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Television Media

Crypto Show on the History Channel Tonight (9/12) 93

Posted by Hemos from the cracking-the-code dept.
aegrumet writes "The History Channel is doing a show tonight at 9pm EDT on WW2 crypto called "The Ultra Enigma". The blurb on their program listing reads "British codebreaking and capture of the German military's super cipher machine, the Enigma, enabled the Allies to pull off one of the greatest campaigns of deception in military history, and changed the course of World War II." This will be especially interesting to those who, like me, are reading or have recently finished Neal Stephenson's book Cryptonomicon. "
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Crypto Show on the History Channel Tonight (9/12) More

Crypto Show on the History Channel Tonight (9/12)

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  • I visted bletchley park and they had alot of but not much money

    to their credit they had set out alot of old machines !

    and no you DID NOT JUST LOOK you can play with them touch them and pick them up they had examples of puch card mainframes which you may use also they had all the code machines and explained all the maths very well
    this was all done by volenteers

    this is because BT (the largest telco in UK and right up their with AT&T for size and profits)and they most greedy !!

    had part of the site they have had to give it up as it now preserved for us all but they had wanted to turn it into an exchange and help center

    but now they need money

    please visit them and see for yourself if you are in the uk @ any time they are very open but like I said they are volenteers

    http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/ [bletchleypark.org.uk]

    have fun

    john


    a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
  • Check out the Enigma literature that they have. Good stuff actually, if a _little_ dry. It's also interesting to get the history of the NSA.
  • You may be confused with another show on the British's efforts of deciphering the Japanese Imperial Navy's code. I remember seeing a show how the British successfully decoded Japanese Naval code, and knew exactly when (12/7/1941) and where (Pearl Harbor) the Japanese Navy would attack.

    The show went on, IIRC, to say that Churchill decided not to warn the US of the potential attack so that Americans, enraged by the surprise attack, would enter the war.

    I think the show was on the History Channel or the PBS.
  • Interesting!

    I've always heard that the CIA was rather surprised by the events at the end of the cold war (and their threat estimates just prior to that time tend to show that too.)

    Breaking a code is great, unless the enemy knows you've broken it, in which case it's a perfect channel for disinformation. Given that there was a mole fairly high in the CIA back then, it's not inconceivable that the Soviets knew, and took advantage to appear stronger than they were.

    I hope there is a documentary about that period like this one about WWII someday.

  • Thanks (Score:1)

    by Mawbid ( 3993 )
    I guess I'm more sensitive than I thought because that attack really hurt me. Your comment was very validating and I thank you for it, though no doubt you meant to stand up for your values, rather than me.
    --
  • Or do US cryptography laws prevent the export of shows like this?
  • Hrm, and I thought the detours were the best part. To me, they really gave meat behind the personalities of Randy and Waterhouse--and the fundamental difference that made Randy an engineer and Waterhouse a mathematician.
  • The enigma really is a great machine and gives a fantastic starting point into understanding other machine based ciphers . I emulated it in Java for a college project last year , but my hard drive died over the summer, so now I'm trying to hunt down my lecturer to get a copy of the source code back.
  • Some of the best bits of Cryptonomicon involve our hero Boby Shaftoe (I love Neil S.s character names e.g. Hiro Protagonist!) trying to lay enough false trails of non-existant spying to justify the actions the allies are taking based on decoded crypto. BTW Much as I loved Cryptonomicon, I still think /. readers not familiar with Neil Stephenson's work should start with Snow Crash.
  • "I simply can't grasp the concept that you could do cryptography without computers. "

    The people at Bletchley Park couldn't do it without computers either. So they designed and built computers to help them. The machines that they built were truly astonishing. They were, in modern terms, massively parallel processors. They pushed I/O performance to ridiculous levels using paper tape, and broke the strongest ciphers in the world at that time fast enough that the information still had tactical value when decrypted.

    Having Alan Turing on the project helped. He must go down in history as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentith century.
    Everyone in the Western world owes an awful lot to the people who worked on code breaking at Bletchley in the Second World War.

