The British government gave/sold Enigma machines to various allies after the war. Somehow forgetting to mention that they could decrypt them. Cunning.
tialaramex 2 minutes ago [-]
Colossus isn't for Enigma, it's to attack Lorenz aka "Tunny".
Enigma is among the last of an obsolete YOLO approach to encrypting written text. On the other hand Lorenz, like the systems Britain and her allies were also using, is a stream cipher, not ultimately so different from say ChaCha20 except that Lorenz is broken and ChaCha20 is not. Lorenz uses streams of 5-bit codes whereas today we'd think in 8-bit bytes, but fundamentally it's the same idea.
Attacking this needed a much more sophisticated machine, enter Colossus, a physical realisation of the idea that Computation can be performed by a machine.
a-dub 1 hours ago [-]
i had the opportunity to visit bletchley about sixteen years ago... one interesting detail was that all the colossus machines were destroyed after the war as they were seen as too powerful and dangerous. it wasn't until years later that the retired telephony engineers (this was where ee excellence lived at the time) who had built them began rebuilding them from memory as a sort of hobby/club centered at bletchley. there used to be a fellow there named tony sale who would tell you all about it, but unfortunately he passed away a few years ago.
super interesting place and worth the short trip out of london! also i believe the term they used was "semi-programmable digital computer." bombes were mechanical search machines that i believe operated on short ciphertext sequences and i believe the big innovation with the colossus was having the ciphertext live on a long optical tape that would be re-read at thousands of characters per second, thus enabling a high speed processing loop of longer sequences. but i am no expert on this!
youngtaff 28 minutes ago [-]
They weren't all destroyed, some were moved to what became GCHQ (UK's equivalent to the NSA)
It's Tommy Flowers I always felt sorry for, after the war he wanted a loan to build a computer was refused on the grounds that what he wanted to build was impossible. He knew it was possible but couldn't disclose that due to secrecy laws
riazrizvi 2 hours ago [-]
It was more of a special-purpose calculation machine than a general purpose computer, as we understand them which are based on von Neummann's architecture.
kiwijimm 2 hours ago [-]
It doesn’t resemble the computers of today, but none the less it was indeed a stored program digital computer. The first of its kind. The bombes were more akin to a special purpose calculation machine. Colossus was something a bit more special.
riazrizvi 21 minutes ago [-]
It was the first programmable electronic digital computing machine, yes. Special-purpose computing machines had been around since the 1600's (where they were used as textile weaving machines I think).
kiaansaraiya 47 minutes ago [-]
An interesting point is that Colossus wasn't solving the same problem as the bombe. People usually group them together due to Bletchley Park, but they attacked different ciphers. It explains why Colossus ended up looking much more like an electronic programmable computer than bombe.
CrzyLngPwd 1 hours ago [-]
From Collosus the code breaker to AI making talking bear videos, deep fakes, and cat videos.
How far we have come :-p
brcmthrowaway 20 minutes ago [-]
Was there anything the Germans could have done to make Enigma foolproof encryption like we have in the modern day?
lukan 12 minutes ago [-]
Also today there is no foolproof encryption if you make misstakes (or if an unknow attacker knows more about math than you do, or made a working quantum computer)
And what nazi germany could have done back then, to not have it broken would have been very simple: not using prussian style of communication, meaning all the messages followed a certain pattern with certain keywords. Since the british knew those keywords and pattern, they had something of an angle to break it. (Parts of it are covered in the article)
Or of course use another layer of encryption (but that requires a simple redesign) which would have made the decryption not useful in a timely manner.
hermitcrab 17 minutes ago [-]
The fact that the Enigma never encoded a letter as itself was a significant flaw in the design, which could presumably have been avoided.
Better training for the operators would also have helped, e.g. don't start every message with "Heil Hitler". Some of the services were much better than the others IIRC.
mannanj 2 hours ago [-]
I'll just leave a documentary here that challenged for me the dominant view around world war 2 that I was indoctrinated with.
"Everything is a rich man's trick"
For example it said we funded the nazi's and ford would sell the engines that powered their machines. Our bankers would also advertise in the papers about how Hitler would be a great leader while funding him and German infrastructure. Has anyone seen this doc and knows what about this or anything else of I mean? I really want to have this intellectual, rational conversation about what it could mean if even 1% of the claims made in that video are true. For me, it could point to why reality and selective enforcement of law feels so prevalent, weird and heavy, and unequal justice is so common today.
notjes 56 minutes ago [-]
We have power centers around the globe. Power centers fill a certain void in societies, because nature hates the void.
Power centers try grow by influencing, coercing, manipulating, buying, bribing other power centers. Again, a law of nature: entities try to expand. Some fail at it, some don't fail - at first. Just like all other entities in nature.
The peasant in the street can profit from it or not. He can be killed by it or not.
Takeway: try to recognize a potentially not profitable grinding operation by power centers. Try not to become a bag hodler :)
Ultimately humans can say NO, no matter the power of the manipulation and coercion by power centers.
Hikikomori 7 minutes ago [-]
See the business plot.
Fascists were temporarily embarrassed by Hitlers loss in Europe. But they're more or less back in power in America with the people behind trump that runs the show, the heritage foundation. As with Hitler they've joined forces with the billionaires.
mrkeen 29 minutes ago [-]
It doesn't seem like fringe conspiracy to me. If you want to tie it to WW2, Hitler declared the superiority of the blonde & blue eyed, but was OK to count Japan and Italy as allies. Reciprocally, Japan and Italy didn't have a problem with Hitler's attitudes either.
