layer two.”


WW, Sanborn told WIRED in 2005, refers to William Webster, director of the CIA at the time of the sculpture’s completion. Sanborn was forced to provide Webster with the solution to the puzzle to reassure the CIA that it wasn’t something that would embarrass the agency.


The third message is a take on a passage from the diary of English Archaeologist Howard Carter describing the opening of King Tut’s tomb on Nov. 26, 1922.


“Slowly, desparatly slowly, the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway was removed. With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left-hand corner. And then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in. The hot air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker, but presently details of the room within emerged from the mist. x Can you see anything? q”


Sanborn has said that the first three sections contain clues to solving the final 97 letters but no one has figured out what those might be. After no progress cracking the last section, Sanborn released the “Berlin” clue four years ago, considering it “a significant clue.”


“I’m throwing it out there. It just makes that many fewer characters people have to figure out,” he told WIRED at the time.


The six letters that spell “Berlin”—NYPVTT—-are the 64th through 69th letters of the final 97 characters and the new clue “clock” are deciphered from the next five letters that follow it.


Code detectives worked to crack the puzzle following the Berlin revelation. Members of a popular Kryptos Yahoo Group led by Elonka Dunin, the foremost expert on Kryptos, tried for months to resolve it but to no avail.


Who knows if the new clue will prove to be any more helpful. And even if it is and sleuths decipher the final code, there’s an additional message they will still need to resolve. Once decrypted, the fourth section reveals a riddle, which Sanborn has said requires sleuths to be on the CIA grounds to solve.


The Mystery of the Riddle


“In part of the code that’s been deciphered, I refer to an act that took place when I was at the agency and a location that’s on the ground of the agency,” Sanborn said during a 2005 interview with WIRED. “So in order to find that place, you have to decipher the piece and then go to the agency and find that place.”


The riddle may refer to something Sanborn buried on the CIA grounds at the time he installed the sculpture, possibly in a location spelled out in section two of the sculpture, which lists a set of latitude and longitude coordinates: 38 57 6.5 N and 77 8 44 W. Sanborn has said they refer to “locations of the agency.”


Dunin has suggested that the coordinates may refer to the location of a Berlin Wall monument on the CIA grounds. Three slabs from the Berlin Wall sit at the spy agency’s headquarters, a gift from the German government. Sanborn has also told WIRED that the collapse of the wall was “big news” at the time he was “casting about” for things he wanted to include in his sculpture. However, the wall monument wasn’t dedicated at the CIA until 1992, two years after Kryptos was unveiled. Although the coordinates of the monument’s location—38 57 2.5 N, 77 8 40 W—differ from the coordinates mentioned in Kryptos by four seconds in both the latitude and longitude, Dunin has speculated that the CIA may have originally planned to position the monument at the coordinates Sanborn mentions on Kryptos but then later chose a different location. Alternatively, Sanborn may have been using an incorrect U.S. geological map when he created his sculpture and thus got the coordinates wrong, she notes. After all, Sanborn has other errors in his sculpture, both intentional and unintentional.


Kryptos includes intentional spelling errors and misaligned characters set higher on a line of text than characters around them. But in 2006, Sanborn realized he had also made an inadvertent error, a missing “x” that he mistakenly deleted from the end of a line in section two, a section that was already solved. He discovered the omission while doing a letter-by-letter comparison of the plaintext and coded text in preparation for a book about his work.


The “x” was supposed to signify a period or section-break at the end of a phrase. Sanborn removed it for aesthetic reasons, thinking it wouldn’t affect the way the puzzle was deciphered, but in fact it did. What sleuths had until then deciphered to say “ID by rows” was actually supposed to say “layer two.” The correction hasn’t helped anyone solve the rest of the puzzle, however, in the subsequent years.


Now this second clue, Sanborn hopes, will reinvigorate efforts to crack the mystery, though he has mixed views on whether he wants the journey to end. The artist has said he’d like to see Kryptos solved in his lifetime, but he also enjoys that some of the smartest minds in cryptography—including those at the CIA and NSA—continue to be baffled by his work.


Only two other people, aside from Sanborn, were initially said to know the solution to Kryptos: one was the retired chairman of the CIA’s Cryptographic Center Ed Scheidt, who helped Sanborn choose and alter the coding techniques for the sculpture. The other was William Webster, the CIA director who received a sealed envelope containing the solution at the sculpture’s dedication. However, in 2005 Sanborn revealed to WIRED that Scheidt and Webster only thought they knew the solution. In fact, he had deceived them.


In November 1989, after the East German government announced that its citizens were free from then on to cross over the Wall into West Berlin and West Germany, crowds of euphoric Germans began chipping away at the cement barrier. With this new clue provided by Sanford, let the chipping away on Kryptos begin.



A brief hiatus and dark skies in danger


U.S. East Coast viewed from the International Space Station.

U.S. East Coast viewed from the International Space Station. NASA



I won’t be able to post many (or any) posts on Beyond Apollo in the next few weeks because of holiday and work travel. I’ll be hauling along research material when I travel (I always do), but I doubt that I’ll have time to do much more than take notes.


The good news is that I’ll be visiting Washington, DC, for the first time in several years, and I’ve built a personal day into my meeting schedule to do some archival research. I hope to be able to photocopy or scan some new documents to write about in the Smithsonian archives at the Udvar-Hazy facility, which I have not visited before.


My meetings are at the Smithsonian on the National Mall, and I look forward to breaking away, if possible, to have a look at the National Air and Space Museum. I last visited in 2000, so I expect that it has changed a great deal since then.


Here’s what I am currently working on for Beyond Apollo: a post on plans for Outer Solar System exploration before gravity-assist and the Grand Tour; a much-delayed second installment in my series of posts on North American Aviation’s 1965 Mars-Venus piloted flyby study (begun here); an anniversary post on Mariner II, the first successful interplanetary spacecraft; and another delayed post, this time on a 1962 Chrysler study of possible equatorial launch sites for NASA launches (the working title is “Spaceport: Somalia”).