    The people who risked (and often lost) their lives bringing information about the German's cryptographic technology also played a vital role. I am very glad they did what they did.

    It puts the "My OS is better than your OS" arguments in perspective, doesn't it?
  • A friend and I were talking about software descramblers one day and wondered why writers of such programs felt a need to "crack the code". It seemed much easier to us to just align the first non-black pixel of each scan line. Could it be that easy? To stop us wondering, I tried it with a modified xzoom. As I pretty much expected, it works as long as there isn't a black area on the left of the screen. Plus, it's as slow as xzoom, so not much fun to watch.

    It should be possible to run a more advanced heuristic than leftmost-nonblack-pixel to get better results. There are only three positions to choose from for each scanline.
    --

  • I guess my requirements for what is news may be a little too high.
    It is good though, have fun watching.

  • What About Al Turing? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    About four years ago I managed to see a speaker at Lehigh University who was a close friend of Turing's. What was interesting wasn't the talk about Turing's competency with mathematics, but his gay lifestyle. The quote I remember the most was, "It's wasn't like he slept with sailors, but..." The British gov't was so worried about Turing being a security risk (b/c of being a homosexual) that they pumped him up with female hormones in order to reduce his sex drive. He became so depressed that he wound up offing himself in the end.

    For the life of me I can't remember who the speaker was, but it was a damn good talk b/c it showed that there are "people behind the machine."

  • I don't know if it will ever get to the US, but another programme worht watching was Project X, it was a series all about Bletchley park et al. really in depth (about six programmes).

    Good point though is that while Turing was important to breaking the code it was very much a team effort, the man who was probably most important was Tommy Flowers the phone engineer who designed the machiens and got them to work so well.

    They had copmputers from the start, human ones, who simply did the same logical task all day. much like the original "Computers" who were people who worked out log tables etc by hand. It was their falibility that sparked Babbage to design his engines (I think I have that right, please correct me if I'm wrong).

    Nice to see that at least US TV can get history right, even if holywood can't :-)

  • Re:Human Error Compromises Secrecy (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Human errors also helped break the German codes. Things like resending a message because a switch on the encoding machine was in the wrong position by one click gave away some of the internal details of the machinery. The KGB re-used some one-time pads about a decade ago, this was an economy move on account of an inadequate supply of the pads, but it allowed the US to read their messages during the period leading to the Soviet collapse. The responsible parties were executed.

  • Turing (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Turing's machine was rebuilt a few years ago and raced against a Pentium at codebreaking. The Pentium couldn't come close to matching the performance of the original. Parallel processing and specialized hardware won.
  • Hold on. This story covers some of the early codebreakers using the German "double dice" method of encryption, which was not the Nazi inspired Enigma machine. But this article gets the facts right on the listening post at Uzes, which was set up to intercept certain local radio messages still using double dice, since the enigma machines were too valuable for every Nazi unit in the field to have one. The old-time commanders in the field just kept using what they knew from the 1920s.

    The real Polish involvement in Enigma started in 1936, when the Nazis were using forced labor in a factory southeast of Berlin to manufacture the wheels and typewriter keyboards. There was heavy security which piqued the interest of the Polish secret service, and there just happened to be several germans of Polish descent working in the factory (the border between Germany and Poland moved many times over the last few centuries). Those workers were considered to be good germans by the Nazis, since they never spoke a word of Polish which would have led to their execution.

    The Polish secret police played on the loyalty to the Polish cause with some of the workers, and they basically sketched out every piece of the enigma machine. The only part missing was the actual wiring of the wheels, which was done in another secret plant (not stupid, these crypto people). With the invasion in 1938, the Polish security services fled to other parts of Europe to escape the special Gestapo teams sent to hunt them down. There were 3 teams sent out with their copies of the plans of Enigma, one group piloted a ship from near Gdansk to Scotland, where they were captured and held as Nazi spies. Eventually the Brits figured out they were Poles, and got the plans to Bletchley Park. [I got the story of the escape first hand from one of the participants. He didn't know at the time what was so important, his group of resistance fighters were assigned to get a handful of people to England "at all costs". There were also some members of the royal family and a government minister, and their safety was considered "secondary". Basically they stole a fishing boat, traveled at night, hid the boat in swedish/norwegian coves each day, and eventually made north Scotland. Later they were all moved to Canada, and after the war he settled in Ireland.]

