The BBC Radio segment aired on their Tuesday morning -- the "Pods & Blogs" segment on Five Live.

In terms of interviewers, I was actually quite disappointed in them. In fact, of all the radio shows I've been on, BBC Radio was clearly the worst, which surprised and saddened me, since I'd thought better of BBC.

Their producer initially contacted me about doing a segment with James Sanborn on Friday afternoon. They scheduled a time, but ended up calling us late, and then when we went on the air, we each got to say just one or two sentences, and then the interviewer interrupted us with, "Sorry, out of time, and I'm not understanding this anyway," and they cut us off and ended the segment rather suddenly.

To the producer's credit, he sent me a letter of apology later in the day. And for what it's worth, I was able to learn from the mistakes of the BBC segment, in order to make the later NPR segment even better, so I thanked the BBC producer for that, and he offered to try again on Monday, with what was implied to be a longer segment about my book (which is coming out in the UK on Thursday).

So I agreed to the second segment, but again, they ran late with previous programming, kept sending me emails saying, "Just a few more minutes", and then when they *did* call, I found out that it was going to be for a pre-recorded segment instead of live. Further, I found out that they now wanted me to be the caller in a two-DJ "make fun of the caller" segment. But I adapted to that and we managed to have a more or less fun time with it.

Then when I asked them when the segment was going to air, they said, "In a couple hours" and that they'd contact me and tell me when, but they never did (I found out after the fact that it aired several hours after we recorded it). So then I went looking for it on the BBC website to find out if I could listen to the recording, but couldn't find any audio file, and their site looks weeks out of date.

So I wrote to the producer, and he apologized and sent me a link of where the show could be found. The audio file is there, but there's no program description so it's not searchable. Further, I'm told that it's only going to be there for a week, and then it's going to be deleted!

So, I had a big "thumbs down" for BBC at the moment. But, the segment came out okay, if you don't mind the silly humor and them mispronouncing my name. And they did at least mention my book.

For anyone who wants to listen to it before it gets deleted, go to this link, click on "Latest Pods & Blogs", and that should start up the BBC Radio Player on the lefthand side. If you're using a compatible browser (IE yes, Firefox probably not, and not sure about Mac), you can use the arrows to fast forward to just past the "18:10" mark, to listen to the 10-minute Kryptos segment.

And if BBC Radio ever calls and asks you to be on one of their programs, be warned.

(2-May-2006 update: The stream is now offline, but a mirror can be located here)

BBC Radio: Pods & Blogs (and Kryptos, oh my!)

Show:AS IT HAPPENS
Date:2006/04/24
Time:17:30:01

For those who don't know, this is the Canadian version of NPR. In today's segment, I'm interviewed by Helen Mann about the Kryptos story. To listen, get "Part one", and the Kryptos segment starts at about the 20-minute mark.

I've been doing enough of these radio interviews now that I'm starting to make value judgments on good interviewers v. bad interviewers. ;) These folks are good ones. It was a fun interview, they were easy to work with, asked some good questions, and had an audio file of the segment up on their website almost immediately. "Thumbs up"!

Elonka :)

CanadaOne Radio - 'As It Happens'

This episode is hosted by P(?)NYB(?)Y and Elonka Dunin. The topic of the show is Cryptography and the Kryptos sculpture. In an obvious attempt to gain listeners, i feel obligated to tell you that this episode of BellCoreRadio contains clues, both to the Kryptos code as well as a code in Elonkas new book, that have
never before been released to the public!

I co-hosted the latest episode of BellCoreRadio, after having met the host, P0nyb0y, at the Notacon hacker conference in Cleveland. The "show" is basically an hour of the two of us chatting about Kryptos, the K2 announcement and related media attention, and my book.

Caveat: The audio levels on the podcast are a bit erratic, so keep your volume control close at hand while listening. If you can work through the sound quality though, it's (IMHO) an interesting conversation.

Elonka :)

Click on the "MP3" or "OGG" link at this URL, as appropriate:

Hacker Media - BellCoreRadio #32

I was enjoying watching the "bumps" of traffic move through my website over the last week. According to sitemeter, the biggest traffic definitely came from the AOL news screen -- during the several hours that the story was up yesterday, traffic was consistently in the 1K-3K/hour range, and overall traffic for the day (31K visitors) was double what Slashdot did (15.8K). Highest Slashdot hour: 3,900. Highest AOL hour: 3,600.

Total "since the webcounter was turned on" traffic to elonka.com:

Total 806,187
Average Per Day 9,707
Average Visit Length 5:25
Last Hour 131
Today 1,036
This Week 67,951

PAGE VIEWS

Total 1,850,868
Average Per Day 30,536
Average Per Visit 3.1
Last Hour 252
Today 2,520
This Week 213,754

At the moment, traffic has scaled back to a dull roar, with hundreds per hour right now instead of thousands, but here's the "referring site" list for the last few thousand visitors:

2,076 articles.news.aol.com 51.9%
352 google.com 8.8%
313 nytimes.com 7.8%
273 wired.com 6.8%
80 schneier.com 2.0%
51 elonka.com 1.3%
43 en.wikipedia.org 1.1%
34 search.yahoo.com 0.9%
23 sploid.com 0.6%
21 stumbleupon.com 0.5%
20 google.ca 0.5%
19 aolsvc.news.aol.com 0.5%
19 slashdot.org 0.5%
14 google.co.in 0.4%
12 google.com.au 0.3%
10 google.com.ph 0.3%
10 images.google.com 0.3%
10 it.slashdot.org 0.3%
10 search.msn.com 0.3%

Before the AOL story, traffic was pretty evenly split between the NY Times, the Wired story, and Schneier's blog. Also, interestingly enough, though the story *did* show up on Digg, it never took off, and I never got more than 1% of hits from digg. I'm not sure what this means, since there was obviously plenty of public interest in the story -- Is "Digg" a fad that has passed, or is it that news links just don't get "dugg" anymore?

