WWII Colossus Codecracker Outdone by a German

superglaze writes "The Colossus codecracker contest was a short-lived ordeal. Not only has it been outdone in a cipher-breaking challenge, but — irony of ironies — it was beaten by a German! From the story: 'The winner was Joachim Schüth, from Bonn, who completed the task using software he wrote himself. "[Schüth] cracked the most difficult code yesterday," said the museum's spokesperson on Friday. "We're absolutely delighted. He used specially written software for the challenge. Colossus is still chugging away, as we got the signals late. Yesterday the atmospheric conditions were such that we couldn't get good signals.'"

wait wait wait.

[moogied (1175879)]

I thought germans weren't allowed to have hacking software on there computers?

"user disabling or circumventing computer security measures to access secure data,"

http://www.ibls.com/internet_law_news_portal_view.aspx?s=latestnews&id=1830 [ibls.com]

Perhaps because they wanted him to "crack" it?

Re:

[RingDev (879105)]

Not all Germans who lived from the 1930's to the 1950's were Nazis. The Nazi party was a political party, not an affiliation of inventors.

-Rick

True.

[NeutronCowboy (896098)]

Unfortunately, it seems that some people need to be reminded of this on occasion. Sad, I know.

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[RingDev (879105)]

Just saying that associating an amateur radio operator/programmer with the Nazi party is a bit on the delusional side.

There are some really weird misconceptions out there about Germany, both present and past.

-Rick

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[uradu (10768)]

> I'm tiptoeing and not trying to introduce "them" into the discussion.

Good thing you didn't mention the war.

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[moogied (1175879)]

Sure! :) The section of the law(if you want to look it up) is Section 202c StGB. The law basically say it is illegal to possess, distrubute, sell, or *create*, any software which has the ability to displace security. Such as cryptography.. he "uses his own program" to decrypt the message. Which in turn displaced its security..

Now I do not really believe this is illegal under german law.. but I am saying that I would not be suprised if someone tried to charge him.

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[Bigjeff5 (1143585)]

Ahhh, I see now.

So basically the Germans have screwed themselves in regards to people within their own country testing their own security. (i.e. company hires individual to test encryption, etc)

It seems that way anyway.

Nice! Lots of forward thinking here. :P

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[yakumo.unr (833476)]

Yup, absolutely, that was the overwhelming slashdot response when their new law was first posted about.

hackers who are doing illegal things anyway will play with all the toys they care to, as they won't care about the new law any more than the old ones, and anyone trying to test and secure their own system would be in breach of the law for having or using security software.

Well, there goes my

[ronadams (987516)]

"Colossus DRM System" project...

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[phillips321 (955784)]

here's a pic of the rebuilt model if your wondering what it looks like:
http://www.forumpix.co.uk/uploads/1195233120.jpg [forumpix.co.uk]

Vee Haf

[by Anonymous Coward]

Vee haf vays uf makink you drink more Ovaltine!

Irony?

[SnoopJeDi (859765)]

It's not irony! :(

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[Liselle (684663)]

Tag it !irony, I know I did. :P

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[0xdeadbeef (28836)]

The actual reality of the situation does not diminish the ironic juxtaposition in our minds of a Nazi helping the Allies.

And if irony is so misused, why isn't there a word to fill that gap? We have sarcasm and hypocrisy, (and, of course, bad luck and coincidence), so what is the word for something doing its opposite for dramatic or humorous effect?

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[MightyYar (622222)]

It would be ironic if a German had cracked the current UK code and submitted that in response to the challenge to beat a British machine that cracks German WWII code.

duh!

[gEvil (beta) (945888)]

Of course the German was able to crack it first. I mean, Colossus was made to crack German codes. Clearly this German guy already knew how to crack it to begin with...

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[RingDev (879105)]

Actually, the encrypted text was written in German, and the local broadcasts were made IN Germany.

So it would be significantly more amazing if someone OTHER than a German cracked it.

-Rick

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[sakusha (441986)]

Um.. you're making a lame joke, right? Because EVERYBODY knows how to crack these codes by now. It is a classic study in cryptography, in many textbooks as an example, the implementation is left to the reader as an exercise.

Time travel hero wannabe

[magarity (164372)]

Now I just need a copy of the software on my laptop and a time warping wormhole to 1942.
 
Just have to remember not to ask for "pepsi, free"...

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[Cheesey (70139)]

Be sure to seal the wormhole after yourself, so that the Nazis can't sneak a copy of AES through it.

