Dot points summary of my Hacker Theory
This is the twenty-first instalment of my "Dot points summary of my Hacker Theory," part #42 of my Turin Shroud Encyclopedia. It will help me answer questions about my Hacker Theory in any future online interviews[14May25]. I need to do this before I write my open letter to Nature[22Jan25], as my 6-part "My Hacker Theory in a Nutshell" series turned out to be longer than I expected. Even though it was much shorter than my hacker posts it was based on! As in my "Hacker Theory in a Nutshell" series, references will normally be linked to my previous hacker posts. Graphics will be `flashcards' which I may hold up to the camera to illustrate a point. If a reference looks the same as another reference (e.g. "09Jan14"), when it is clicked it will open at the correct place.
[Index #1] [Previous: My Hacker Theory (6) #41] [Next: To be advised #43].
■ My Hacker Theory is that: "The 1988 radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin as `mediaeval ... 1260-1390' was the result of a computer hacking, by Arizona radiocarbon dating laboratory physicist Timothy W. Linick (1946-89), aided by German hacker Karl Koch (1965–89), on behalf of the former Soviet Union, through its agency the KGB." [23Jul15; 19Aug15; 13Apr19; 03Aug19].
■ 1260-1390 The 1988 radiocarbon dating of the Shroud as "mediaeval ... AD 1260-1390, with at least 95% confidence"[06Jan12; 22Jul12; 17Feb19] was from a 16 February 1989 article in the science journal Nature, "Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin." That article was not peer-reviewed[PM96, 110; GV01, 132-133; 28Jan25]. The "1390" date is fraudulent[22Jan25; 28Jan25]. The "with at least 95% confidence" is false[17Feb19; 29May19]. And the article contains evidence that the 1260-1390 date was the result of a computer hacking[28Jan25] (see future below)!
■ 1325 ± 65 The midpoint of 1260-1390 is 1325 ± 65 years[09Jan14; 18Feb14; 11May14; 02Dec14; 23Jul15]. This `just happens' to be 30 years before the Shroud first appeared in undisputed history at Lirey, France in 1355[09Jan14; 18Feb14; 02Dec14; 23Jul15]! Tite fraudulently rounded to the nearest 10, "1384" to "1390," in the 1989 Nature article[22Jan25]. And it was Tite who pointed out at the 13 October 1988 press conference where he announced that the Shroud's radiocarbon date was "1260-1390"[03Oct18; 08Dec22], that "the Shroud's raw flax had most likely been made into linen on or about the year AD 1325, give or take sixty-five years either way"[11Jan10]. And, "Had anyone wished to discredit the Shroud, '1325 ± 65 years' is precisely the sort of date they would have looked to achieve"[09Jan14]!
■ AMS The Shroud's radiocarbon dating was by Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS)[ 18Feb14; 24May14; 23Jul15]. Which was fully controlled by a computer[13Mar14; 08Jun14]. So it was vulnerable to hacking[08Dec14; 23Jul15; 28Feb25]. See below "VMS security flaw."
■ Markus Hess In 1986 Clifford Stoll (1950-), a System Administrator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL), caught a hacker, Markus Hess (1960-), dialing in from Germany, logging in to an LBL computer and from there logging into military and government computers elsewhere[22Feb14]. In the 1980s those computers had easily guessed login IDs and passwords[21Jul14].
■ Hacker ring Hess was a member of a German hacker ring which also included Hans Hubner (1968-) and Karl Koch (1965-89)[13Dec14]. The hacker ring sold hacked secrets to the Soviet Union through the KGB[02Jun16].
■ VMS security flaw In 1986 two German hackers with pseudonyms "Bach" and "Handel" discovered that the DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation)'s VMS (Virtual Memory System) operating system on DEC computers (which the 3 AMS computers were[05Jul14]) had a major security flaw[02Jun16; 07Apr25]. If a user typed any login and password, and simply ignored the error messages, he could enter the system[02Jun16; 07Apr25]. And then by running a short program he could become a System Manager[21Jul14; 17May15]!
■ Patch Linick would have been aware of this because DEC sent to the System Administrators of all DEC/VMS systems (which Linick was[09Jan21]) a software patch to be installed to close the loophole[21Jul14]. However, the accompanying documentation was so low-key that most did not bother installing the patch[21Jul14]. This likely would have been the case for the 3 AMS computers which were not online[21Jul14].
■ Karl Koch Koch became an expert in hacking DEC/VMS systems[14May25]. Not only could he exploit the VMS security flaw, he was also an expert in guessing logins and passwords[14May25; 02Jun16].
■ Espionage Hess was arrested in June 1987, put on trial and convicted of espionage[21Jul14; 02Jun16]. This was worldwide news, so Linick would likely have heard of it. However, due to a police failure to catch Hess in the act of hacking, on appeal, his conviction was dismissed[21Jul14; 02Jun16].
