pica_pica

Just finished reading "Digital Fortress" by Dan Brown. Yeah, the same guy that wrote The Davinci Code (which I haven't read)

Not a bad book, not great... It was one of those last stop airport magazine shop purchases, you know the ones...
Anyways, the books all about encryption and espionage and government blah blah blah... coming from a code perspective there were a couple of issues I had with the "realities" of parts of the story.

(for example. at one point he's talking about this guy that has a 64 bit encryption key engraved onto a gold ring. This key is supposed to be of extreme importance The dialog in the book goes on to say:

"even if anybody saw it, there is no way that a person could remember all 64 characters from a glance" ... or something like that.

grrr. It's the little things like that that kinda wreck fiction for me when it's to do with technology. It's not rocket surgery. Ask your 12 year old nephew how many bits in an ASCII character the next time you wanna write a book about top notch code breakers rushing to save the world...

nonetheless, there's this string on the last page that is going to bug me until I figure it out. it's all alone on the last page, obviously there to be cracked.

128-10-93-85-10-128-98-112-6-6-25-126-39-1-68-78

yeah, yeah,... I could probably do a google search for that string and come up with the solution in about 3 seconds, but I'd rather not.
(and don't post the answer in here if you figure it out, but hints are allowed.)

In other news,
uh...