The whispering typewriter

In 1984, at the American embassy in Moscow and the consulate in Leningrad, sixteen IBM Selectric typewriters were found that had spent eight years retelling everything typed on them. A bug in a metal bar caught the movements of the mechanism: four bits per keystroke, several letters to each sound. What exactly had been typed, the post rebuilt by the laws of probability. How I came upon this story is on my blogon my blog.

The real scheme was never published. My bug has sixteen sounds, two or three letters to each, and the post knows only the 9660 words Vova’s sites are written in (the dictionary was built at commit 4596eec). A word it doesn’t know, it won’t guess.

Type anything, in English or Russian

What the bug hears

74 · 04081350 · 4 · D · D212 · F83D · 92 · 33A397531 · E0 · 935 · 1 · 07461 · 3C1 · E0 · 7320 · 1721 · E35 · 1 · 6132 · 13C · F83D · 05631450 · 3C8 · DC64B ·

What the post writes down

hi everyone, i’m maya from da/oblozhkoy. we don’t exist, but we hope that won’t stop you from enjoying our music.

23 of 24 right. Red is a wrong guess, underlined could read otherwise, grey is a word the post doesn’t know.