Enigma Machine for Sale on eBay 175
RagingMaxx writes "An Italian antiques dealer has recently put to auction a mint condition, fully operational Enigma machine on eBay. The machine, dated circa 1938, will be sold to the highest bidder in just over a week, but after 30 hours of bidding the price has already surpassed $12,000 US. For those of you who can't afford the real thing, why not make your own?"
Potential buyer (Score:5, Funny)
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MPAA doesn't want unbreakable encryption; who would they sue?
England and America for violation of DMCA?
Darn (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Darn (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Darn (Score:5, Informative)
When thinking of answers to questions like that I find it impossible to separate cryptomonicon from reality.
As usual, wikipedia has some answers [wikipedia.org]
Re:Darn (Score:5, Funny)
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The Master, eh? What's Mr. Saxon going to do about this, I'd like to know.
U-505 and Enigma in Chicago (Score:2)
http://www.msichicago.org/exhibit/U505/index.html [msichicago.org]
I was there last week and it is a pretty cool exhibit -although the rest of the museum is pretty kids oriented. That enigma machine looks a little smaller and lighter than the one on eBay. The whole story of saving the sub from scrap and moving it from the Bahamas to Chicago is an interesting one too.
the sailors captured were held incommunica
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Anything and everything is justifiable... on the side that wins the war. Classify the truth, indoctrinate those who don't know, and kill or imprison those who know enough to throw doubt on your justification.
Re:Darn (Score:5, Interesting)
The Enigmas were not the only things destroyed (Score:5, Informative)
Not gonna Karma-whore by posting a zillion Wikiped links, but it's all there if you're interested and don't know the story. Worth a read, newbies, since a lot of what you now take for granted was developed by these folks.
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Many of the pioneers of British computing had previously worked at Bletchley.
It's also wrong IMO to suggest that, in the early days of computing the Briti
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>It still is.
Look, I'm doing my best here guys...
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Re:Darn (Score:5, Interesting)
This one looks like an Enigma 1 [Wermacht or Services Enigma]. They were also used by government and banks so this one could have been ex-government etc.
The important of cracking Enigma cannot ever be overstated. There is a general agreement amongst historians that the Allies ability to read the German's encrypted traffic shaved a couple of years off the war. I would encourage our American brethren to read the book 'Enigma:The Battle for the Code' by Simon Sebag-Montefiore. Its an exceptionally good and instructive read about the whole Enigma issue.
See also (in German): (Score:5, Informative)
German Translation: "Im Banne Der Enigma" (Under The Spell Of The Enigma)
Original title: "W krgu Enigmy", published in Warsaw in 1979
Author: Wladyslaw Kozaczuk
Translation published by: Militärverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik
(translator's name not listed)
ISBN 3-327-00423-4
In addition to its rather interesting political perspective, the book has an extremely detailed account of the Polish Intelligence Service's work on Enigma, including material I'd not seen in most of the more accessible Western literature on Enigma. In essence, the Polish crypto boffins had Enigma cracked (including automated cracking machines) before the war even started, but lacked the resources to scale up their efforts as the machines were upgraded (addition of the plugboard and new rotors); that, and the German occupation of Poland and later France, led them to share their findings with Britain, and the history most folks hear about.
BTW, WRT the "Enigma-E" electronic Enigma machine, I highly recommend it. I still get a kick out of decrypting messages with the one I built (in its nifty wooden case). Well worth the cost for those who've gotten the "Enigma virus".
Erratum:"krgu" should be "kregu" (sort of) (Score:2)
Re:Darn (Score:5, Interesting)
I would go as far and say that cracking Enigma prevented nuclear bombs over Europe. Nevertheless, the names of Rejewski, Turing and others have been forgotten or never known by the public. It's a shame.
Re:Darn (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, it can be (and often is) overstated. The fascination with Enigma, among both the general public and the historians, often obscures (or fails to mention at all) the fact that the codebreaking effort was but one portion of the overall electronic intelligence effort. Especially in the Battle of the Atlantic where Huff-Duff and more conventional technques (like traffic analysis) yielded vast amounts of vital intelligence data.