As always, I thank you for reading Beyond Apollo. I appreciate your comments and suggestions.


To conclude this post, I want to let any night-sky fans out there know about a disturbing development in Flagstaff, Arizona. Located 7000 feet above sea level in ponderosa pine forests on the flank of an extinct volcano, this city of 60,000 people is home to Lowell Observatory, the U.S. Naval Observatory, the U.S. Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Science Center, Northern Arizona University’s recently upgraded observatory, and other educational and science institutions. Most of these institutions have a global reach – actually, an interplanetary reach, because scientists based at many of them are involved in missions to Pluto, Saturn, Ceres, and other places.


For its innovative dark-skies policies, Flagstaff was designated world’s first International Dark-Sky City in 2001. Nevertheless, dark-sky advocates – only a few of whom work for the observatories, it turns out – continue to fight off challenges to Flagstaff’s dark-skies zoning rules. Occasionally the city government is seduced by the light side; usually, as is now the case, when big-money development is promised.


Often this happens when members of the city council fail to understand the contribution the science institutions in Flagstaff make to the community. They pump millions of dollars into this small city on an on-going basis, and have done so at least since the U.S. Naval Observatory came to town in the 1950s.


In addition, Flagstaff’s science institutions support local science and technology education. One example is Flagstaff’s annual two-week Festival of Science, which takes place every September, but support for schools, teachers, and students continues throughout the year.


I wrote about Flagstaff’s long and successful battle to keep its skies dark. You can find my article here, on the website of the Flagstaff Dark Skies Coalition.


The latest challenge to Flagstaff’s dark skies is well described here. It is an apartment complex on the road leading to the U.S. Naval Observatory. A vote will be held December 2. A defeat for dark skies in Flagstaff will send a negative message to other towns and cities near observatories all around the world. If you wish to tell the Flagstaff city government that the world is watching what it does next, you can do so by sending email to the addresses below:


Mayor Jerry Nabours – jnabours@flagstaffaz.gov


Vice-Mayor Coral Evans – cevans@flagstaffaz.gov


Councilmember Celia Barotz – cbarotz@flagstaffaz.gov


Councilmember Karla Brewster – kbrewster@flagstaffaz.gov


Councilmember Jeff Oravits – joravits@flagstaffaz.gov


Councilmember Scott Overton – soverton@flagstaffaz.gov


Out-going Councilmember Mark Woodson – mwoodson@flagstaffaz.gov


In-coming Councilmember Eva Putzova – eva.putzova@gmail.com


Assistant to the City Manager Stephanie Smith – ssmith@flagstaffaz.gov



Utah Considers Cutting Off Water to the NSA’s Monster Data Center


An aerial view of the cooling units at the NSA's Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah.

An aerial view of the cooling units at the NSA’s Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah. Rick Bowmer/AP





Lawmakers are considering a bill that would shut off the water spigot to the massive data center operated by the National Security Agency in Bluffdale, Utah.

The legislation, proposed by Utah lawmaker Marc Roberts, is due to go to the floor of the Utah House of Representatives early next year, but it was debated in a Public Utilities and Technology Interim Committee meeting on Wednesday. The bill, H.B. 161, directs municipalities like Bluffdale to “refuse support to any federal agency which collects electronic data within this state.”


The NSA brought its Bluffdale data center online about a year ago, taking advantage Utah’s cheap power and a cut-rate deal for millions of gallons of local water, used to cool the 1-million-square-foot building’s servers. Roberts’ bill, however, would prohibit the NSA from negotiating new water deals when its current Bluffdale agreement runs out in 2021.


The law seems like a long-shot to clear legislative hurdles when Utah’s legislature re-convenes next year, but Wednesday’s committee hearing was remarkable, nonetheless, says Nate Carlisle, a reporter with the Salt Lake Tribune who has waged a fight with the NSA and Bluffdale officials to determine how much water the data center is actually using. “What’s noteworthy is no one on the panel said: ‘Hey, wait a minute, we can’t do this,'” he says. “They had some specific concerns about the language of the bill, but there was no outright opposition.”


Utah lawmakers on the committee could have voted to give the bill an “unfavorable” review on the spot, essentially dooming it on the floor, but they didn’t do that.


Instead, they simply listened to testimony on the NSA and Bluffdale’s support of the center. “I just don’t want to subsidize what they’re doing on the back of our citizens,” Carlisle quotes Republican Representative Roger Barrus as saying during the meeting.


Utah has a long history of disputes with the federal government, but this is the first time Carlisle remembers anyone proposing to cut off water to a federal agency. “I think it’s representative of an attitude change in Utah that the bill is even being discussed,” he says.



Google’s New Service Kills Ads on Your Favorite Sites for a Monthly Fee


contributor-inline

Google



The web is funded by ads. But so many people hate seeing them, and they often resent all the data tracking that props them up. It’s a clash that has become a major pain point for news websites and other publishers. The rise of ad blockers, which let people surf the web without these annoying ads, is also blocking their revenue.

But Google is now offering a service that addresses both sides of this rather complicated issue.


Launched on Thursday, the service is called Google Contributor, and it asks you to pay $1, $2, or $3 a month to back the websites you particularly like. In exchange for your support, you’ll see “thank you” messages where ads used to be—at least on the websites that participate in the program. At the moment, Google is testing the idea with ten online publishers, including The Onion, ScienceDaily, Urban Dictionary, and Mashable.


The thank-you notes are served up through Google’s existing advertising channels, and Google still takes a cut of each contribution. According to Google, the $1 to $3 users pay essentially covers the cost of that ad space. But all of this is subject to change, she says, as the platform develops. “At this point, what we’ve rolled out is very much an experiment,” a Google spokesperson tells us. “We’re getting the publishers on board today. We’ll see not just how it works but also the public interest level.”


