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The Daily Toad: Proudly disseminating sensationalised rubbish since 1645. 12th May 2020

GCHQ yesterday - Source, UK Gov, Wikinedia Commons

In the light of faster and faster computers now able to crack increasingly complex computer passwords, and the likelihood of Quantum Computers being able to solve all codes no matter how complex, cryptologists at GCHQ have been working a viable alternative in order to keep communications secure for the foreseeable future.

The 'BWS' encoding and decoding system works on a three-tier architecture, where the plain text is typed into a machine where it is translated into how Russell Brand would say the same thing, complete with lengthy digressions about the current political situation and randomly generated non sequiters that may take in everything from popular culture to fashion to a sometimes freestyle approach to history.

This tract is then fed into the Rowan William device, which translates Brand's wide ranging invective using the former Archbishop of Canterbury's trademark pauses, softly spoken paternalism and long words, interesting use of grammar into an interpretation of man's relationship with the universe, and the struggles for uniformity of moralistic behaviour in a multicultural world.

This 'Brand-Williams' hybrid semi-encodedment is then fed into the Will Self machine which translates it into a piece intended for publication in Granta , with a lot of very long words that you have to look up, and while interesting reading, does leave one with the impression that someone a bit brighter than you has probably understood it a lot better.

And it is this final encoded text that it has proved impossible to crack, using even the most sophisticated computer processors, and even by employing lookalikes or impersonators to attempt the decryption.

"Obviously we are hugely proud of our achievement," said a spokesperson for GCHQ's cryptology department, "but since we could not use Brand, Williams and Self to encode the messages themselves as they are all very busy, we have constructed advanced computer models of their curious lexicographical, grammatical and sometimes tangential thought processes, and it is this software that allows us to not only encode messages, but also decode them with almost 99% accuracy."

Asked if there were any drawbacks to the system, the same spokesperson admitted that the three tranches of encoding did have a verbosity issue, with a simple twenty-eight word message becoming a seventy thousand word book with its own Faber & Faber contract by the end of process.

"If we attempt to encode a message of anything longer than seventy-two words," explained the spokesperson, "we see a 'runaway verbosity' issue where the three encoded texts increase in length exponentially. A one hundred word test message was sent off six months ago, and we're now at a three hundred thousand word political, spiritual and academic manifesto, that while making for extremely interesting reading and may result in a blueprint by which mankind can better itself, does not seem to be ending any time soon, despite the introduction of Calvin Coolidge/Haiku/Sun Headline moderators to decrease the word count. It's an ongoing problem, but we'll be sure to crack it."

Josh Hatchett, for The Toad