Even with decrypted ciphertext, it always took considerable analysis to break the code(s) the messages used in the text for further security. (In the Atlantic the Allies, for example, never got a break like 'AF is short of fresh water'.)
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...and what should Britons read for further information? How about Canadians? Or is it only Americans who need a book list patronizingly offered up?
Might I suggest for them both "Everybody Poops?" [amazon.com] This will greatly aid you in understanding your American cousins. For advanced reading, see "The Gas We Pass, the Story of Farts." [amazon.com]
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Matter of fact, when US forces did capture a U-boat with its Enigma machine, they came close to blowing the whole operation. A rather flamboyant Naval officer named Gallery planned and carried out the operation on his own initiative, unaware that the Allies already had the machine, and the Chief of Naval Operations went ballistic when he heard of it. There was quite a scramble to keep the capture secret.
rj
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And wildly inaccurate too.
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Re:Darn (Score:4, Funny)
QKGYE SYEBD ARELM YEKHD? QTDPO STWEK YEGDT MWKOI FDYUW ARRTK HQPTY NVDQK!
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But it has the plug board (Score:3, Informative)
It also has the military symbol... (Score:2)
I know this is slashdot...but does nobody look at the pictures before posting?
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I meant all the other posters...
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Instructions? (Score:4, Funny)
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Yes, I am. In fact, many of those groups actually WERE terrorists. Not all, thou.
I really can't say if most were terrorists or not, since I have no clue. I have an auntie who lived in Paris at the time, and whose father was part of the resistance. He was not exactly a terrorist, but neither from one of the more moderate groups. The point I want to make is that he told her (never met him myself) there were groups tha
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Are you insane? So it is "terrorism" now to fight with violence a regime that is bringing blood and suffering over the world and commits a horrific genocide? A resistance fighter and a hero is each and every one of them, nearly regardless of their specific actions.
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As far as THEY are concerned, they are "fighting with violence a regime that is blinding blood and suffering over the world and commits a horrific genocide".
Either we have clear parameter to define something, or we don't define it. What you are saying is, basically, if you side is doing it, it is heroism. If the other side is doing it, it is terrorism.
For your information, there were some resistance groups that even attacked German civilians. All p
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As for those resistance fighters who attacked German and Austrian civilians, I applaud and thank them for providing my countrymen with the just consequences
Fantastic (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Fantastic (Score:4, Funny)
That explains it (Score:5, Funny)
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Or a bombe
Re:That explains it (Score:4, Funny)
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AIU, that would be "Or a bombe, and a team of cryptographers". Cracking an Enigma message was a two-step process.
1. create a 'menu', a set of clues to be fed into the bombe, basically bringing down the number of possible combinations to a manageable level. The menu was created manually.
2. let the bombe do its run.
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Re:That explains it (Score:5, Funny)
o
-|- -----> You
/ \
The future (Score:2, Funny)
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Then we really shouldn't have driven Alan Turing into suicide.
Re:The future (Score:5, Funny)
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I really regret all those homophobic actions I took over 20 years before I was born. In a related story, under 60 "news" personalities are still proud of fighting in World War II (see statements like "when we saved you in WWII...")
Military or commercial? (Score:4, Interesting)
sPh
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Well, and "Shock and Awe" is probably the commercial version of "Military Op. Foxtrot Bravo 5.2.5.3.5.25.a [classified]".
The military are artistic guys in nature.
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Re:Military or commercial? (Score:4, Informative)
The Wehrmacht symbol, by the way, is a stylized Iron Cross, which is also the current emblem of German armed forces (and has been since the German Empire).