This type of thinking makes sense. If people are going to gripe constantly about ads and having their personal data sold to advertisers, why not ask them to put a nominal amount of money where their mouths are? Google Contributor tries to appeal to readers’ sense of ethics, urging them to believe that the content they enjoy is well worth spending $1 a month.


But this approach may be too little, far too late. People are already used to getting content online for free. As much as they hate ads and ad tracking, they hate paying for free stuff even more. It’s not unlike what happened to the music industry back in the early 2000s. Once people realized they could download music for free, the industry had to take legal action against companies like Napster in order to convince listeners to start paying again.


Now, easy and instant transactions through platforms like iTunes make the whole paying-for-music thing a little more palatable. What’s more, fans are even beginning to come down on the side of artists, when they feel music platforms are robbing them of their fair share. The Spotify-Taylor Swift fallout is only the most recent example.


The publishing industry is now finding itself at a similar crossroads, trying to convince the world that the articles and videos they’re consuming are actually worth something. But appealing to people’s ethical duty isn’t a surefire way of winning over the masses. That’s one reason why publishers like The New York Times, which has had moderate success with paywalls, have to charge a lot more than $1 a month for digital subscriptions. They count on the fact that some readers will do the cost-benefit analysis and decide that access to the Times isn’t worth the money, and that’s for one of the most highly respected publications on the web. Now imagine the challenge a publication like ScienceDaily would face if it started charging.


And while Google’s partner websites won’t track contributors’ behavior, that doesn’t change the fact that every other website will. It’s that widespread culture of data collection that will be the toughest to overcome.1


Still, for all its potential drawbacks, Contributor could solve a lot of problems on the web today. It could save publishers who are struggling to stay afloat as ad dollars dwindle, while also giving consumers what they say they want. Now, we’ll have to see just how much they want it.


1. Update: After publishing, Google amended its statement to WIRED on how user behavior will be tracked through Google Contributor. The story has been updated to clarify.



Finally, a New Clue to Solve the CIA’s Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture


Kryptos, a sculpture by American artist Jim Sanborn located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia.

Kryptos, a sculpture by American artist Jim Sanborn located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia. MAI/Landov



In 1989, the year the Berlin Wall began to fall, American artist Jim Sanborn was busy working on his Kryptos sculpture, a cryptographic puzzle wrapped in a riddle that he created for the CIA’s headquarters and that has been driving amateur and professional cryptographers mad ever since.


To honor the 25th anniversary of the Wall’s demise and the artist’s 70th birthday this year, Sanborn has decided to reveal a new clue to help solve his iconic and enigmatic artwork. It’s only the second hint he’s released since the sculpture was unveiled in 1990 and may finally help unlock the fourth and final section of the encrypted sculpture, which frustrated sleuths have been struggling to crack for more than two decades.


The 12-foot-high, verdigrised copper, granite and wood sculpture on the grounds of the CIA complex in Langley, Virginia, contains four encrypted messages carved out of the metal, three of which were solved years ago. The fourth is composed of just 97 letters, but its brevity belies its strength. Even the NSA, whose master crackers were the first to decipher other parts of the work, gave up on cracking it long ago. So five years ago, concerned that he might not live to see the mystery of Kryptos resolved, Sanborn released a clue to help things along, revealing that six of the last 97 letters when decrypted spell the word “Berlin”—a revelation that many took to be a reference to the Berlin Wall.


To that clue today, he’s adding the next word in the sequence—“clock”—that may or may not throw a wrench in this theory. Now the Kryptos sleuths just have to unscramble the remaining 86 characters to find out.


Is a Clock a Clock?


Sanborn told WIRED that he’s always been fascinated by Berlin’s many clocks but the Berlin Clock in particular has intrigued him the most. The clock, also known as the Berlin Uhr or Set Theory Clock, was designed in the 1970s by inventor and tinkerer Dieter Binninger. It displays the time through illuminated colored blocks rather than numbers and requires the viewer to calculate the time based on a complex scheme.


The Berlin Clock, or the Set Theory Clock.

The Berlin Clock, or the Set Theory Clock. John Freeman/Lonely Planet Images/Getty Images



A yellow lamp at the top of the clock blinks every two seconds while a row of red lamps beneath it represent five hours. Red lights on a second row denote one hour each, and time is calculated based on the number of lights illuminated. “So if in the first line 2 lamps are lit and in the second line 3 lamps, it’s 5+5+3=13h or 1 p.m.,” notes one description of the timepiece.

“Most people have no idea who Dieter is and all of the other people who make strange clocks in Berlin,” Sanborn says. “There’s a very interesting back story to [the Berlin Clock].”


The focus on the clock, however, may just be a bit of sly misdirection from Sanborn—who is known among Kryptos fans for his puckishness.


“Clock” could easily refer instead to a method devised by a Polish mathematician and cryptologist during World War II to crack Germany’s Enigma ciphers—a method that was expanded on by Alan Turing and his team at Bletchley Park who are credited with ultimately cracking Enigma. (It may be no coincidence that Sanborn has decided to release hi new clue at the same time The Imitation Game , a film about Turning’s work on Enigma, is opening in US theaters on Nov. 28.)


How Kryptos Has Remained Unsolved for 20 Years


Sanborn’s Kryptos sculpture was unveiled at the CIA on Nov. 3, 1990, a month that has a recurring theme in the sculpture’s ethos.


The artwork features a large block of petrified wood standing upright, with a tall copper plate scrolling out from the wood like a sheet of paper. At the sculpture’s base is a round pool with a fountain pump that sends water moving in a circular direction around the pool. Carved out of the copper plate are approximately 1,800 letters, some of them forming a cryptographic table based on a method developed by a 16th-century Frenchman named Blaise de Vigenere.