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[MoralHazard (447833)]

Totally offtopic, but my freshman roommate and I were both military history buffs and slightly nutter. We had an imagination game called "Go back in time with a machine gun" that we used to play while drinking heavily. The challenge was to construct the most compelling fantasy of altering historical events merely by traveling back in time for a few hours with an M-60 machine gun and a lot of ammo. The Punic wars (for instance) just wouldn't be the same.

Although the fact is that the game only really makes

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[AaxelB (1034884)]

I think bringing a digital camera and a stack of memory cards (not that I actually have either in my dorm room, but I could on short notice if I had plans to time travel) would be more efficient than the portable scanner, and you could go for longer. The challenge would be convincing the librarians or guards or whatever to let you in and not run you through with a spear. I'm sure they protected their scrolls pretty carefully...

I suppose you could bring a supply of gold/precious stones, though they might b

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[db32 (862117)]

You are ignoring the classic education of Army of Darkness...this is my boom stick! Just bring the mentioned machine gun AND a camera... This also assumes you can return to your time, and with the camera, in which case why not just toss the scrolls back on through as well?

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[Blakey Rat (99501)]

Bring some Aluminum. It's dirt cheap now that we have the electrical power to create it artificially, but it's extremely hard-to-find naturally and for most of history, aluminum has been one of the most rare metals there is. Napoleon dined with aluminum silverware, reserving the gold for his guests.

Go back in time, get rich

[DrVomact (726065)]

I've toyed with the question of "What would you take back in time with you to make yourself wealthy no matter where you land?" Best answer I could come up with: stainless steel needles. Yes...sewing needles. You can carry an amazing amount and variety of needles in a relatively small container. Do you have any idea what a single fine steel needle would cost back in 1100 AD...assuming you get such a thing?

Well, maybe you want to bring the Glock too, just in case the local powers don't feel compelled to tre

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[Dr. Eggman (932300)]

Sounds fun! But what would pictures of musty old scrolls we've already probably gotten past the need of do? If it were me, I'd instead try to stop the fire and/or spread the knowledge so we have an altered history of not having to relearn all that stuff and possibly end up even more advanced that we currently are because we spent time on newer things.

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[Carnivore (103106)]

History. There were history texts there that went back farther than anything we have now, with sources that were closer to the events than we have access to now.

I don't think we even know what we lost.

The currency to get you into the library would be information. We have lots of information they didn't have--maps would be good. Drawings of animals they didn't have. Lots of stuff.

Re:Time travel hero wannabe

[kliklik (322798)]

Just as you surround yourself with the most important scrolls and start scanning, the battery in your laptop decides to explode, starting the fire.

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[Provocateur (133110)]

And his last heroic words before he died in the conflagration were 'Don't buy Delllllll!'

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[hey! (33014)]

How about: travel back in time with a knowledge of the germ theory of disease?

An army is a large group of men living in close quarters, under stress. In other words, a microbe's banquet. I've read historical accounts of battles that offhand mention the fraction of soldiers who are disabled by infections like dysentery, and it's astonishing the degree to which health casualties outnumber battle casualties. How many battles woudl have gone differently if the quartermasters knew about basic food safety? Ath

source code

[by Anonymous Coward]

He posted the source code on his hompeage at http://www.schlaupelz.de/SZ42/SZ42_software.html [schlaupelz.de].
Most of it is written in Ada.

racism?

[RingDev (879105)]

I could understand a stereotype tag, even a nationalism tag, but racism? Are the taggers implying that people from German are of different races than the rest of the world?

I RTFA and there is nothing racist in there. Just that a guy from Germany cracked the code using some software written in Ada.

-Rick

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[gardyloo (512791)]

Pfft. The Boston Marathon is *obviously* superior to the Tour de France, and the Iditarod beats them bo--... Oh, wait.

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[NoseyNick (19946)]

Is it also sexist because HE wrote the program HIMself? I mean, c'mon!

Bad definitions. Race != Ethnicity

[TerranFury (726743)]

"any people united by common history, language, cultural traits, etc" [...] Nobody would say "Japanese" or "Korean" wasn't a racial group.

I think that's a bad definition for race. It sounds more like a correct definition for ethnicity. "Japanese" and Korean" are nationalities and, more than that, they are ethnicities, but I wouldn't call them "races" any more than I'd say that Italians and Swedes are of different "races." Italians and Swedes are "Caucasian;" Japanese and Koreans are "Asian," (or "East-Asian" if you want to differentiate from "South-Asian.")

Because by the definition you cited, Kurds are a race, as are Armenians, as are.

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[nagora (177841)]

Why do you guys make such a topic of that man being a german?

