I have a major problem with that article, it completely ignores Polish mathematicians' contributions who literally GAVE the brits the codes 5 weeks BEFORE the start of WWII.
This article is about Lorenz but you're thinking about Enigma, a completely different cipher used in a different way and by different parts of the German military in the same war and broken, as the article explains, using a Computer, not based on tricks learned from the Poles.
It's like you've seen an article about the Knicks winning a basketball game and you ask why it doesn't mention Igor Shesterkin - who plays ice hockey.
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!
I don't think I would describe the NMC as "just up the road". It's the same physical site.
If you consider the NMC "just up the road" then the Bletchley Park site you're thinking of is also "jump up the road" from er, Bletchley Park, a stately home that's less interesting to a nerd than either the NMC or Bletchley Park museum about war era "intelligence" but might be fascinating if period furniture is more interesting to you than the world's first (for many different values of first, the museum has several options, but not all of them) programmable computer.
that's what i was describing! :) it's on the bletchley site (they share a parking lot) and was where tony sale and friends rebuilt the colossus.
although i just looked. critically they have different ticket offices. it was a long time ago! either way, worth a visit of both and they make up an excellent way to spend a day.
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
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.
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.
‘Stored program’ is where the debate is. Colossus was ‘programmable’ but the program was not a series of instructions executed in a sequence - it was a single data process executed on the input data against a set of stored registers.
Definitely programmable, definitely capable of computing, but not a ‘stored program’ in the sense we know it today.
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).
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.
Iirc, veritasium video said it was the weather report at the beginning of the message that fueled quicker decryption. So, not following same letter format each time might have helped.
Had they not used a reflector pin in the encryption (simplified encrypting/decrypting a message using the same rotor configuration) it would have been far harder to crack, because the pin ensured that no letter could ever encode itself and that greatly reduced the search space
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.
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.
The Kriegsmarine had more secure procedures for transmitting the setting key, added more rotors for more possible combinations, and eventually introduced a new Engima with four rotors instead of three. Their transmissions were more difficult to decrypt.
The Luftwaffe were far more lax in their procedures, and Hermann Goring sent many trivial messages that made it easy for Bletchley Park to decrypt.[1] From early 1940 to the end of the war, air force messages were routinely read.
[1] From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma: "Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring was known to use it for trivial communications, including informing squadron commanders to make sure the pilots he was going to decorate had been properly deloused."
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.
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.
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 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)
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.
It's important to remember that Nazi Germany was not seen as an enemy at first, and many people admired how Hitler had supposedly lifted Germany out of the economic catastrophe of Weimar. Years passed between the Nazis taking power and the outbreak of war. It was not an uncommon sentiment that democracy was weak and the Nazis showed us a better way. This sentiment was extremely wrong-headed, but it wasn't a matter of outright sympathizing with the enemy.
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.
" 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.
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.
I have a major problem with that article, it completely ignores Polish mathematicians' contributions who literally GAVE the brits the codes 5 weeks BEFORE the start of WWII.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski
This article is about Lorenz but you're thinking about Enigma, a completely different cipher used in a different way and by different parts of the German military in the same war and broken, as the article explains, using a Computer, not based on tricks learned from the Poles.
It's like you've seen an article about the Knicks winning a basketball game and you ask why it doesn't mention Igor Shesterkin - who plays ice hockey.
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!
The National Museum of Computing (just up the road from Bletchley Park) has a working Colossus
I don't think I would describe the NMC as "just up the road". It's the same physical site.
If you consider the NMC "just up the road" then the Bletchley Park site you're thinking of is also "jump up the road" from er, Bletchley Park, a stately home that's less interesting to a nerd than either the NMC or Bletchley Park museum about war era "intelligence" but might be fascinating if period furniture is more interesting to you than the world's first (for many different values of first, the museum has several options, but not all of them) programmable computer.
that's what i was describing! :) it's on the bletchley site (they share a parking lot) and was where tony sale and friends rebuilt the colossus.
although i just looked. critically they have different ticket offices. it was a long time ago! either way, worth a visit of both and they make up an excellent way to spend a day.
They weren't all destroyed, some were moved to what became GCHQ (UK's equivalent to the NSA)
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
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.
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.
‘Stored program’ is where the debate is. Colossus was ‘programmable’ but the program was not a series of instructions executed in a sequence - it was a single data process executed on the input data against a set of stored registers.
Definitely programmable, definitely capable of computing, but not a ‘stored program’ in the sense we know it today.
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).
From Collosus the code breaker to AI making talking bear videos, deep fakes, and cat videos.
How far we have come :-p
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.
Was there anything the Germans could have done to make Enigma foolproof encryption like we have in the modern day?
Iirc, veritasium video said it was the weather report at the beginning of the message that fueled quicker decryption. So, not following same letter format each time might have helped.
Had they not used a reflector pin in the encryption (simplified encrypting/decrypting a message using the same rotor configuration) it would have been far harder to crack, because the pin ensured that no letter could ever encode itself and that greatly reduced the search space
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.
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.
The Kriegsmarine had more secure procedures for transmitting the setting key, added more rotors for more possible combinations, and eventually introduced a new Engima with four rotors instead of three. Their transmissions were more difficult to decrypt.
The Luftwaffe were far more lax in their procedures, and Hermann Goring sent many trivial messages that made it easy for Bletchley Park to decrypt.[1] From early 1940 to the end of the war, air force messages were routinely read.
[1] From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma: "Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring was known to use it for trivial communications, including informing squadron commanders to make sure the pilots he was going to decorate had been properly deloused."
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
3 replies →
It's important to remember that Nazi Germany was not seen as an enemy at first, and many people admired how Hitler had supposedly lifted Germany out of the economic catastrophe of Weimar. Years passed between the Nazis taking power and the outbreak of war. It was not an uncommon sentiment that democracy was weak and the Nazis showed us a better way. This sentiment was extremely wrong-headed, but it wasn't a matter of outright sympathizing with the enemy.
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.
" 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.
The British government gave/sold Enigma machines to various allies after the war. Somehow forgetting to mention that they could decrypt them. Cunning.
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.