A fringe but growing part of the American right-wing believes the Clintons, Bushes, and Obamas are all part of a wide-ranging conspiracy that is involved in pedophile rings, controls the media, and runs the government from the shadows. According to this conspiracy theory, known as QAnon, Donald Trump has a plan to defeat them, and it will all soon come to light.
This wild conspiracy theory relies in part on coded messages posted on message boards such as 4Chan or 8Chan by someone who only goes by the moniker “Q,” an alleged government insider who has been leaking information online.
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But as it turns out, these coded messages may be totally meaningless, “random typing” according to a security researcher who has studied code creation.
“These are not actual codes, just random typing by someone who might play an instrument and uses a qwerty keyboard,” Mark Burnett, a security consultant who has analyzed millions of passwords over the course of more than a decade, wrote on Twitter after studying the codes.
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Burnett said he noticed a pattern in the codes: “almost all the characters” in the codes alternate between the right and left hand or are close to each other in a normal QWERTY keyboard. Imagine someone’s hands resting on a regular keyboard. According to Burnett, QAnon is likely simply typing keys randomly with his left hand and right hand where they rest, resulting in a combination of characters alternating between one group of keys on the right side of the keyboard, and one group of keys on the left side of the keyboard.
“The funny thing about people is that even when we type random stuff we tend to have a signature. This guy, for example, likes to have his hand on the ends of each side of the keyboard (e.g., 1,2,3 and 7,8,9) and alternate,” Burnett wrote in his thread.
Burnett collected some of the Q codes on his GitHub, encouraging others to look at them and find patterns or challenge his conclusions.
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