Bletchley Park Codebreaker Honored 57
Rambo Tribble writes "England has awarded Raymond Roberts, one of the nine cryptanalysts responsible for breaking the Nazi Tunny code machine, (also known by the German designation Lorenz cipher machine) the MBE. Roberts is the last surviving member of the team which cracked the German army's cipher machine functionality, much like others at Bletchley broke the better-known Enigma machine."
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Re:Seriously (Score:5, Insightful)
Who gives a fuck?
Anyone with an interest in history, technology, mathematics, and honoring under-recognized individuals who made a crucial contribution to society. Clearly not you.
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I took cyrptography in university. Busting codes is a sonofabitch. The reason that the NSA and others utilize rubber hose cryptography is because busting codes is a sonofabitch. What is rubber hose cryptography? An example can be found here [xkcd.com]. Reasons for R.H.C.? Well there are several. One is that if there is plausible deniability (they beat the information out of you), then the 'other side' will continue to use the same cryptographic system, meaning you don't have to do any new work. Another reason
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Who gives a fuck?
Nymphos?
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People who's lives were saved because of this, dickface.
What, is it not moe or call of duty enough for you? Go back to high school, chump.
should have been a knighthood (Score:5, Interesting)
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Bletchley Park could have probably gotten by without any one or two of the code breakers, but as a group they had a significant effect on the course of WWII, and thus deserve these honours. If the people at Bletchley Park had not been as successful as they were it is possible that WWII in Europe would have lasted a lot longer than it did. It is also quite plausible that the European portion of the war would have ended with the Soviet Union extending to the Atlantic.
Re:Stop overrating the guy (Score:4, Informative)
While most of the work they did could have gone on fairly uninterrupted with the loss of any one particular person, there are some specific counter-examples. Tuttle [wikipedia.org] took over researching a german goof in using their Lorenz set that had stumped a team there for three months, and single-handedly identified a 41 character patten that led to the breaking of Lorenz [wikipedia.org]. Without his accident/brilliance, Lorenz either would have lasted much longer, or possibly never been broken by Bletchley. (that member that was interviewed speculated the Lorenz's early break had shortened the war by 2 years, saving 20,000,000 lives)
While this is the only specific example I can quickly quote, I would wager there are at least a handful of other points in Bletchley's history that hinged on a single member coming through with a hail-mary for the team.
Reminder: Alan Turing year (Score:3)
While probably somewhat known among Slashdotters, I think it is worthwhile to remind people of Alan Turing [wikipedia.org], mathematician, logician, WWII code breaker and father of computer science (as well as being a victim of cruel injustice by the state).
He's unfortunately by far less recognized than people like Steve Jobs (probably because turing machines don't have rounded corners by design). It's a bit like the story of Tesla vs. Edison [theoatmeal.com]. One was a genius scientist, the other one an asshat making lots of money, without contributing nearly as much to the field, but still being more famous and celebrated.
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Re:Reminder: Alan Turing year (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason Turing was persecuted by the state, though, and the reason that a lot of people don't want to recognize him even now, is that he was privately homosexual. For many, that outweighs being key to defeating the Nazis, which is simply a shame.
Re:Reminder: Alan Turing year (Score:4, Interesting)
Turing is not getting knighted because he's dead, not because he was homosexual.
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Re:Reminder: Alan Turing year (Score:4, Insightful)
There's also not terribly good evidence he committed suicide. He was known for handling toxic chemicals in a dangerous manner, didn't seem to be suicidal (his life was improving and getting back on track), didn't leave a note and chose a rather odd method for suicide. His family members are all convinced it was an accident.
Reminder - there's more than cryptography. (Score:2)
Less well known among Slashdotters, in fact among anyone who isn't a serious historian, is the enormous amount of work that wasn't cryptography. There's Huff-Duff. There's the enormous amount of what would be called data-mining today - the cataloging and indexing of all that data so it could be correlated and compared. There's all of the operational research based on that correlation and those comparisons. There's tons of weapons and tactical development b
"You can put ', Esq.' after your name now!" (Score:1)
Whew! They achieved the same as the Beatles.
