Why all the missing letters?!

[TheHow7zer]

Hello 405th!
I have a small question that has been bothering me FOREVER! Why is it that in Ghosts of Onyx and Fall of Reach the letters "fi" are always missing? (the are only ever missing in that order Ex:" le" instead of "file", but not like: "e ect ve" instead of "effective")

The letters only seem to be missing in the messages from AIs or other electronic messages.

Am I the only one who noticed it? Or is it just a miss print?

Thank in advance!

~Jacob T.

 

[Varsity]

do you have a picture i can see?

 

[AceNat]

I have the same thing in my fall of reach book,
Didn't notice it untill i saw this thread, but it's not it my ghosts of onyx though.
weird..

 

[alix965]

I too found this odd and slightly off-putting. I've never read literature that has used a device like this to illustrate to the reader what was being read in the book.

Perhaps it was decided by the publisher that this would be a recurring theme in all the Halo novels. The same effect is used in William C. Dietz's 'The Flood'. I think they use it to represent an encrypted electonic communique which has not survived the decryption process wholly intact after being beamed across multiple relays throughout the farthest reaches of space.

or not. meh.

 

[Garland]

Never noticed that before. Maybe if you find all of the missing letters, it reveals some secret message?

 

[ventrue]

So far, I've noticed that only with the letters "fi".

In books, these two are usually combined into one character (take a close look: The i's dot is part of the f), and I suppose that there was a problem with that character in the font they used for the messages.

 

[TheHow7zer]

Never noticed that before. Maybe if you find all of the missing letters, it reveals some secret message?

Well, the only letters missing are f and I in the sequence "fi". So not really much of message. lol

@ http://www.405th.member.php/16483-alix965alix965
Your explanation makes some sense, but why was data loss never addressed/explained? Anywhere?

@AceNat
I am probably wrong about GoO, as I am at University and away from all my Halo books, I had to guess which ones they were in.

@ Got armour
I don't have pictures (reasons above ^^)

But I went and looked through the E-book version and couldn't find anything of the sort missing!
But, (two buts in a row ) I also noticed that the E-books didn't use a special font for the electronic read-outs. Maybe the that has something to do with it...

 

[TheHow7zer]

Sorry for the double post, but I though this was important.
I found Eric Nylund's website and fired him an email:

Hey Eric,
First of all I want to tell you how much I've enjoyed your Halo series of novels. They really add a lot of character and depth to the series that wouldn't be noticed otherwise!

But I have a question that I have been discussing with the 405th Halo armouring community (http://www.405th.com/showthread.php/28055-Why-all-the-missing-letters-!?p=455368#post455368) about some of the electronic (AI) messages in the book.

In some of the novels, like Fall of Reach there are two letters that are systematically missing all the time; "fi". I was wondering if this has any meaning or if it just has to do with the printing of the book.

Thanks! From a BIG fan!

 

[ventrue]

They aren't missing everywhere. Somewhere at the end of Fall of Reach, they do show. Check page 302 when you have the book available.

 

[Garland]

I just flipped through my copy of Fall of Reach. The "fi" is missing in every electronic message I looked at, except the one on 302. In one of the messages the "fi" was missing from identification, so it read "identi cation." Weird. . .

 

[TheHow7zer]

They aren't missing everywhere. Somewhere at the end of Fall of Reach, they do show. Check page 302 when you have the book available.

Huh, odd. So that would mean that it didn't have anything to do with the font. Interesting... *scratches beard*

 

[ventrue]

My guess is that at some point they changed something that restored that fi-character. Maybe a different version fo the font or something like that.

 

[DogWizard]

My belief is that it was done from a cryptography standpoint. By making the assumption that your transmissions are being monitored, dropping letters or inserting nonesense could disrupt or interfere with some of the simpler cyphers even within a single language. A native speaker could fill in the gaps that would stonewall someone (or something) translating using a standard substitution cypher. Just imagine the additional challenges it could pose to interspecies translations...

 

[alix965]

My belief is that it was done from a cryptography standpoint. By making the assumption that your transmissions are being monitored, dropping letters or inserting nonesense could disrupt or interfere with some of the simpler cyphers even within a single language. A native speaker could fill in the gaps that would stonewall someone (or something) translating using a standard substitution cypher. Just imagine the additional challenges it could pose to interspecies translations...