In 1995 a small group of cryptanalysts inside the NSA quietly deciphered the first three sections of the sculpture, though no one outside the agency and the CIA’s top brass knew about it. In 1998, CIA analyst David Stein cracked the same three messages using paper and pencil and about 400 lunch-time hours. Only his CIA colleagues knew of his success, however, because the agency didn’t publicize it. A year later, California computer scientist Jim Gillogly gained public notoriety when he cracked the same three messages using a Pentium II.


The first message is a poetic phrase that Sanborn composed:


“Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion.”


The second one hints at something buried:


“It was totally invisible. How’s that possible? They used the earth’s magnetic field. x The information was gathered and transmitted undergruund to an unknown location. x Does Langley know about this? They should: it’s buried out there somewhere. x Who knows the exact location? Only WW. This was his last message. x Thirty eight degrees fifty seven minutes six point five seconds north, seventy seven degrees eight minutes forty four seconds west. Layer two.”


The third message is a take on a passage from the diary of English Egyptologist Howard Carter describing the opening of King Tut’s tomb on Nov. 26, 1922.


“Slowly, desparatly slowly, the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway was removed. With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left-hand corner. And then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in. The hot air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker, but presently details of the room within emerged from the mist. x Can you see anything? q”


Sanborn has said that the first three sections contain clues to solving the final 97 letters but no one has figured out what those might be. After no progress cracking the last section, Sanborn released the “Berlin” clue five years ago, considering it “a significant clue.”


“I’m throwing it out there. It just makes that many fewer characters people have to figure out,” he told WIRED at the time.


The six letters that spell “Berlin”—NYPVTT—-are the 64th through 69th letters of the final 97 characters and the new clue “clock” are deciphered from the next five letters that follow it.


Code detectives worked to crack the puzzle following the Berlin revelation. Members of a popular Kryptos Yahoo Group led by Elonka Dunin, the foremost expert on Kryptos, tried for months to resolve it but to no avail.


Who knows if the new clue will prove to be any more helpful. And even if it is and sleuths decipher the final code, there’s an additional message they will still need to resolve. Once decrypted, the fourth section reveals a riddle, which Sanborn has said requires sleuths to be on the CIA grounds to solve.


The Mystery of the Riddle


“In part of the code that’s been deciphered, I refer to an act that took place when I was at the agency and a location that’s on the ground of the agency,” Sanborn said during a 2005 interview with WIRED. “So in order to find that place, you have to decipher the piece and then go to the agency and find that place.”


The riddle may refer to something Sanborn buried on the CIA grounds at the time he installed the sculpture, possibly in a location spelled out in section two of the sculpture, which lists two latitude and longitude coordinates: 38 57 6.5 N and 77 8 44 W. Sanborn has said they refer to “locations of the agency.”


Dunin has suggested that the coordinates may refer to the location of a Berlin Wall monument on the CIA grounds. Three slabs from the Berlin Wall sit at CIA headquarters, a gift from the German government. However, the slabs weren’t dedicated as a monument until 1992, two years after Kryptos was unveiled. Although the coordinates of the monument’s location—38 57 2.5 N, 77 8 40 W—differ from the coordinates mentioned in Kryptos by four seconds in both the latitude and longitude, Dunin has speculated that the CIA may have originally planned to position the monument at the coordinates Sanborn mentions on Kryptos then later chose a different location. Alternatively, Sanborn may have been using an incorrect U.S. geological map when he created his sculpture and thus got the coordinates wrong, she notes. After all, Sanborn has other errors in his sculpture, both intentional and unintentional.


Kryptos includes intentional spelling errors and misaligned characters set higher on a line of text than characters around them. But in 2006, Sanborn realized he had also made an inadvertent error, a missing “x” that he mistakenly deleted from the end of a line in section two, a section that was already solved. He discovered the omission while doing a letter-by-letter comparison of the plaintext and coded text in preparation for a book about his work.


The “x” was supposed to signify a period or section-break at the end of a phrase. Sanborn removed it for aesthetic reasons, thinking it wouldn’t affect the way the puzzle was deciphered, but in fact it did. What sleuths had until then deciphered to say “ID by rows” was actually supposed to say “layer two.” The correction hasn’t helped anyone solve the rest of the puzzle, however, in the subsequent years.


Now this second clue, Sanborn hopes, will reinvigorate efforts to solve the puzzle, though he has mixed views on whether he wants the mystery to end. The artist has said he’d like to see it solved in his lifetime, but also enjoys that some of the smartest minds in cryptography—including those at the CIA and NSA—continue to be baffled by his work.


Only two other people, aside from Sanborn, were initially said to know the solution to Kryptos: one was the retired chairman of the CIA’s Cryptographic Center Ed Scheidt, who helped Sanborn choose and alter the coding techniques for the sculpture. The other was William Webster, the CIA director who received a sealed envelope containing the solution at the sculpture’s dedication. However, in 2005 Sanborn revealed to WIRED that Scheidt and Webster only thought they knew the solution. In fact, he had deceived them.


In November 1989, after the East German government announced that its citizens were free from then on to cross over the Wall into West Berlin and West Germany, crowds of euphoric Germans began chipping away at the cement barrier. With this new clue provided by Sanford, let the chipping away on Kryptos begin.


Homepage image:wanderingYew2/Flickr



A brief hiatus and a call for help


eastcoast660

U.S. East Coast viewed from the International Space Station.



I won’t be able to post many (or any) posts on Beyond Apollo in the next few weeks because of holiday and work travel. I’ll be hauling along research material when I travel (I always do), but I doubt that I’ll have time to do much more than take notes.


The good news is that I’ll be visiting Washington, DC, for the first time in several years, and I’ve built a personal day into my meeting schedule to do some archival research. I hope to be able to photocopy or scan some new documents to write about in the Smithsonian archives at the Udvar-Hazy facility, which I have not visited before.