    Once Turing and company were able to see exactly how the system physically worked, they went back and found a few test transmissions some poor fool in the field sent to his buddy. Those copies of the plain text and the crypto text (plus several attempts of sending the starting wheel positions in the clear) enabled them to figure out the wiring.

    Colossus was built to figure out the starting wheel positions, since it changed each day based on either a OTP or other pre-arranged sequence. Each pair or group of Enigma stations maintained their own keys and key distribution scheme.

    Thats the Polish story as it relates to Enigma. They didn't break it, but they certainly knew the value of it. Bletchley couldn't have broken it without the physical plans.

    the AC

  • It is little known that in reality (you know, as opposed to books about heroic efforts of british folks) Enigma was solved by polish scientists (notably Marian Rejewski) in years 1928-1939.

    All data and a reconstruted working model of Enigma was submitted by polish intelligence to the british and french intelligence, after it become impossible to continue work in occupied Poland.

    All misinformation you can read nowadays is partially result of a cold war, lack of appreciation, and probably imperial "superiority" of Brits and other allies who prefered to claim the glory for themselves.

    In Great Britain methods created by Poles were enhanced and deployed on larger scale, but please don't ignore that this is not entirely british effort !

    http://www.gl.umbc.edu/~lmazia1/ Enigma/enigma.html [umbc.edu]

    --
    Marek Moskal

  • The Poles provided the British and French with a working 3 wheel Enigma machine shortly before the invasion of Poland. While handy, a production model of the Enigma machine used by any branch of the service does one no good unless one could devise a way to crack the wheel order, ring settings (ringstellung) and steckering and daily keys, all of which were communicated by more secure channels. The Poles Rejewski, Zygalski and Rozycki devised a manner to provide this information (the bomba) which worked well for the 3 ring Enigma, but scaled in a manner insufficient to crack the 5 ring Enigma put in production shortly before the war. The Poles provided the basis by which the Enigma could be cracked and Turing and his gang at Bletchly Park ran with the concept, improving it greatly. No real cloak and dagger stuff here, just a lot of hard work and a heapin' helpin' of brilliance.
  • Well, cable's just a phase shift, no? So it's more analogous to letter-switching or some other orthography than encryption, but it's certainly encoding.

    --
  • That program isnt new, its been on the history channel several times, and I must admit - it is well worth the watch. Ill have to see it for the 3rd time, as I only remember brief bits of it. *sigh* memory isnt what it used to be. Judg3
    *******
  • Well if anything is worth me taking my hands off the keyboard for awhile, it will be this show Too ba di dont have a TV tuner card or I could read /. and watch it at the same time =) Ahh well someday =)

  • Where do these shows come from? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've seen the same subject covered on Nova. I often get the idea that programs on the History Channel and Discovery Channel are programs produced by PBS, BBC, CBC, etc, re-done with a different sound track, but working from the same video and research notes as were used to put together the original for the non-commercial broadcaster. Anybody know howcome so much similarity between what is on PBS and what later shows up on these trailing-edge, recycled-news, low-budget, high-profit commercial cable operations?
  • Yeah that one has been on before. Anyone who is even slightly interested in cryptography should tune it. Really gives you a good understanding about how cryptography all got started - building up from sending passwords back and forth with simple keys all the way up to sophisticated encryption machines, and about the entire behind the scenes crypto-war that was going on in WW2.

