Disk information for the file that displays William Gibson's Agrippa exactly once and then renders the text unreadable
Academic researchers are calling on cryptographers to crack the encryption behind a two-decade-old floppy disk that displays a poem penned by cyberpunk author William Gibson exactly once and then permanently scrambles the words so they can never be read again.
The 3.5-inch diskette was unveiled at a 1992 meeting held by the Americas Society. It caused a then-unknown poem called "Agrippa (a book of the dead)" to be displayed on a Mac PowerBook exactly once. A script contained on the disk, which was included with an obscure "noir art book" by Dennis Ashbaugh and Kevin Begos, Jr., then caused the words of the poem to self destruct, and no amount of tinkering has been able to restore them. (New York University film students captured the words as they scrolled up the screen during the event and later transcribed and posted them to the Internet, where they still live today.)
Almost exactly 20 years later, Quinn Dupont, a University of Toronto PhD student studying cryptography, has compiled disk image, a System 7 emulator, and much of the underlying source code for the app. He is sharing it online in the hopes that cryptographers can figure out exactly how it all works. The first person to document the scheme will receive a copy of every William Gibson book ever published (except Agrippa). Runners up will be credited with also solving the puzzle.
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