The occasional scrivener

Ancient secrets

Venona: sp�ren fr�n ett underr�ttelsekrig by Wilhelm Agrell.

A history of the Venona telegrams intercepted in Sweden during the Second World War, and the implications of their decoding on the revelations of Soviet espionage in Sweden during the period.

Man, that was a long sentence.

Agrell describes the Venona decrypts as the "Dead Sea Rolls of the Cold War". The limited decryption of the traffic meant that the recovered plaintext nearly raised more questions than it answered.

Blogging hiatus

Symbiandiaries.com is back online after a longer hiatus. The problem lay in the management interface, not the serving of pages. For once, Movable Type's use of static pages paid off.

I've been chafing under the enforced silence, not realizing until now how much I appreciate the chance of self-expression. I really regret the chance to publish this post (now backdated). Oh well.

I've offered my services to Rafe of AAS fame as ronin sysadmin, so perhaps we can recover faster next time the site goes down.