What is the world’s biggest secret? Perhaps you are thinking “the formula for Coca-Cola”, “who shot Kennedy”,” what happened to the Holy Grail”, or “the location of Atlantis”. All good guesses, but these are merely historical curiosities.

Right now, the biggest secret in the world is the encryption key that unlocks the Wikileaks “insurance” file. In case you haven’t been following the story closely, Wikileaks has only published a small fraction of the massive database of government and commercial secrets which were leaked to them. However, on July 30, in response to strong US government threats, Wikileaks released to the world a 1.4 GB “insurance” file.

The file is encrypted with AES256, the same encryption algorithm used by the government to protect it’s own “Top Secret” files. Although Wikileaks has not made any public statements about the contents of this file, its purpose seems clear: in case something happens to the site or to Julian Assange himself, they made a backup of their secrets and stored it in the one place where it can never be destroyed; everywhere. Speculation is that this information bomb contains the balance of the State Department cables, as well as commercial and military secrets ranging from BP to The Vatican.

Every spy organization in the world and a half-million hackers and computer science students are hard at work analyzing this file. But without the key, they have little chance of success. What does a 256-bit key look like? In hexadecimal, it might be: “496e2031363932203139206d656e20616e642074776f20776f6d656e20″. But such a key is unwieldly.

A binary key is difficult to store and transmit, and it looks like, well, an encryption key.  More than likely, the key hidden in plain sight; a common, publicly available reference (perhaps the first line of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”).  To create a 256-bit key like the one above, you only need 29 characters, so “In 1692 19 men and two women ” would do nicely. Of course, you could also make it be much longer.

One thing is certain: someday we will know the answer. It is highly unlikely that several young people will all carry this secret to their graves, never succumbing to pressure, argument or temptation, and never making a mistake. And once we have the key, we will have everything because the file that it unlocks is readily available. (There are millions of copies of it around the world. You could easily get a copy for yourself.)

Cracking the code through “brute force” methods is far beyond the capabilities of the worlds fastest (and most secret) supercomputers. An entirely new generation of computers, based on quantum physics, may have a chance, but that type of innovation is decades away.

Until then, unless someone screws up or forces Julian Assange’s hand, the Wikileaks insurance file will remain one of the greatest mysteries of the modern world.

"Do you see what I see?"

Every good designer knows the rules about page layout. Your eye goes first to the headline, then to the caption of the picture, then to the picture… whatever. But if you’re really serious about page layout and GUI design, you have to use eyetracking.

The problem is, eyetracking is really expensive and time-consuming. You need special equipment and a testing environment and, probably most difficult to come by, test participants. Maybe…

Now, a group of artificial vision scientists who call themselves Feng-GUI Lab have created a piece of software that simulates the human vision process. You can upload a still image or a movie and in seconds approximate the results of a weeks worth of human testing. Their website allows you to try out a free image analysis every three hours. I tried an analysis of my home page. The result is displayed above (click on it for a larger view).

Feng-GUI also has a lot of interesting applications of AI vision analysis listed on their home page including “smart thumbnails,” the technique of only including the visually interesting part of a picture. Make your own AI eyetracking simulations here.

Links:

• Good info on consumer Web visual behavior
• 5-step formula for creating a David Ogilvy-style ad layout

"Visit Our Website"

When “King Kong” opened as a film in 1933, its pioneering special effects (stop motion animation and miniature models) amazed and terrified audiences. Sixty years later, we find that same animation laughable.

Audiences learn quickly and rapidly grown in sophistication once exposed to a new media. Remember how we used to have to write “CLICK HERE” next to hypertext links? And now, all you have to do is change the cursor rollover or the link text.

What was once amazement soon turns to boredom. All you needed to do to get people to come to your website in 1998 was to let them know that you had one. Novelty and curiosity drove audiences to your site in herds. But as competition for online attention increased, website promotion became a real challenge. We started putting our URL on everything, running contests and promotions, producing videos and complex campaigns in hopes of rising above the noise level. Pretty much, the race is over.

People don’t have time to come to your website anymore. You are expected to have one, and frankly, you are expected to delight us when we visit it. But we don’t want to go there anymore. We have other places to be and other things to do. What other things?

We are planning our entertainment activities, chatting with friends and sharing baby pictures and motorcycle wipeouts. We’re too busy speculating on ball scores and making fun of the government to drag our browsers over to your site to learn about your product or service. If you have something to say to us, you had better package it up like a burger and fries and hand it to us as we drive by.

That’s why social networking is so important to marketers. [bedtime...more on this later]