    "The voices in my head say crazy things"
  • I know what i'll be doing tonight at 9pm EST. I love the history channel and watch it constantly. I've learned so much from watching 2-3 hours a day of that and the discovery channel (though I'm getting really sick of DISC's forensic science shows, and I've seen enough about WWII to make me sick - wish they'd do more on Rome and other not-so-american history).

    BTW. What's this cryptomicron book I keep hearing about? I think I missed something.

  • Whoa...sudden flash forward... (Score:5)

    by JoeShmoe ( 90109 ) <askjoeshmoe@hotmail.com> on Sunday September 12, 1999 @07:57AM (#1687555)
    Whenever I see topics like this (um, history) I can't help but wonder what the History Channel will be doing specials on in like ten or twenty years...

    "Rise and Fall of an Empire: The Microsoft Story"

    "The Penguin Cronicles: Why the Inter(pla)net runs Linux"

    Or mebbe I'll just be watching the SlashDot channel...

    - JoeShmoe

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  • Crypto show... (Score:3)

    by dark&stormynight ( 69479 ) on Sunday September 12, 1999 @08:27AM (#1687556)
    If you're ever in the DC area, see the Enigma machine at the National Cryptologic Museum. Here's the page for the map...http://www.nsa.gov.8080/museum/map.html
  • It's scrambled! It sounds interesting, though.

    According to TV Guide [tvguide.com] (which I visit religiously, and I'm not religious):

    Sworn to Secrecy: The Ultra Enigma

    A look at British efforts to break Germany's 'Enigma' code in World War II, which enabled the Allies to defend against the Luftwaffe and locate and destroy marauding U-boats. Also: the manpower employed to decipher codes. Narrated by Charlton Heston.

    Rating: TV-G
    Category: Other, documentary
    Originating Country: United States

  • yea its on ultra enigma , and ww2 codes, i still want an enigma machine , closed i ever got was a win 2000 beta about a year ago . every thing felt weired and nothing worked. oh well i guess they fixed most of that by now. but hey i have to watch the ultra enigma show tonight , see ya there

    i just encrypted my jocky shorts eekkk
  • Been a while since I saw this, I'll see it again tonight. One of the interesting bits (IIRC) is the assertion that Churchill withheld the extent of their ability to decode Enigma from Roosevelt, ostensibly to help accelerate American involvement in the war.

    Some mention of Alan Turing, et.al., but not as much as might be expected.

    All in all, a good overview of the British cryptography effort.

    For those who can't see it at 9(EDT), it is also repeated Monday at 1am(EDT).

  • Grandpa (Score:3)

    by RobertGraham ( 28990 ) on Sunday September 12, 1999 @08:39AM (#1687561) Homepage
    I just purchased a copy of Cryptonomicon [slashdot.org] for my Grandfather, as he was involved in the crypto-effort during the war (he's a native German speaker/translator). Since I'm part of security company, I thought the parallel was interesting.

    It causes my brain to hurt talking to him. He doesn't understand computers, so computer terms like "disk drive" are complete gibberish to him. On the other hand, words like "cipher-text", "one-time-pad", and other cryptography terms are perfectly natural for him. I simply can't grasp the concept that you could do cryptography without computers.

    He has a lot of interesting annecdotes. For example, the Germans thought they had a machine that produced a one-time-pad, but the codebreakers found it repeated over a long cycle. Cracking security today is no different: find accidental weaknesses left behind by the engineers.

  • More Enigma... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you like the show tonight, you might want to read Thomas Harris' book _Enigma_, which is a fictional account of a brilliant cryptanalyst's life at Bletchley Park during the war. It's well-researched and includes all sorts of cool stuff. Well worth a read.