My meetings are at the Smithsonian on the National Mall, and I look forward to breaking away, if possible, to have a look at the National Air and Space Museum. I last visited in 2000, so I expect that it has changed a great deal since then.


Here’s what I am currently working on for Beyond Apollo: a post on plans for Outer Solar System exploration before gravity-assist and the Grand Tour; a much-delayed second installment in my series of posts on North American Aviation’s 1965 Mars-Venus piloted flyby study (begun here); an anniversary post on Mariner II, the first successful interplanetary spacecraft; and another delayed post, this time on a 1962 Chrysler study of possible equatorial launch sites for NASA launches (the working title is “Spaceport: Somalia”).


As always, I thank you for reading Beyond Apollo. I appreciate your comments and suggestions.


To conclude this post, I want to let any night-sky fans out there know about a disturbing development in Flagstaff, Arizona. Flagstaff was designated world’s first International Dark-Sky City in 2001. Located 7000 feet above sea level in ponderosa pine forests on the flank of an extinct volcano, the city of 60,000 people is home to Lowell Observatory, the U.S. Naval Observatory, the U.S. Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Science Center, Northern Arizona University’s recently upgraded observatory, and other educational and science institutions. Most of these facilities have a global reach – actually, an interplanetary reach, because scientists based at many of them are involved in missions to Pluto, Saturn, Ceres, and other places.


Over the years, dark-sky advocates – only a few of whom work for the observatories, it turns out – have fought off challenges to Flagstaff’s dark-skies zoning policies. Occasionally the city government has been seduced by the light side; usually, as is now the case, when big-money development is promised.


Often this happens when members of the city council fail to understand the contribution the science institutions in Flagstaff make to the community. They pump millions of dollars into this small city on an on-going, regular basis, and have at least since the U.S. Naval Observatory came to town in the 1950s (Lowell Observatory has contributed to Flagstaff since Percival Lowell set up his first telescope on Mars Hill in 1894). Some of this money comes from tourism – people visit from all over the world – but even more comes from science.


In addition, Flagstaff’s science institutions support local science and technology education. One example is Flagstaff’s annual two-week Festival of Science, which takes place every September, but support for schools, teachers, and students continues throughout the year.


I wrote about Flagstaff’s long and successful battle to keep its skies dark. You can find my article here, on the website of the Flagstaff Dark-Skies Coalition.


The latest challenge to Flagstaff’s dark skies is well described here. It is an apartment complex on the road leading to the U.S. Naval Observatory. A vote will be held December 2, but it’s doubtful that the battle will end there if this ill-conceived plan goes ahead. A defeat for dark skies in Flagstaff would send a negative message to other towns and cities near observatories all around the world. If you wish to tell the Flagstaff city government that the world is watching what it does next, you can do so by sending email to the addresses below:


Mayor Jerry Nabours – jnabours@flagstaffaz.gov


Vice-Mayor Coral Evans – cevans@flagstaffaz.gov


Councilmember Celia Barotz – cbarotz@flagstaffaz.gov


Councilmember Karla Brewster – kbrewster@flagstaffaz.gov


Councilmember Jeff Oravits – joravits@flagstaffaz.gov


Councilmember Scott Overton – soverton@flagstaffaz.gov


Out-going Councilmember Mark Woodson – mwoodson@flagstaffaz.gov


In-coming Councilmember Eva Putzova – eva.putzova@gmail.com


Assistant to the City Manager Stephanie Smith – ssmith@flagstaffaz.gov



Utah Considers Cutting Off Water to the NSA’s Monster Data Center


An aerial view of the cooling units at the NSA's Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah.

An aerial view of the cooling units at the NSA’s Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah. Rick Bowmer/AP





Lawmakers are considering a bill that would shut off the water spigot to the massive data center operated by the National Security Agency in Bluffdale, Utah.

The legislation, proposed by Utah lawmaker Marc Roberts, is due to go to the floor of the Utah House of Representatives early next year, but it was debated in a Public Utilities and Technology Interim Committee meeting on Wednesday. The bill, H.B. 161, directs municipalities like Bluffdale to “refuse support to any federal agency which collects electronic data within this state.”


The NSA brought its Bluffdale data center online about a year ago, taking advantage Utah’s cheap power and a cut-rate deal for millions of gallons of local water, used to cool the 1-million-square-foot building’s servers. Roberts’ bill, however, would prohibit the NSA from negotiating new water deals when its current Bluffdale agreement runs out in 2021.


The law seems like a long-shot to clear legislative hurdles when Utah’s legislature re-convenes next year, but Wednesday’s committee hearing was remarkable, nonetheless, says Nate Carlisle, a reporter with the Salt Lake Tribune who has waged a fight with the NSA and Bluffdale officials to determine how much water the data center is actually using. “What’s noteworthy is no one on the panel said: ‘Hey, wait a minute, we can’t do this,'” he says. “They had some specific concerns about the language of the bill, but there was no outright opposition.”


Utah lawmakers on the committee could have voted to give the bill an “unfavorable” review on the spot, essentially dooming it on the floor, but they didn’t do that.


Instead, they simply listened to testimony on the NSA and Bluffdale’s support of the center. “I just don’t want to subsidize what they’re doing on the back of our citizens,” Carlisle quotes Republican Representative Roger Barrus as saying during the meeting.


Utah has a long history of disputes with the federal government, but this is the first time Carlisle remembers anyone proposing to cut off water to a federal agency. “I think it’s representative of an attitude change in Utah that the bill is even being discussed,” he says.



Google Launches Contributor To Reinvent the Way We Fund the Web


google contributor

Google



The web is funded by ads. But so many people hate seeing them, and they often resent all the data tracking that props them up. It’s a clash that has become a major pain point for news websites and other publishers. The rise of ad blockers, which let people surf the web without these annoying ads, is also blocking their revenue.

