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]

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?

What was that about secret svcs?

[mattr]

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?

Please give the Nazi jokes a rest

[CranberryKing]

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 At least keep the outdated references limited to cold war stuff.

Re:Never underest. Nazi brains - Hitler had syphil

[uradu]

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 gains from physical goods removed from Germany, which after all the destruction would have been somewhat anemic. I'm talking about intellectual property and patents [wikipedia.org], which benefited American companies for decades after the war. While it would be hard for various reasons to perform detailed studies of German reparations to the US--not least because most were in hard to calculate IP--some attempts were made. The most prominent one appears to be the book Science Technology and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany [amazon.com] by John Gimbel, mentioned in the article I linked to above, which seems to be cited by others as well. I have read the Operation Paperclip book, which talks about rocketry specifically, but similar technology transfers happened in many branches of industry.

Again, I'm not listing any of this as a justification for the war, or a white washing of the war crimes, or anything like that. I still think Germany got away quite lightly in American hands, compared to the destiny that could have befallen it purely in European or Soviet hands. My point was simply that the US benefited enormously from WWII, and some have even suggested that it may very well not have been what it is today without the war.