  • Re:Definitely worth the watch. (Score:4)

    by bjohnson ( 3225 ) on Sunday September 12, 1999 @08:49AM (#1687564)
    Churchill didn't withhold Ultra stuff to accelerate our entry into the war, he withheld it because it was the single most secret secret on the planet. Churchill more than once allowed Britich troops to die to hide the fact that Ultra could read Enigma transmissions, when they thought the Germans would deduce that the only way for the Brits to have known something was codebreaking. Every bit of intel ever released from Ultra had a cover from some other intel source. In fact, hiding Ultra decodes as intercepted paper, first hand leaks, etc was a major part of British Intelligence work during WWII A useful side effect of this was that the Nazi counterintelligence program spent much of the war chasing non-existent spies.
  • I still think /. readers not familiar with Neil Stephenson's work should start with Snow Crash.

    Well, I think many first time readers can be put off by Snow Crash's "cyberpunkeshness" (?!? wow, could that possably be a word?)

    I loved SC but I think as far as lit. goes, Dimond Age was by far Stephenson's best book.
  • I just put my DiSH unit on the history channel.
    Got a black screen. Damn slashdot effect... :)
  • Sorry, but this sounds pretty impossible to me. Are you aware of the crudeness of the Enigma cryptographic algorithm vs. modern cryptographic algorithms? I've done some comparative work on this subject for a research paper recently, and just out of curiosity, tested optimized implementations of brute-force attacks against Enigma; although it did not go into the paper since it would have been ridiculous. The Enigma is a joke for modern microprocessors.

    IMHO, there absolutely is NO WAY even a 386 can be beaten by the original Turing bombe. This should be some kind of folk tale. But since you mentioned it, can you post here a link or some published article to justify this? Thanks..
  • It's a sad fact that history is written by the winners, and the smaller/less noisy players tend to get overlooked.

    Thanks for the info, it's always nice to have history set straight. Shame holywood doesn't seem to aqree (chip on my shoulder, never!).
  • ww2 sigint was categorized under at least two codewords: magic and ultra.

    if you read _Cryptonomicon_ there's a character who'd had a nervous breakdown in a bathrobe. in reality, this character was none other than William Friedman who broke the Papanese purple machine. he did this by studying ciphertext alone. this was Magic.

    Conversely, workmen smuggled parts of enigma machines out of german factories to Poland, where Polish cryptanalists devised the crypto attack. enough parts were smuggled out for the Poles to build a complete enigma machine. the Brits received all this intel after Poland fell. the Brits were effective in automating the Poles' crypto attack. this was Ultra.

    All the Magic intel came from cryptanalysis based solely upon studying ciphertext, whereas the ultra intel came from studying an intact enigma machine. (when steckered enigma came out, it took the allies *months* to figure out the variation in the rotor motion. this almost cost us the battle of the atlantic.) the cryptanalytic achievement of William Friedman, Lambros Dimitrious and the organization that became the NSA was far more significant than the cryptanalytical achievement of the Brits' GCHQ.

    btw, _Cryptonomicon_ is a veiled reference to the _MilCrypt_ volumes, some of which I believe you can buy from Agean Park Press.

    incidentally, i'd like to ask Neal Stephenson if i ever meet him, "Was Randy's grandfather patterened after Lambros Dimitrious?"

    i think this is all written up in _the codebreakers_ by David Kahn. there are also some very good books now available about "Venona" that describe what the Russians were doing. if ever between Washington DC and Baltimore on the BW Parkway, stop in at the National Cryptologic Museum at the NSA exit.
  • Good show. I just hung up on two phone calls to watch the program. Now isin't that geeky?
  • Hahahaha....what a great post! And scary that its so true...
  • It wasn't engima that was solved by Marian Rejewski, it was a number of other military cyphers used during the 1920s and 30s. He was a brilliant man. He later was stationed in France to help de-cypher intercepted low power radio comms between low level military units. They used a number of older cypher techniques, since they already knew them and not every unit had an Enigma (only units with a protection group were allowed to have them, and they were destroyed whenever there was the chance of the allies capturing them, only 4 were captured before the end of the war).

    The enigma machines were rare at the beginning of the war, used for only the most important traffic. By 1943 there were about 25,000 of them spread among units all over the place.