But Google is now offering a service that aims address both sides of this rather complicated issue.


Launched on Thursday, the service is called Google Contributor, and it asks you to pay $1, $2, or $3 a month to back the websites you particularly like. In exchange for your support, you’ll see “thank you” messages where ads used to be—at least on the websites that participate in the program. At the moment, Google is testing the idea with ten online publishers, including The Onion, ScienceDaily, Urban Dictionary, and Mashable.


The thank-you notes are served up through Google’s existing advertising channels, and Google still takes a cut of each contribution. According to Google, the $1 to $3 users pay essentially covers the cost of that ad space. But all of this is subject to change, she says, as the platform develops. “At this point, what we’ve rolled out is very much an experiment,” a Google spokesperson tells us. “We’re getting the publishers on board today. We’ll see not just how it works but also the public interest level.”


This type of thinking makes sense. If people are going to gripe constantly about ads and having their personal data sold to advertisers, why not ask them to put a nominal amount of money where their mouths are? Google Contributor tries to appeal to readers’ sense of ethics, urging them to believe that the content they enjoy is well worth spending $1 a month.


But this approach may be too little, far too late. People are already used to getting content online for free. As much as they hate ads and ad tracking, they hate paying for free stuff even more. It’s not unlike what happened to the music industry back in the early 2000s. Once people realized they could download music for free, the industry had to take legal action against companies like Napster in order to convince listeners to start paying again.


Now, easy and instant transactions through platforms like iTunes make the whole paying-for-music thing a little more palatable. What’s more, fans are even beginning to come down on the side of artists, when they feel music platforms are robbing them of their fair share. The Spotify-Taylor Swift fallout is only the most recent example.


The publishing industry is now finding itself at a similar crossroads, trying to convince the world that the articles and videos they’re consuming are actually worth something. But appealing to people’s ethical duty isn’t a surefire way of winning over the masses. That’s one reason why publishers like The New York Times, which has had moderate success with paywalls, have to charge a lot more than $1 a month for digital subscriptions. They count on the fact that some readers will do the cost-benefit analysis and decide that access to the Times isn’t worth the money, and that’s for one of the most highly respected publications on the web. Now imagine the challenge a publication like ScienceDaily would face if it started charging.


What’s more, Google says, Contributor won’t change the fact that people’s activity online will still be tracked, which is one of the primary reasons people hate ads in the first place.


Still, for all its potential drawbacks, Contributor could solve a lot of problems on the web today. It could save publishers who are struggling to stay afloat as ad dollars dwindle, while also giving consumers what they say they want. Now, we’ll have to see just how much they want it.



A New Service Will Help You Wrest Your Online Identity From Google


Indie Hosters founders Michiel de Jong and Pierre Ozoux.

Indie Hosters founders Michiel de Jong and Pierre Ozoux. Indie Hosters



Google and Facebook don’t just run your email and your social network. So often, they’re a core part of your online identity. They help you log in to countless other services across the net.


This is a handy thing. You don’t have to remember as many usernames and passwords, but it’s also dangerous. You’re putting all your eggs in one basket. What if your Google account gets hacked or suspended? Not only would you lose your email address and potentially everything tied to it, but you’d lose access all those other internet services too. And then there are the privacy issues — you can’t control how the data these companies gather about you is used.


A new group called Indie Hosters wants change this. They want to give you a web identity that you have complete control over—and they want to make it just as easy as signing up for Facebook.


The idea behind Indie Hosters is to create a network of web hosts that use a set of common standards, take care of geeky technical details of maintaining your identity, and, crucially, make it dead simple to move from one Indie Hosting provider to another with no hassle. Each host will be an independent business, and you, not the host, will own and control your identity. Through these hosts, you can not only log in to a wide range of other websites, but also published your own stuff to the web.


So far, there are only two members of the network, the project’s founders Michiel de Jong and Pierre Ozoux. But they hope more hosts will join them, and today, the team launched a crowdfunding campaign to work on building the tools and network to make that happen.


Indie Hosters is part of what’s called the indie web movement, a loose knit bunch of programmers, designers, and activists who think you should own your own web content and online identity. For the past few years, indie webbers have advocated that everyone register their own domain name and use it to create your own email address and universal login system.


The New Alternative


There are plenty of alternatives to Google and Facebook’s universal login that you can run from your own website, such as Mozilla Persona and OpenID. The problem has always been that setting up a server to run all this stuff is too technical for the average user. Indie Hosters tries to solve this by setting all this up for you on a server managed by someone who understands all this technical stuff, but who won’t lock you in.


Most web hosts already offer some sort of “one-click” installer to help you setup popular tools like WordPress. But Indie Hosters is trying to take this a step further by automating absolutely everything you need to manage your identity online.


Instead of confusing users by making core features optional, all accounts will come with both a your own top-level domain, custom email forwarding based on that domain, and a TLS certificate—the same standard that banks and retailers use to protect your credit card transactions online. And web identity software such as OpenID and Mozilla Persona will soon work right out of the box.


At the same time, Indie Hosters will let you publish and build your own stuff on the web. At the moment, it offers only two publishing tools to start: the popular blogging system WordPress and a new, social-media-aware tool called Known. But de Jong says Indie Hosters will offer far more applications in coming months, ranging from personal cloud storage systems like OwnCloud to the Bitcoin-style application development system Ethereum.


Traditional hosting services don’t usually add new apps to their one-click installer packages until they’ve become popular. That creates a paradox for new applications looking to gain traction among the non-geek set. de Jong hopes Indie Hosters can give these new applications a better chance of succeeding.


The Beauty of Open Source


De Jong and Ozoux aren’t the only ones trying to make running a personal web server easier. The creators of Indie Box and Freedom Box hope to sell you a physical server that you can run from home, so that you don’t have to trust any cloud provider. Meanwhile, Sandstorm, managed by ex-Googler Kenton Varda, is aiming to create a brand new open source web hosting platform that makes it far easier to manage servers in the cloud.


