The Cyrillic Projector is a sculpture created by American artist Jim Sanborn in the early 1990s, and purchased by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1997. It is currently installed between the campus's Friday and Fretwell Buildings.
The encrypted sculpture Cyrillic Projector is part of an encrypted family of three intricate puzzle-sculptures by Sanborn, the other two named Kryptos and Antipodes . The Kryptos sculpture (located at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia) has text which is duplicated on Antipodes.Antipodes has two sides — one with the Latin alphabet and one with Cyrillic. The Latin side is similar to Kryptos. The Cyrillic side is similar to the Cyrillic Projector.
The encrypted text of the Cyrillic Projector was first reportedly solved by Frank Corr in early July 2003, followed by an equivalent decryption by Mike Bales in September of the same year. Both endeavors gave results in the Russian language. The first English translation of the text was led by Elonka Dunin. [1] [2]
The sculpture includes two messages. The first is a Russian text that explains the use of psychological control to develop and maintain potential sources of information. The second is a partial quote about the Soviet dissident, Nobel Peace Prize awarded scientist Sakharov. The text is from a classified KGB memo, detailing concerns that his report at the 1982 Pugwash conference was going to be used by the U.S. for anti-Soviet propaganda purposes.
Kazakh or Qazaq is a Turkic language of the Kipchak branch spoken in Central Asia by Kazakhs. It is closely related to Nogai, Kyrgyz and Karakalpak. It is the official language of Kazakhstan and a significant minority language in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang, north-western China and in the Bayan-Ölgii Province of western Mongolia. The language is also spoken by many ethnic Kazakhs throughout the former Soviet Union, Germany, and Turkey.
Kryptos is a sculpture by the American artist Jim Sanborn located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters, the George Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley, Virginia. Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the four encrypted messages it bears. Of these four messages, the first three have been solved, while the fourth message remains one of the most famous unsolved codes in the world. The sculpture continues to be of interest to cryptanalysts, both amateur and professional, who are attempting to decipher the fourth passage. The artist has so far given four clues to this passage.
Herbert James Sanborn, Jr. is an American sculptor. He is best known for creating the encrypted Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
The romanization of the Russian language, aside from its primary use for including Russian names and words in text written in a Latin alphabet, is also essential for computer users to input Russian text who either do not have a keyboard or word processor set up for inputting Cyrillic, or else are not capable of typing rapidly using a native Russian keyboard layout (JCUKEN). In the latter case, they would type using a system of transliteration fitted for their keyboard layout, such as for English QWERTY keyboards, and then use an automated tool to convert the text into Cyrillic.
Three scripts are currently used for the Tatar language: Arabic, Cyrillic and Latin.
Faux Cyrillic, pseudo-Cyrillic, pseudo-Russian or faux Russian typography is the use of Cyrillic letters in Latin text, usually to evoke the Soviet Union or Russia, though it may be used in other contexts as well. It is a common Western trope used in book covers, film titles, comic book lettering, artwork for computer games, or product packaging which are set in or wish to evoke Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, or Russia. A typeface designed to emulate Cyrillic is classed as a mimicry typeface.
Jaꞑalif, Yangalif or Yañalif is the first Latin alphabet used during the latinisation in the Soviet Union in the 1930s for the Turkic languages. It replaced the Yaña imlâ Arabic script-based alphabet in 1928, and was replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet in 1938–1940. After their respective independence in 1991, several former Soviet states in Central Asia switched back to Latin script, with slight modifications to the original Jaꞑalif.
The Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet is a Cyrillic alphabet designed for the Romanian language spoken in the Soviet Union (Moldovan) and was in official use from 1924 to 1932 and 1938 to 1989.
Kim Zetter is an American investigative journalist and author who has covered cybersecurity and national security since 1999. She has broken numerous stories over the years about NSA surveillance, WikiLeaks, and the hacker underground, including an award-winning series about the security problems with electronic voting machines. She has three times been voted one of the top ten security journalists in the U.S. by her journalism peers and security professionals. She is considered one of the world's experts on Stuxnet, a malicious computer worm used to sabotage Iran's nuclear program, and published a book on the topic called Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon.
Edward Michael Scheidt is a retired Chairman of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Cryptographic Center and the designer of the cryptographic systems used in the Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
James J. Gillogly is an American computer scientist and cryptographer.
Informal or ad hoc romanizations of Cyrillic have been in use since the early days of electronic communications, starting from early e-mail and bulletin board systems. Their use faded with the advances in the Russian internet that made support of Cyrillic script standard, but resurfaced with the proliferation of instant messaging, SMS and mobile phone messaging in Russia.
Numerous Cyrillic alphabets are based on the Cyrillic script. The early Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the 9th century AD and replaced the earlier Glagolitic script developed by the Byzantine theologians Cyril and Methodius. It is the basis of alphabets used in various languages, past and present, Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Russian. As of 2011, around 252 million people in Eurasia use it as the official alphabet for their national languages. About half of them are in Russia. Cyrillic is one of the most-used writing systems in the world. The creator is Saint Clement of Ohrid from the Preslav literary school in the First Bulgarian Empire.
The A,A is a sculpture by artist Jim Sanborn, located on the campus of the University of Houston, adjacent to the M.D. Anderson Library.
The Lingua is a sculpture by American artist Jim Sanborn located at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.
The Mengenlehreuhr or Berlin-Uhr is the first public clock in the world that tells the time by means of illuminated, coloured fields, for which it entered the Guinness Book of Records upon its installation on 17 June 1975. Commissioned by the Senate of Berlin and designed by Dieter Binninger, the original full-sized Mengenlehreuhr was originally located at the Kurfürstendamm on the corner with Uhlandstraße. After the Senate decommissioned it in 1995, the clock was relocated to a site in Budapester Straße in front of Europa-Center, where it stands today.
Antipodes is a public artwork by American sculptor Jim Sanborn located outside of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, United States.
The George Bush Center for Intelligence is the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, located in the unincorporated community of Langley in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States, near Washington, D.C.
Elonka Dunin is an American video game developer and cryptologist. Dunin worked at Simutronics Corp. in St. Louis, Missouri from 1990–2014, and in 2015 was Senior Producer at Black Gate Games in Nashville, Tennessee. She is Chairperson Emerita and one of the founders of the International Game Developers Association's Online Games group, has contributed or been editor in chief on multiple IGDA State of the Industry white papers, and was one of the Directors of the Global Game Jam from 2011–2014. As of 2020 she works as a management consultant at Accenture.
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