I don't know how you'd go further in terms of "what it means" in any deeper sense. Trump praises Netanyahu and Putin. It's all just there on the surface. It's just the world we live in.
lukan 8 minutes ago [-]
" Hitler declared the superiority of the blonde & blue eyed, but was OK to count Japan and Italy as allies. "
Hitler himself was not blond or blue eyed. So .. inferiority complex is a dangerous thing.
As for everything was a conspiracy .. I advise to read a bit more about that time. The german rich elite also thought they could control hitler and use him against the communists.
colechristensen 1 hours ago [-]
I mean Henry Ford was only not a Nazi in the sense that he wasn't a card carrying member of a foreign political organization. There were plenty of similar Nazi supporting executives in corporate America in the 1930s. And why wouldn't there be? It wasn't like fascism was a one time thing led by one person, it was all over Europe and spread to America, much like Communism in the other direction who similarly wanted to remake the world in their image.
It would be a mistake to associate either just with wealth and tax brackets.
Those kinds of documentaries muddle the water by being too conspiratorial and not building an idea of things that actually happened in context instead they're just raising the spectre of one cabal or another. They just make you afraid and say whacko things which is counterproductive to actually recognizing and forming actual resistance to real threats like present day reality show themed fascism by insecure idiots in power. (it was a much scarier time when the fascists were competent)
TheOtherHobbes 18 minutes ago [-]
It was a much scarier time because far more people were far more competent.
I doubt that if you took the smartest people today and equipped them with the knowledge and resources around at the time - and no more than that, so no modern insights or historical knowledge - they'd be able to do what Turing, Flowers, and the others did.
Reverse engineering and breaking an encryption protocol by hand and then mechanising it with just math and valve technology was an astounding achievement.
Rendered at 16:57:18 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Enigma is among the last of an obsolete YOLO approach to encrypting written text. On the other hand Lorenz, like the systems Britain and her allies were also using, is a stream cipher, not ultimately so different from say ChaCha20 except that Lorenz is broken and ChaCha20 is not. Lorenz uses streams of 5-bit codes whereas today we'd think in 8-bit bytes, but fundamentally it's the same idea.
Attacking this needed a much more sophisticated machine, enter Colossus, a physical realisation of the idea that Computation can be performed by a machine.
super interesting place and worth the short trip out of london! also i believe the term they used was "semi-programmable digital computer." bombes were mechanical search machines that i believe operated on short ciphertext sequences and i believe the big innovation with the colossus was having the ciphertext live on a long optical tape that would be re-read at thousands of characters per second, thus enabling a high speed processing loop of longer sequences. but i am no expert on this!
See Influence and Fate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
It's Tommy Flowers I always felt sorry for, after the war he wanted a loan to build a computer was refused on the grounds that what he wanted to build was impossible. He knew it was possible but couldn't disclose that due to secrecy laws
How far we have come :-p
And what nazi germany could have done back then, to not have it broken would have been very simple: not using prussian style of communication, meaning all the messages followed a certain pattern with certain keywords. Since the british knew those keywords and pattern, they had something of an angle to break it. (Parts of it are covered in the article)
Or of course use another layer of encryption (but that requires a simple redesign) which would have made the decryption not useful in a timely manner.
Better training for the operators would also have helped, e.g. don't start every message with "Heil Hitler". Some of the services were much better than the others IIRC.
"Everything is a rich man's trick"
For example it said we funded the nazi's and ford would sell the engines that powered their machines. Our bankers would also advertise in the papers about how Hitler would be a great leader while funding him and German infrastructure. Has anyone seen this doc and knows what about this or anything else of I mean? I really want to have this intellectual, rational conversation about what it could mean if even 1% of the claims made in that video are true. For me, it could point to why reality and selective enforcement of law feels so prevalent, weird and heavy, and unequal justice is so common today.
Takeway: try to recognize a potentially not profitable grinding operation by power centers. Try not to become a bag hodler :) Ultimately humans can say NO, no matter the power of the manipulation and coercion by power centers.
Fascists were temporarily embarrassed by Hitlers loss in Europe. But they're more or less back in power in America with the people behind trump that runs the show, the heritage foundation. As with Hitler they've joined forces with the billionaires.
I don't know how you'd go further in terms of "what it means" in any deeper sense. Trump praises Netanyahu and Putin. It's all just there on the surface. It's just the world we live in.
Hitler himself was not blond or blue eyed. So .. inferiority complex is a dangerous thing.
As for everything was a conspiracy .. I advise to read a bit more about that time. The german rich elite also thought they could control hitler and use him against the communists.
It would be a mistake to associate either just with wealth and tax brackets.
Those kinds of documentaries muddle the water by being too conspiratorial and not building an idea of things that actually happened in context instead they're just raising the spectre of one cabal or another. They just make you afraid and say whacko things which is counterproductive to actually recognizing and forming actual resistance to real threats like present day reality show themed fascism by insecure idiots in power. (it was a much scarier time when the fascists were competent)
I doubt that if you took the smartest people today and equipped them with the knowledge and resources around at the time - and no more than that, so no modern insights or historical knowledge - they'd be able to do what Turing, Flowers, and the others did.
Reverse engineering and breaking an encryption protocol by hand and then mechanising it with just math and valve technology was an astounding achievement.