Indie Hosters is focused on helping you own your identity, while Sandstorm is more about getting applications up and running quickly. To sign-up for Sandstorm, you need to use either a Google Account or GitHub account. Varda says that will change eventually, but the two projects clearly have different priorities. While Sandstorm is trying to build a new platform that makes managing servers much easier, de Jong says that he and Ozoux are trying to avoid writing any new software at all. Instead, they’re trying to use the best software already available and writing automation scripts to manage everything.


Varda says that although Sandstorm has more apps available on its platform now, the Indie Hosters approach will probably enable them to add new apps more quickly than Sandstorm can, since most apps need to be tweaked to run on Sandstorm. “In the long run Sandstorm will offer a more transformative change in the way we run servers,” Varda says.


But the beauty of open source is that Indie Hosters can use Sandstorm’s tools to improve its own offering. Then everybody wins.



Your First Look at the Game of Thrones Videogame Trailer


tyrion-game

Telltale Games



Game of Thrones is coming. No, not the HBO show—you still have to wait till 2015 for that— but rather the highly-anticipated videogame coming from Telltale Games. The first chapter of the game’s six episodes is due out before the end of the year for PC, Mac, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and iOS.


Today, we’ve finally got our first look at the trailer, whose narrator sounds very much like actor Lena Headey. It also features some familiar faces: Cersei, Tyrion, Margaery Tyrell, Ramsay Bolton, and a guy getting tortured by Ramsay who may or may not be Theon.



Apple Changes Freemium Wording in the App Store to Avoid Getting Sued


IMG_3843

Screenshot: WIRED



Up until yesterday, when you visited the App Store on iOS and browsed through free apps, the download button on the far right said “Free” in all caps. It made sense: The app is free to download, after all. But if you visit the App Store now, that “Free” button now says “Get.” This is being done to avoid confusion, and potential litigation, around apps that actually include in-app purchases.

Earlier this year, Google ceased labeling apps as “free” if they included in-app purchases, following a request from the European Commission (EC). The EC came out with four guidelines it wanted app stores and developers to follow: Games labeled as “free” shouldn’t be misleading about actual costs; they shouldn’t exhort children to ask their parents to make in-app purchases; they should inform users about purchasing practices and not allow purchases without explicit consent; and app makers should offer an email address where users can file complaints. When this happened in July, Apple also agreed to make changes to its App Store, but never specified when.


Apple already offers a number of safeguards against accidental in-app purchases. The Family Sharing feature in iOS 8 includes something called Ask to Buy, which is designed to ensure kids ask for permission before making iTunes or App Store purchases. The feature sends a notification to the parent’s iOS device, where you can tap to grant permission or deny it. Otherwise, apps have to ask for confirmation that you want to make the in-app purchase before it goes through, and then you either need to enter your passcode or use Touch ID to validate the purchase. Previously, Apple settled with the FTC over rampant, exorbitant in-app purchases from minors when there were no safeguards against kids being able to make these purchases on their own. It also offered app users who suffered from this issue a way to get refunded.


So now all iOS apps that are initially free to purchase have a “Get” button next to their title rather than a “Free” button, regardless of whether they offer in-app purchases or not. Google also changed the Top Free Apps and Top Free Games section headers to “Top Apps” and “Top Games” to comply with EC requests, but Apple has thus far left its “Free” app section titles unchanged.



Apple Changes Freemium Wording in the App Store to Avoid Getting Sued


IMG_3843

Screenshot: WIRED



Up until yesterday, when you visited the App Store on iOS and browsed through free apps, the download button on the far right said “Free” in all caps. It made sense: The app is free to download, after all. But if you visit the App Store now, that “Free” button now says “Get.” This is being done to avoid confusion, and potential litigation, around apps that actually include in-app purchases.

Earlier this year, Google ceased labeling apps as “free” if they included in-app purchases, following a request from the European Commission (EC). The EC came out with four guidelines it wanted app stores and developers to follow: Games labeled as “free” shouldn’t be misleading about actual costs; they shouldn’t exhort children to ask their parents to make in-app purchases; they should inform users about purchasing practices and not allow purchases without explicit consent; and app makers should offer an email address where users can file complaints. When this happened in July, Apple also agreed to make changes to its App Store, but never specified when.


Apple already offers a number of safeguards against accidental in-app purchases. The Family Sharing feature in iOS 8 includes something called Ask to Buy, which is designed to ensure kids ask for permission before making iTunes or App Store purchases. The feature sends a notification to the parent’s iOS device, where you can tap to grant permission or deny it. Otherwise, apps have to ask for confirmation that you want to make the in-app purchase before it goes through, and then you either need to enter your passcode or use Touch ID to validate the purchase. Previously, Apple settled with the FTC over rampant, exorbitant in-app purchases from minors when there were no safeguards against kids being able to make these purchases on their own. It also offered app users who suffered from this issue a way to get refunded.


So now all iOS apps that are initially free to purchase have a “Get” button next to their title rather than a “Free” button, regardless of whether they offer in-app purchases or not. Google also changed the Top Free Apps and Top Free Games section headers to “Top Apps” and “Top Games” to comply with EC requests, but Apple has thus far left its “Free” app section titles unchanged.



The Internet Just Isn’t That Big a Deal Yet: A Hard Look at Solow’s Paradox


Robert Solow , Winner of the Noble Prize in Economics in 1987.

Robert Solow, Winner of the Noble Prize in Economics in 1987. redfalo/Flickr



The Internet age has given us blisteringly fast connectivity to the World Wide Web, cloud computing, nearly instant collaboration and high definition face-to-face video communication with our peers around the world. Yet in terms of our rate of economic productivity, we have not only stalled in the past several years but also taken hugely dramatic dips. The promise of the Internet making everyone’s job easier and boosting economic advancement has not been met. Why?