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On looking at the rotors more closely, they are numbered, not lettered. All the discussions of Enigma machines I've ever seen indicate that the rotors should be lettered - a
The secret message is: (Score:5, Funny)
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Concern about the price. (Score:4, Funny)
unimpressed (Score:5, Funny)
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How secure is Enigma these days? (Score:5, Interesting)
But a recent effort to crack some M4 messages using distributed computing [bytereef.org] estimated some 10,000 PC-hours to break a message.
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The thinkquest page is discussing the Bombe machine that Turing developed. It would take about 15 hours for it do one run. A modern computer can perform the same tasks in seconds. The Bombe machine had a very specific task. Its job was not to decipher the messages. Its job was to figure a few probable rotor combinations and settings from thousands of possibilities. The analyst would then test the resulting combinations manually on a block of text.
Also the
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Original Bombe was used to break three rotor commercial enigma. M4 Project is trying to break four rotor Kriegsmarine Enigma messages. Read the ones that are broken. Short messages, non-english language, lots of short cuts, only some words are from dictionary. Even if you broke one, you still have to decypher what von Looks wants to say in his message.
Kriegsmarine has some security rules for Enigma transmissions. U-boat commanders usually followed them.
Re:How secure is Enigma these days? (Score:5, Informative)
The subs had a four-rotor machine, but the operators made a fatal mistake. In order for messages to be read on three-rotor machines, an operator encrypted the same message twice--once with three rotors and once with four. That gave the codebreakers the information they needed to deduce the fourth rotor. They built a machine for breaking the Enigma codes which, given what they knew about the rotors, they could break them quickly enough to be extremely useful in the war.
Also a German U-boat was captured, along with a code book showing the rotor positions for the next few months. With that information they learned enough about the four rotor system to be able to break those messages also.
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Why build one when you can play with an emulation? (Score:3, Informative)
http://homepages.tesco.net/~andycarlson/enigma/en
If you want to build something mechanical try a remote control aircraft. Much more fun.
A dupe? Or is there a regular market in these? (Score:2)
Is there a regular market in these things? Or is this the same machine going through cycles of spiffing up and reselling? Either way, I'm not sure every Enigma that goes on sale is "stuff that matters."
What's remarkable (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a pretty good artile on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
why not make your own? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Allied Tactic Against Enigma Wouldn't Work Today (Score:2)
Godwin and eBay (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to invoke Godwin's Law here, but I thought that eBay refused auctions of WWII Nazi German wartime memorabilia? Is it just those items that bear the symbol of the Third Reich? It's a cool object to geek sensibilities. I would say that today, it symbolizes a particularly crafty bit of code-busting on the part of the Allies against Nazi Germany, even moreso than the crafty bit of code-creating clock-engineering work on the part of the Germans. But it's still Nazi memorabilia on some level, which I thought was against eBay rules.
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Re:Godwin and eBay (Score:4, Interesting)
AFAIK*, there were both military and civilian versions of Enigma. The eBay piece doesn't appear to be military (no iron cross, no mil. ID, etc.,) so I'm going to assume that this was not a true "Nazi" piece. It was probably used in high-finance or something similar. So, in theory, this would be similar to selling an early model Volkswagen that was built for the general public.
* IANA Historian/Nazi Enthusiast/Cryptogeek
Hands on display at NSA Museum, Ft. Meade (Score:4, Interesting)
THis place is _really_ worth a visit. The staff are all retired NSA staff and are glad to talk to you about the exhibits (now that the equipment is declassified!) They have an excellent exhibit on Cold War era supercomputers, with a Cray and a Connection Machine CM-5 on display.
Also worth a visit: Bletchley Park (Score:3, Informative)
Enigma 2007, now bundled with Vista Home Edition (Score:2, Funny)
Make your own? (Score:2)
Just Wondering (Score:2)
Shipable in France (Score:2)
DIY? Tatjana Van Vark's is the one to beat (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Only one for sale? Already Pointed Out! (Score:2)
Actually that was already pointed out above, in a post on why buying only one of them might be so cheap. Perhaps you didn't decrypt that post properly.