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I am called "George Marvelous Esq.", but you can call me Mr Marvelous.
You do realize that the Esq. and the Mr. are in most of the world equivalent for all intents and purposes.
Breaking Tunny (Score:5, Informative)
Tunny was broken because of a test message that had to be resent, and was re-encoded with the same key. The cryptographer was bored, and he made some abbreviations in the second encoding (which was manually typed). That put them out of phase, which meant that the message could be broken in crab-fashion. (Guess a word in the cipher text. If you are correct that gives you a little of the key and thus the decryption of the same block of characters in the other text. That, if you are lucky, will reveal another word, which gives more characters in the second text, which yields more in the first, making the entire decrypt fairly straightforward once you get going.) Breaking that message was enough to reveal how the machine worked, it was reverse engineered, and in operational use it was broken by computer basically from the start.
All of this because one operator got sloppy on one test message that wasn't even intrinsically important anyway. But, i think it is fair to say that more crypto is broken by sloppiness than by advanced math (not that the math might not be useful in exploiting the break).
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What MBE stands for? (Score:2)
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Using my google de-encryption method, the MBE Acronym appears to stand for the "Multi State Bar Exam" - a degree for Yankee lawyers practicing across state lines. Why on earth did they give that to this poor gentleman?
Welcome to the search filter bubble. [ted.com]
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MBE stands for Member of the British Empire. It's the lowest of 5 ranks in the Order of the British Empire.
(emphasis mine)
And also why the leader "England has awarded Raymond Roberts" is a trifle inaccurate. Never mind anthropomorphising a country; like computers, they hate that.
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Yes, and to put those ranks into context, our old local council leader got a CBE (the next rank up AFAIK) for "Services to local government" when those services involved getting it £27million into debt during the boom and times of highest funding, before he left to get paid even more to fuck up another council elsewhere.
So in other words, getting an MBE is a bit like being told you're just beneath someone who is highly incompetent and arguably even extremely corrupt.
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It stands for "people different from you"
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It's an Honor bestowed on individuals, military or civilians, who have demonstrated service in the spirit of the Order of the British Empire's motto: "For God and Empire!"
Like, Sir Jimmy Saville, for his "work with children."
Or, Sir Anthony Blunt, for his "service" to British Intelligence.
Although, there have been allegations made in notable British periodicals, such as "The Economist" and "Viz", that monetary contributions to political parties may also have some influence in the matter.
For Sir Raymond
Re:public/private (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember a talk about Bletchley Park where I asked whether the germans had any codebreaking work. I still have not heard nor seen a word of it anywhere at all.
I read an account recently about German cryptanalysis of the US M-209 machine [wikipedia.org], which happens to be one of my favorites [nf6x.net]. I don't remember where I read it, though. I'll reply again if I find the link before my mind wanders too far. It is my understanding that Allied forces were aware that Germany could break the M-209 cipher, but used it for low-level traffic because the machine was so convenient for widespread field use, where we wouldn't want to risk capture of our higher level cryptosystems. Low-level tactical information often is only of value to an enemy for a short period of time; i.e., a message about a small troop movement that will happen in an hour isn't very useful the following day after it has already happened. Thus, if you believe that your enemy requires a day to break one of your codes, that code can still be useful for messages that would only be of value to them for a few hours.
If I recall correctly, Germany did do codebreaking work against the Allies, but didn't achieve the same level of success that the Allies did against their codes.
If you would like to try your hand at cryptanalysis of the M-209 and related machines, take a look at this ongoing M-209 Crypto Challenge [jfbouch.fr]. I solved the first problem in the series, but then had to quit working on the challenge because of other stuff that came up. I may go back and work through the other problems when I have some free time.
Richly deserved recognition for Capt. Jerr Roberts (Score:5, Interesting)
Peter Higgs (Score:2)
Peter Higgs was awarded the Companion of Honour [guardian.co.uk] but he was the exception to the rule, Scientists and Engineers are routinely ignored in favour of those with a large media profile such as Sports stars and Fashion designers.