    The Polish intelligence service was able to completely reconstruct an entire working Enigma down to the last detail, all except for the wiring of the wheels which was done in a more secure location before final assembly. They realised how important it was going to be to the allies, and managed to smuggle the plans to the French and the Brits. France, unfortunately, fell the next year.

    The team at Bletchley applied some good crypto (they kept copies of every intercepted transmission from about 1937 onwards) and discovered the wiring of the wheels.

    If it weren't for the Poles, Turing and his group wouldn't have broken the code until one of the machines was captured from a sub in 1942. They did a lot of other stuff with the allies as well, but thats a history lesson and not a slashdot topic.

    the AC

  • What? (Score:1)

    by Mawbid ( 3993 )
    What web site would that be? I haven't authored, administered, hosted, or written for any website at all (not counting things like slashdot). There's nothing out there that can be described as my website or one of my websites. I've even done an Altavista search for my name and verified that there are no racist sites published by a namesake of mine. Please name the site you're referring to.
    --
  • Check the related links in the slashbox next to the article for a review of Cryptonomicon.

  • so descramble it! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    > It's scrambled! It sounds interesting, though. After all, the show is on encryption.... j/k

  • Polish cryptoanalysts broke Enigma (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 12, 1999 @09:03AM (#1687586)
    Have a look at: http://www.polamjournal.com/library/enigma.html Enigma machines were stolen from Germans by polish secret service.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • So this is a rerun, ok. Can someone that _has_ seen it post some more information about it? Do they explore the math behind the codes, or just how the enigma machine came to be in british hands?

    ------
    Cool Linux Project of the Week! [xoom.com]
    Coming Soon.... October 1st!
  • I simply can't grasp the concept that you could do cryptography without computers.

    Cryptography without computers I can understand. Cryptanalysis without computers is what fascinates me. Many codes have been broken with just pencil and paper. The codebreaking machines like the bombe are fascinating too. This is all covered in Kahn's The Codebreakers, which I'm working my way through and plan to finish before I tackle Cryptonomicon (it's about as long, too -- reading both will take a while).

    --JT
  • Actually, I agree with your point.

    I can't remember the context of the specific withholding, but in the documentary where this was mentioned, it was asserted that among the possible reasons to withhold was the hope that America would perceive a greater danger (or degree of knowledge by the Germans) and that, in turn, might improve the chances of an earlier intervention.

    In a wartime environment, the strategic advantage of breaking the enemy's codes definitely would warrant a great deal of secrecy, even from one's allies.

    If, indeed, the assertion that I mentioned is part of this documentary (assuming I remember correctly and am not confusing this with another program), it might denote some other bias or issue on the part of the author. I did like the show, though, even if it might have a few flaws.

  • I was in the U.S. a few years ago stuck in my hotel room with the usual assortment of boring cable channels. I was zapping around and found a presentation to congress by some crypto expert about the breaking of the enigma cypher, and why it was necessary to keep all crypto out of enemy hands. It covered it all, including the role of the Polish inteligence agency, and the fact that they all spent the rest of the war in Canada in a special POW camp after giving the Brits a crude copy of the enigma machine.

    The most frustrating part was that the camera work was obviously directed to not show any of his notes flashing up on the board behind him. There were a few glances from other cameras showing the inner workings of an enigma machine, as well as the math used to find the initial wheel position. The talk was absolutely interesting, since it was un-edited, but I was dying to see the slides as well. I had to leave before the talk was over (it ran at least 2 hours).

    If anybody can find a tape of that lecture, it was pretty interesting. I remember that they never announced the name of the speaker during the whole show, but they were showing the name of the sub-commitee.

    There was also a bit about why crypto is good for the U.S. spy agencies, and why it is bad for everyone else. The usual tripe discussed to death on slashdot, and this guy was even squirming talking about it. Just his job on the line, I guess.

    the AC
  • The original patent was Dutch.

    Summarized from Kahn, "The Codebreakers"

    Hugo Alexander Koch filed a patent in the Netherlands on a rotor based cipher machine. He assigned these patent rights in 1927 to Arthur Scherbius who invented and had been marketing the Enigma machine since about 1923.