■ Three AMS Laboratories On 10 October 1987[22Oct17; 08Dec22], the Archbishop of Turin, Cardinal Ballestrero (r. 1977-89), announced that the recommended 7 laboratories using 2 different methods, would be reduced to 3 laboratories using only the AMS method[22Feb16; 13Mar21].
[...]■ Linick was a signatory to the above Nature article[31Mar14; 05Jul14]. He was "extremely mathematically gifted[05Jul14; 13Aug14; 22Feb16]. Linick did the Arizona laboratory's computer programs[09Jan21].
[Above (enlarge): Photograph of Linick, in the black shirt, standing in front of Arizona radiocarbon dating laboratory leaders and staff around the AMS control console computer terminal after it had, on 6 May 1988 displayed Linick's computer-generated "1350" very first radiocarbon date of the Shroud[02Dec14; 22Feb16; 22Nov16]. That Linick is standing in front of Arizona laboratory leaders and staff indicates that he was in charge of Arizona's AMS computerised dating process and those present were acknowledging that[05Jul14; 22Feb16; 25Mar18; 23Jun18; 25Mar18; 08Dec22]. The photo was evidently taken by Rochester radiocarbon dating laboratory's Prof. Harry Gove (1922-2009)[05Jul14], because he was there but isn't in the photograph, which is in Gove's 1996 book[GH96, 176H]. That Gove later realised that Linick was the leaker of Arizona's first "1350 AD" date to Sox is evident in that Gove barely mentioned Linick in his book but he couldn't take him out of this historic group photograph[25Mar18; 08Dec22]!]
■ Linick's problems Linick had major psychological and personal[09Jan21] problems. He was deeply introverted[30Dec15; 22Feb16; 15Aug17; 03Aug19]. Linick suffered from depression[30Dec15; 22Feb16; 09Jan21], and had threatened to commit suicide[09Jan21]. Linick was separated from his wife and son[09Jan21]. Linick's wife, Constance Blackburn (1953-2016), changed her surname back to her maiden surname (Ancestry.com), which seems unusual and suggests that she was aware of Linick having been involved in something shameful or criminal? Linick had become an "underachiever"[09Jan21]. It seems likely that Linick had been experiencing a mid-life crisis:
"Mid-life crisis ... a transition of identity and self-confidence that can occur in middle-aged individuals ... a psychological crisis brought about by events that highlight a person's growing age, inevitable mortality, and possible lack of accomplishments in life. This may produce feelings of intense depression, remorse, and high levels of anxiety; or the desire to ... make drastic changes to their current lifestyle ..." (my emphasis)[MLC].
■ Soviet Union In 1988 the Soviet Union (USSR) was on the brink of collapse[03ep14]. It did collapse in November 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall[03ep14]. The USSR was an Atheist State[03ep14], but within it were many millions of Roman Catholics, Russian Orthodox and Protestant Christians, who believed that the Shroud was Jesus' burial sheet[03ep14]. So if the radiocarbon dating revealed that the Shroud was first (or early because of irremovable carbon contamination[13Jun14; 24Jun14; 30Dec15]) century, it would be major problem for the crumbling USSR[03ep14].
■ KGB So if in his depressed state, Linick sought to escape from his problems by offering the KGB, through the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco[03Sep14], a guaranteed pre-1355 radiocarbon date of the Shroud, for a large sum of money[24Jun14], if the KGB could provide a hacker who could install Linick's program on Zurich and Oxford AMS computers[07Apr25], the KGB would have eagerly accepted Linick's offer[03Sep14].
■ Not online The three laboratories' AMS computers were never online[07Mar14; 05Jul14], so although Linick could run his hacker program on Arizona's AMS computer, he needed a hacker to load and run his program on Zurich and Oxford's AMS computers[25Apr14; 21Jul14].
■ Automatic The AMS computers being off-line, to hack Zurich and Oxford's dating, Linick's program had to operate automatically with no human interventione[08Jun14; 30Jan15; 22Sep15; 15Oct15]. Each AMS dating run had a prearranged order, so when the program detected it was a Shroud sample, it substituted the Shroud's first (or early) century date[08Jun14; 30Jan15; 15Oct15], with a computer-generated date[13Jun14; 30Jan15; 15Oct15], which when combined and averaged across all three laboratories, returned a plausible pre-1355 radiocarbon date of the Shroud[05Jul14; 30Jan15; 22Sep15]. It was not necessarily 1260-1390 = 1325 ± 65 because Tite fraudulently rounded to the nearest ten 1384 to 1390[22Jan25].