It's called "irony". Jesus! It's not that complicated.

TWW

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[Adambomb (118938)]

I'd be interested to see a slashdot week where all of a sudden posts could only be modded up instead of up or down. Modding against opinions pretty much makes the forum fairly worthless. If you only want to read what you already think, Find an outlet that caters to your views and avoid the commentary entirely.

Reffering to those who mod down an excellent point, of course. The fact that people have slowly warped racism to mean referring to any detail beyond the scope that someone is human from planet earth. T

get that man a time machine quick!!

[Some_Llama (763766)]

oh wait..

What was that about secret svcs?

[mattr (78516)]

Heise security article says, "...British and German secret services initially had reservations about the cipher challenge."

I'd like to know more about what they said. Are they worried it will encourage kids to get interested in crypto? Where do they expect to pick up talented cryptographers anyway?

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[Roger W Moore (538166)]

I'd like to know more about what they said. Are they worried it will encourage kids to get interested in crypto?

They are worried because they are still using those codes. Clearly they had not been cracked until now so they must have been secure. Now they are going to have to make things even harder by doing a ROT13 encryption first.

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[HRogge (973545)]

The German museum which did the sending part of the whole project had to borrow a Lorenz SZ42 encryption engine from England (because the Allies grabbed all of them after WW2). The English GCHQ (http://www.gchq.gov.uk/) feared that someone would call it war booty (sp?) and a court might decide they don't get it back.

Same reason why the art taken by the Russians by the end of WW2 can never be shown outsite Russia... according to most countries laws they would have to confiscate it..

Achtung!

[dkleinsc (563838)]

Das encryptmachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy wrecken der secrets, schnatchendatas und breakensecurity mit grossembrassen. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.

Please give the Nazi jokes a rest

[CranberryKing (776846)]

It has been ~70 years now, hasn't it? A couple of generations.. At least keep the outdated references limited to cold war stuff.

Why irony?

[xPsi (851544)]

Why irony to describe the result? irony: incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs. Here the expectation, even if misguided, is a historical one, not a nationalistic nor skill-based one. Since irony is based on expectation, it is as much an emotional process as an intellectual one. It is not necessarily a rational response; it CAN be just a sensation one gets. Obviously no one doubts Germans are technically capable of cracking codes, so expectation is not twisted around for th

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[uradu (10768)]

And in other news, over-analyzing humor takes all enjoyment out of it, along the lines of "what the hell would a rabbi do in a bar?!".

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[A nonymous Coward (7548)]

If you're going to be pedantic, I will too.

1941-12-07

Try -08. The Japanese military ran off Tokyo time, not local time.

Re:Never underest. Nazi brains - Hitler had syphil

[Dogtanian (588974)]

Never underestimate Nazi brains, and be very glad (Frenchies especially) Hitler had syphillis and was quite bonkers. You would all be driving around in volkswagons, wearing lederhosen, talking german, paying in deutche mark, and working in the mines to keep the germans even fatter.

Just a thought, but I've always considered that the Germans were lucky to have lost the war when they did. Why?

The atomic bomb. It's easy to forget that it was developed in response to fears that the Germans might develop one first (which makes it ironic that it was the Japanese that it was ultimately used against). It might be easy in retrospect to say that they weren't realistically close to having one during WWII, but this wasn't so clear at the time.

And even if this *had* become known towards the e

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[uradu (10768)]

Well, lucky are the few with such moral certitude as you. It's not clear at all that the Allies would have ever dropped a bomb over Germany, given the proximity of so many Allied countries. They had no qualms dropping them on Japan because of its geographic isolation. Besides, obliterating Germany that way would have prevented much of the technological looting after the war. The US in particular made out like bandits so to speak, and the war ended up being a net economic gain in the long run, both in terms

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[uradu (10768)]

That hardly applies to the US after WWII. While the war certainly cost the US a lot of money, they gained a massive captive market in Europe for several decades that wouldn't have been the same without the war, since Europe had had its own strong industrial competitors to the US. I would consider the US more like the glazier in the parable, since its costs were negligible compared to the benefits, as opposed to those borne by Europe and other parts of the world.

Besides, I wasn't talking about immediate gain

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[Dogtanian (588974)]

They were lucky? Well the guessing at alternate history game is always fun.

Yes, I'm aware that debating the past in this manner is always an intellectual wankfest to some extent.

However, Noncrazy Hitler wouldn't have been Hitler as we know him, and history would have had to be very different. By contrast, Germany surrendered just 3 months before the atomic bomb was ready enough to be dropped on Japan.