    There's a good history of cryptography at:

    http://www.clark.net/pub/cme/html/timeline.html
  • Many codes have been broken with just pencil and paper

    Extremely fascinating in this regard is how the Japanese code was broken in WWII. The Japanese employed one time pads (which I think the strengths and weaknesses of have been thoroughly addressed in previous /. discussions). One of the codebreakers was a student of Japanese culture and knew that communications from junior officers to senior officers always started with a fairly lengthy formal salutation, and that it never varied. Not to do so was considered very bad form, so he basically knew how each dispatch to senior officers began. At one point he noticed that someone had used their pad twice, and armed with that knowledge and a lot of pencil and paper (no machines were involved), broke the Japanese code. An absolutely incredible story, and well worth your time to check out if you're remotely into this kind of stuff.

    Another point often overlooked that this and Enigma show very well is that in any form of crypto, the people using it are invariably the weakest link in the chain.

  • Purple, Ultra, and JN25 (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I look the History Channel Site and saw a listing, The Purple Code airs September 26. For those of you unfamiliar with this, Purple was the Japanese diplomatic code during WWII. IIRC, much of the info about how Purple was broken is still classified. On a side note, much intelligence about Germany was gathered by reading the msgs from the Japanese ambassador in Berlin.

    The Japanese military used their own ciphers, Ultra for the army, and JN25 for the navy. A major problem associated with the breaking the Japanese code was that the language itself; various words take on different meaning dependent on how it is used (more complicated than English).

    Enigma get the majority of interest by the popular press. Historians are now realizing that breaking Enigma was not as significant in stopping the u-boats as we were once led to believe. However, the breaking of JN25 was very important as indicated by the battle of Midway.

  • Further References (Score:3)

    by Multics ( 45254 ) on Sunday September 12, 1999 @01:11PM (#1687596) Journal
    Two good sources of further informtation:

    David Kahn's book (considered the definitive reference on cryto through the end of WWII):

    The Codebreakers
    David Kahn
    ISBN 0-02-560460-0
    MacMillan Publishing Company
    (c) 1967

    and a newer book (and interesting story):

    Between Silk and Cyanide - A Codemaker's War
    Leo Marks
    ISBN 0-684-86422-3
    The Free Press
    (c) 1998

    Both can be found at your favorite library or book seller.
  • What is stupid is that Turing was driven to suicide by actual *charges* against his homosexuality.

    Why were we fighting the germans again?

    A

  • According to Bit by Bit (good book, by the way) the race to crack Enigma led them to create Colossus. Somehow, the creators of Colussus came to the US to see von Neumann's EDVAC. The group then went back to England where Turing, studying notes on the EDVAC, proceded to invent the first fully electronic stored program computer ever. At that point Great Britain stole the lead in computing technology. They went on to develop EDSAC while the US stalled on a patent fight over ENIAC.

    FUD anyone?
  • My god, Neal Stephenson has really hit the mark hasn't he? Not only has he gotten you kids to read his fat book but he's gotten you interested in history too! Some time in the future you may find yourself being drawn towards a big building called a "Library".. they have lots of books in there about such exciting things as Enigma and other parts of history. It's good that someone has taken up the task of spoon feeding the youth of today with something other than 90 second ads.
  • Robert Harris, not Thomas Harris. :)
  • Witholding Ultra information is by no means the most interesting thing the British government did to try and get us out of our isolationist mode and into war. Thomas Mahl wrote an excellent (though fact-packed) book called Desperate Deception, which talks about the hundreds of things the British tried to do to bring us into war. The OSS (precursor to the CIA)? Formed with the help of the British. Female British agents hopping in the sack with Senators. American (bui British-run) polls finding 80% of young men in favor of a draft. Great stuff. I recommend this for any conspiracy junkie out there. (Here's a link [amazon.com] to the book.)
  • The irony. That's what I was thinking, too, but it's not really encryption.

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