Monday, January 23, 2017

Hacking an explanation & Index: Steps in the development of my radiocarbon dating of the Turin Shroud hacker theory #1

Copyright © Stephen E. Jones[1]

This is part #1, "Hacking an explanation" and the Index of my "Steps in the development of my radiocarbon dating of the Turin Shroud hacker theory" series. It is the continuation of my "The 1260-1390 radiocarbon date of the Turin Shroud was the result of a computer hacking" series." It was formerly titled, "June 2007" but I later realised that it will be more informative to include in the title of each post in this series a brief description of the actual step in the development of my hacker theory. In this series I will set out in chronological order the steps in the

[Above: Page 147 of David Sox's 1988 book, "The Shroud Unmasked," in which he stated of the very first radiocarbon dating run of the Shroud at Arizona laboratory on 6 May 1988, that:

"The calculations were produced on the computer, and displayed on the screen"[2].]
When I read this in June 2007, I did not then see the significance of "Timothy Linick, a University of Arizona research scientist" (above) communicating with Sox, but then apparently no one else did either. See my post of 31Mar14 where I first alleged that Linick may have been the hacker whose program produced the bogus "1260-1390" radiocarbon date of the Shroud, and my post of 24Jun14 where I first alleged that Linick was the leaker of Arizona's first "1350" date of the Shroud to Sox.]

development of my theory that the 1988 radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin as "mediaeval ... AD 1260-1390"[3] was the result of a computer hacking. Each step will be a separate post linked back by the date of the step to this index.

[Next: Fraud a real possibility #2] [Index: #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12]

Hacking an explanation As mentioned in my post of 24Oct16, in the late 1980s-early 1990s I was the Systems Administrator of a wide-area network of 7 hospitals' UNIX servers in rural Western Australia. As part of my job interest I had read Clifford Stoll's 1989 book, "The Cuckoo's Egg," in which he documented from personal experience (much of which was at Arizona University!) how poorly secured university networked computer systems were in the 1980s and therefore how easy they were to hack, and were hacked.

So when I read the above in June 2007, that "The calculations were produced on the computer, and displayed on the screen," it occurred to me that since the AMS computer produced the calculations of the Shroud's radiocarbon date and displayed them on the computer's screen, then hacking of the AMS computer's radiocarbon dating program could be an explanation why the authentic and therefore first-century (or earlier) Shroud had a 13th/14th century radiocarbon date.

However, I had only just started this blog and had a lot to learn about the Shroud, so didn't begin to post that the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud may have been hacked until 09Jan14, when I intended to mention hacking in the context of a 7-part series on fraud in the Shroud's radiocarbon dating, but which I abandoned because it was too broad and I wanted to concentrate on hacking as a form of fraud in the Shroud's radiocarbon dating.

So it was not until 6½ years later on 18Feb14 that I mentioned "hacker" but then only in the title of a four-part series as a question, "Were the radiocarbon dating laboratories duped by a computer hacker? (1)." And then on 22Feb14 in part #3 of that series, I first proposed, tentatively, that:

"...there is another form of fraud that does not seem to have occurred to anyone, namely that the laboratories may have been duped by a computer hacker."

Continued in part #2 of this series.

Notes
1. This post is copyright. Permission is granted to quote from any part of this post (but not the whole post), provided it includes a reference citing my name, its subject heading, its date and a hyperlink back to this post. [return]
2. Sox, H.D., 1988, The Shroud Unmasked: Uncovering the Greatest Forgery of All Time," Lamp Press: Basingstoke UK, p.147. [return]
3. Damon, P.E., 1989, "Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin," Nature, Vol. 337, 16th February, pp.611-615, 611. [return]

Posted 23 January 2017. Updated 7 November 2023.

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