The answer lies in a closer look at Solow’s Paradox. The concept was first described in 1987 by economist and author Robert Solow, who stated, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” As it grew in popularity, Solow’s Paradox became defined as the “discrepancy between measures of investment in information technology and measures of output at the national level.” In particular, it asks why the rate of productivity increase appears to be slowing dramatically in the Internet age.


And that is undeniably true. According to an early November report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2014’s third quarter business sector labor productivity increased at a 2.0 percent annual rate. Output increased 4.4 percent and hours worked increased 2.3 percent. From the third quarter of 2013 to the third quarter of 2014, productivity rose 0.9 percent as output and hours worked increased 3.0 percent and 2.1 percent, respectively.


Looking at the year-over-year performance by quarter, that seems like good news. But taking a closer look, productivity actually declined steadily from a high of 8.3% in Q2 2009, including sizable dips of -2.7 percent in Q1 2011 and – 4.5% in Q1 of 2014.


An average productivity growth of 2.0% is something people actually might notice in their lifetimes. With the trends since 2009 showing steady decline over the past several years, however, what’s really noticeable is that there seems to be no correlation between productivity and technological advancement.


For me, it boils down to the fact that, compared to the technological innovations of the last industrial revolution (electricity, automobiles, wireless broadcasting) the Internet age just isn’t that impressive. Technological advancements of the last century had a truly transformative effect over the previous industrial age. Ice farming was replaced by refrigeration, the horse and buggy by the automobile, burning of fossil fuels for energy by centralized electrical power production. These advancements were notable not just in what they achieved in themselves but how they affected society.


What’s more, consider that the average American worker’s productivity soared at an average rate of 2.7% from 1939 to 2000. Among other reasons, the productivity surge occurred because the military industrial complex went from building more weapons to building more expensive, more sophisticated ones. This was a 20th Century idea, and came into its own with the advent of the Cold War. The USA knew it could never beat the Soviet Union or China by weight of numbers, but it could beat them with more efficient systems. This caused both the arms race escalation and the space race.


In defense of today’s technology, despite its ubiquity, some industry observers believe society has really only been in the Internet age for no more than 15 years. As a result, today’s incredible advances in technology innovation have simply not had the time to effect society yet. With the every-quickening rate of change offered by the Internet, it is sensible to assume that 15 years from now we may see some more profound changes, on the order of those enjoyed across society in past periods of innovation.


That is, of course, it we take advantage of the new technological changes available to us. Right now, we are not. People are afraid of rapid change, and when technological change happens faster than the investment cycle for a technology, major problems can happen. People will dig in their heels as a reaction to the newness of innovation. They will stick to old familiar processes, even when the new ones are faster, easier and more efficient. That’s the equivalent of driving a horse-drawn carriage on the freeway.


To avoid falling victim to Solow’s Paradox over the long term, society as a whole – and business in particular – needs to think bigger. No longer can business think in terms of 10% improvement. Today’s business leaders need to radically change their business process, and look for 10 times better process. Take advantage of the opportunities offered by the cloud and gigabit Ethernet, put the applications of the Internet age to work daily, across every aspect of your operations.


That will spur a real revolution in how to do business. And only then might we be able to disprove and put to rest Solow’s Paradox.


Simon Dudley is the Video Evangelist for Lifesize. He can be reached via Twitter @simondudley.



Apple’s Newest Designer Reimagines the Shotgun




Italian firearms giant Beretta was founded in 1526 when Maestro Bartolomeo Beretta began producing rifles for the Arsenal of Venice, at a time when the city-state was a world power in the Renaissance rather than a honeymoon destination. Marc Newson, who recently joined Apple as a special adviser, has been working with the arms maker to design a shotgun, called the 486, for the modern age.


The design of firearms tend to be a hybrid of high-technology and human-centered elements. Barrels are carefully fabricated to exacting standards, but the grips and shoulder stocks are artfully sculpted to fit human hands. Newson made it his mission to harmonize these two types of forms. “The main focus for my design of the 486 was to simplify and rationalize all the surfaces,” writes Newson. “Specifically streamlining the area of the action.”


gun-inline-02

The Beretta 486 designed by Marc Newson brings a sense of refinement to firearms. Beretta



The “Action” is the metal hub where the trigger, reloading mechanism, and safety come together and serves as a showcase for Newson’s design expertise. Trigger guards are often screwed-on pieces of sheet material, but Newson opted to mill his so that it becomes part and parcel of the gun’s receiver. Cleverly, the 486’s safety switch stands alone on the stock with a “wood bridge” hiding its connection to the receiver—and thereby calling special attention to its lifesaving functionality. Similarly, the lever that unlocks the barrels for reloading was left uncluttered by decorative swirls to better reveal its critical role.


beretta-inline

Newson’s Beretta 486 maintains the shotgun’s rich visual history while adding the thoroughly modern angles and laser engraved manufacturing typically seen in Apple’s products. Beretta



The delicate, laser-etched engravings depict quails which were imported to Europe from Asia as game birds for hunting. Newson used them as an homage to the slaughtered flocks and an opportunity to add a personal dimension to the aesthetics. “I am fascinated by Japanese culture and in particular the different comprehension of scale and detail,” writes Newson. “With this in mind I started to look at Japanese tattoos and the craftsmanship involved in creating complex engravings as a means to compliment the surfacing of the action.”


Newson’s 486 pays tribute to company’s nearly five-hundred year history, but is loaded with design touches that are only possible by leveraging modern technology. The stock and forend are are made of burled walnut, a material befitting one of Lord Fairfax’s famous fox hunts, but feature precisely knurled grips produced using ultra-modern milling and robotic manufacturing tools. The result is the closest thing to the iGun we’re ever likely to get.


No product pricing or availability information is yet available, but be sure to inquire with your local Gucci-clad gun dealer for more details.