Anyway, passing along the data in case anyone's interested,

Elonka :)

April 21, 2006:

LONDON (Reuters) - Dan Brown's follow-up novel to his global bestseller "The Da Vinci Code" won't be ready by the end of the year as originally expected, his publisher said on Friday.
"We don't know when it's coming, but it's out of the schedule for this year," said Larry Finlay, managing director for Transworld Publishers in London, a division of Bertelsmann-owned Random House.
"At one point we were hoping for it around October or November, but now it's looking like 2007," he told Reuters, confirming a report in the Bookseller trade publication.

Hmm, perhaps the delay is because of the Kryptos announcement? Brown has to rewrite the Kryptos section now... ;)

'Da Vinci Code' sequel delayed

Book news
FROM LOCAL AND WIRE SOURCES

04/23/2006

Author update

A local code breaker is getting closer to cracking Kryptos, a sculpture on the CIA grounds in Washington with an embedded code that has stumped experts for years.

Two weeks ago, the Post-Dispatch featured Elonka Dunin, a St. Charles computer game company executive, about her new book of codes and puzzles. She co-moderates an online group devoted to solving Kryptos. The group has figured out three of four parts.

This is an interesting milestone for me -- my name showed up in a newspaper article, without me having talked to the reporter ahead of time. Granted, it's a local St. Louis paper that is just posting an update based on recent media attention that I *do* know about, but still, it was kind of an odd feeling. Like a new "fame" stepping stone.

Elonka

STLtoday - Entertainment - Books - Author update

All Things Considered, April 21, 2006 ? A sculptural cryptogram at the CIA's headquarters that has intrigued people for years may have flaws in its design, says its creator. For more than a decade, professional cryptologists and amateur code breakers have been trying to decipher Kryptos, an encrypted sculpture at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.
But it turns out that the artist made the challenge a bit more complicated than he intended. Melissa Block talks with James Sanborn, the sculptor who recently realized a mistake in the piece, and Elonka Dunin, a cryptologist who maintains a website on the sculpture.

Audio stream, for anyone who wants to listen to yesterday's "All Things Considered" segment. I had to grip my desk to keep my hands from shaking right before the segment, I was in such "fan-girl" mode. I was actually being interviewed by Melissa Block, wow!

Elonka :)

NPR : Enigmatic CIA Puzzle 'Kryptos' May Be Flawed

Congratulations to Elonka on making prime coverage in the New York Times ...

For nearly 16 years, puzzle enthusiasts have labored to decipher an 865-character coded message stenciled into a sculpture on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. This week, the sculptor gave them an unsettling but hopeful surprise: part of the message they thought they had deciphered years ago actually says something else.

On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Sanborn left a phone message for Elonka Dunin, a computer game developer who also runs an e-mail list for enthusiasts trying to solve the "Kryptos" puzzle. For the first time, Mr. Sanborn had done a line-by-line analysis of his text with what Mr. Gillogly and Mr. Stein had offered as the solution and discovered that part of the solved text was incorrect.

Within minutes, Ms. Dunin called back, and Mr. Sanborn told her that in the second section, one of the X's he had used as a separator between sentences had been omitted, altering the solution. "He was concerned that it had been widely published incorrectly," Ms. Dunin said.

The formality of the New York Times cracks me up. "Ms. Dunin", indeed...

Elonka :)

New York Times: A Break for Code Breakers on a C.I.A. Mystery

Kryptos sculptor Jim Sanborn (and maybe I) will be on BBC Radio Five this afternoon (Friday) at 1:50 p.m. Eastern, for a 5-minute segment. I don't know yet if they'll have an audio file posted on the website afterwards, so here's a link to what will probably be the live stream, if anyone wants to try capturing it.

FYI,

Elonka :)

BBC - Radio Five Live - Kryptos

For more than a decade, amateur and professional cryptographers have been trying to decipher an encrypted sculpture that sits on the grounds of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Three-fourths of the sculpture has already been solved.

But now Jim Sanborn, the artist who created the Kryptos sculpture, says he made a mistake and a previously solved part of the puzzle that sleuths assumed for years was correct isn't.

Big big news: Everybody who thought they knew the answer to K2, check again. Instead of ending "...seconds west. ID by rows", the correct plaintext is "...seconds west. X Layer Two".

More details at our Kryptos Group announcement.

Heading back to watch the webcounter spin,

Elonka :)

Wired News: Kryptos Part 2 Was Wrong