Nice. But this also is confusing. Is it an attempt to break the fourth wall and connect with the reader on a more meta level as BUNGIE is wont to do? If so why hasn't it been explained or even hinted at?

 

[alix965]

Sorry for the double post, but I though this was important.
I found Eric Nylund's website and fired him an email:

Hey Eric,
First of all I want to tell you how much I've enjoyed your Halo series of novels. They really add a lot of character and depth to the series that wouldn't be noticed otherwise!

But I have a question that I have been discussing with the 405th Halo armouring community (http://www.405th.com/showthread.php/28055-Why-all-the-missing-letters-!?p=455368#post455368) about some of the electronic (AI) messages in the book.

In some of the novels, like Fall of Reach there are two letters that are systematically missing all the time; "fi". I was wondering if this has any meaning or if it just has to do with the printing of the book.

Thanks! From a BIG fan!

Hey TheHow, This post is more leet than I can put into words, going directly to the author? That's pretty badass. Nice work on the research tip. Make sure you post his reply please

Nylund is probably all like, "Huh? The who? WHAT??! That was like, skatey- eight years ago!!Let me place my finger over the delete key. *delete*
That was easy. Now back to my coffee."

 

[RadioactiveMicrobe]

It's decryption errors. Eac of those electronic messages are encrypted and decrypted. There will be an increasing decline of quality the number of times a file is encrypted/decrypted. Like recording on a VHS.

 

[DogWizard]

It's decryption errors. Eac of those electronic messages are encrypted and decrypted. There will be an increasing decline of quality the number of times a file is encrypted/decrypted. Like recording on a VHS.

Is that fact or opinion? You seem rather certain... :confused


While I think that's one of the better suggestions, decryption really doesn't work that way - it can't. Why only those specific letters? Assuming file degradation, one would expect to see random errors scattered throughout the transmissions. Mil-spec cryptography (even today) is significantly better than that. If encrypted transmissions were subject to random decryption errors each time they were encrypted/decrypted, they would be essentially useless. What if some of those errors/omissions happened to be numerals instead of letters - say dates, or times, or coordinates for an attack? That would throw any coordinated military actions into a complete shamble.


I'm sorry but I can't accept "VHS-like" degradation as the reason. VHS copies degrade because the physical medium degrades, not because of any issue with the decoding algorithms (and it's 30-year old tech - we have already advanced significantly). Not to mention the fact that it is a fair assumption that encryption at that level (and in the future) is done in the digital domain. Even today we can make bit-perfect digital copies of encrypted files (large and small) and reproduce them ad infinitum. I should hope that our technology hasn't deteriorated that far 500 years from now...


I believe that because of these “errors” specific repeatability (and the notable lack of random errors elsewhere), they are not errors at all, but the result of intentional design.

 

[ventrue]

[lalala]
I believe that because of these “errors” specific repeatability (and the notable lack of random errors elsewhere), they are not errors at all, but the result of intentional design.

I completely support your line of thought and come to a completely different result with it: It's neither intentional nor part of the Halo Universe. It's simply an error producing the book, in our world.

 

[DogWizard]

I completely support your line of thought and come to a completely different result with it: It's neither intentional nor part of the Halo Universe. It's simply an error producing the book, in our world.

Sorry, but I have to disagree with this conclusion as well. Having done my share of technical copywriting and editing, that many errors would never have slipped through the editing/proofing process - even in a mass-market paperback. The errors are too specific and too repeatable to be a simple printing oversight. While the occasional typo or legitimate printing error do slip through the cracks, they tend to be one-off mistakes rather than a specific string of the same error occuring multiple times - especially given that they only occur in what is assumed to be encrypted UNSC orders/communications. If it were simply a case of sloppy editing/printing, I would expect to see numerous errors throughout the entire text...

 

[Garland]

My belief is that it was done from a cryptography standpoint. By making the assumption that your transmissions are being monitored, dropping letters or inserting nonesense could disrupt or interfere with some of the simpler cyphers even within a single language. A native speaker could fill in the gaps that would stonewall someone (or something) translating using a standard substitution cypher. Just imagine the additional challenges it could pose to interspecies translations...

Short of Nylund telling us exactly what it means, I'm sticking with this.