■ Algorithm In addition to the above constraints on Linick's algorithm, because he needed Arizona's very first dating run of all three laboratories to be the psychological `hammer blow' date "1350," to overcome the Arizona scientists' critical faculties[08Jun14; 31Mar15; 22Feb16; 23Jun18; 22Jan25], and which he could leak to the media to create a climate of expectation[24Jun14; 22Sep15; 03Aug19; 21Mar23] that the Shroud's radiocarbon date would be close to its first appearance in undisputed history at Lirey, France in 1355[24Jun14; 22Oct17; 25Mar18]. But this created a problem for Linick in that because "1350" was the most recent of all three laboratories' dates of the Shroud, and Arizona's other dates of the Shroud would also have to be more recent than all the other laboratories'dates, otherwise the "1350" date would be too much an outlier. But then Linick's algorithm would have to balance Arizona's most recent dates with Zurich and Oxford's least recent dates, for the combined and averaged date of the Shroud across all three laboratories to be a few decades before 1355[22Jan25]. An article in Shroud News indirectly made this point:
"The Arizona and Switzerland lab dates gave a later age (late 14th century) than the final published results. The Oxford lab dates came in late and conveniently low enough to skewer the average of the three labs to an early 14th century date instead of a late 14th century date. Had the Oxford lab been consistent with the other two labs, the late 14th century results would clearly have made the whole procedure erroneous since we know that the Holy Shroud had to have been in existence in the early 14th Century since it was exhibited in 1340 [sic 1355] in France"[DV94, 11].■ Reverse engineering Linick's aglorithm The mechanism of Linick's algorithm was random years within limits[08Jun14; 22Feb16; 20Mar19; 07Apr25]. In the Excel spreadsheet below, from 07Apr25,
[Above: Reverse engineering Linick's algorithm: proof of concept. Starting with a laboratory's first run, `hard-wired' date, then each successive dating run being a random number between the limits of the target date and the previous dating run's date, the hacker's algorithm would converge on the target date, no matter how many dating runs there were, providing the algorithm controlled extremes. Zurich's dates were used because it had the most dating runs in Nature's Table 1. The "extremely mathematically gifted" (see above) Linick's program would be more sophisticated than my simple Excel spreadsheet, but the basic concept of random numbers within limits converging on a target date, for each laboratory would be the same.]using Zurich's dates because it had the most dating runs in Nature's Table 1[28Jan25]. The numbers in the left-hand column under "Table 1" are Zurich's mean dates of its 5 dating runs [28Jan25]. As can be seen, Zurich's first run date, "733" (i.e. 1950-733 = 1217), is the least recent (oldest) of all Zurich's dates. As we saw above, Linick's algorithm needed to balance Arizona's most recent dates with Zurich and Oxford's least recent dates, so "733" was Linick's algorithm's `hard-wired' least recent Zurich date and so its dates had to move in the most recent (younger) direction. Therefore I assumed a target date of "630" for Zurich because "635" was the most recent (youngest) of Zurich dating runs. Column 2 "Hack" used Excel's "RANDBETWEEN(bottom, top)" funcrion. So, "721" in the second row was the result of RANDBETWEEN(630, 722). Pressing Excel's F9 (calculate) key 10 times, to simulate 10 runs, produced 10 different random numbers in each row of the "Hack" column, between the dates in each row of the Table 1 column and 630. And as can be seen, the mean of one of those 10 results "681.4" was very close to Zurich's Table 1 mean of "681.6"! (Table 2 of the Nature article says the mean of Zurich's Shroud dates was "676 ± 24"). I chose the "681.4" mean result as the best fit out of the 10 calculations with the F9 key, but Linick's program would presumably have the mathematical equivalent of a human choice of the best result. That I could get so close to Zurich's total mean date in only 10 tries must mean that this is indeed a `reverse engineering' of Linick's algorithm. It is clearly not possible to know exactly what Linick's algorithm was (since his program would likely have included an instruction for its own deletion after it had ceased dating the Shroud[08Jun14; 30Jan15; 29May19]). Nor is it possible to reproduce exactly the laboratories' hacked results (at least not in this "dot points" format). But coupled with the "proof beyond reasonable doubt" that my Linick-Koch Hacking Theory is true (see 14May25), this is as good as it gets!
To be continued in the twenty-second instalment of this post.
Notes:
1. This post is copyright. I grant permission to extract or quote from any part of it (but not the whole post), provided the extract or quote includes a reference citing my name, its title, its date, and a hyperlink back to this page.
Bibliography
DV94. de Vincenzo, V., 1994, "12 reasons why I cannot accept the carbon-14 test results on the Holy Shroud of Turin," Shroud News, No. 82, April, 3-13.
GH96. Gove, H.E., 1996, "Relic, Icon or Hoax?: Carbon Dating the Turin Shroud," Institute of Physics Publishing: Bristol UK.
GV01. Guerrera, V., 2001, "The Shroud of Turin: A Case for Authenticity," TAN: Rockford IL.
MLC. "Midlife crisis," Wikipedia, 14 June 2025.
PM96. Petrosillo, O. & Marinelli, E., 1996, "The Enigma of the Shroud: A Challenge to Science," Scerri, L.J., transl., Publishers Enterprises Group: Malta.
RTB. Reference(s) to be provided.
Posted 4 July 2025. Updated 26 July 2025.
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