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Encryption Security

Stolen Enigma Machine Recovered In Style 119

Posted by timothy from the leisurely-sunday-morning-reading dept.
glomph writes: "A priceless Enigma crypto device (only three exist) was stolen this spring from a museum in the UK. The Sunday Times describe in fascinating detail how they fully recovered the item. Codewords hidden in the newspaper, buried video tapes, meetings in dark misty cemeteries and other cloak-n-dagger stuff were used. The Bad Guy was also nabbed. A must-read tale."
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Stolen Enigma Machine Recovered In Style More

Stolen Enigma Machine Recovered In Style

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  • When this enigma machine was stolen, no expense was spared, both by British detectives and by interested parties in the private sector (including the Sunday Times), who understood what important part of British cultural heritage enigma machines constitute.

    But steal from the weak, and the weak will have to do without; for the rich will watch idly by. More than fifty years after the engima machines were built to fight the Nazis, the descendants of Churchill are doing nothing to help recover works of art stolen by those same Nazis, stolen from homes of the people they liquidated.

    It's not that there aren't appropriate mechanisms aren't in place to find and recover stolen art. The Art Loss Register [antiquesandart.com.au] will soon be seeing its tenth birthday. The means exists but the will is lacking: cultural racism prevents otherwise honest and decent people from lending their hand and bringing these works home.

    I'm happy for Bletchley Park and the relief they must feel now that their engima machine is returned to their collective busom. Now, perhaps, they can find the time to recover Nazi loot that remains stolen, even now in the 21st century! Don't you see? Churchill, Stalin, and the British people thought they won the war, but they've lost as long as the Nazis' perpetrations cast a stain upon England. What would Churchill do?

    That's the question, and I fear England may ignore the answer.
  • After reading this article, I now want to move to Britan, since a) their police have much more entertaining ways of solving crimes, and 2) their papers have a much higher quality of writing.

    "Blow up your TV/Throw away your paper/
    Move to the country/Build you a home"
  • honestly, is it really ncessary to point this crap out every single time there is an article on the Enigma? Are you karma whoring again? :)
  • I don't think that would qualify as war booty. Probably falls into the category of proceeds from crimes against humanity.

  • right... (Score:3)

    by fjordboy ( 169716 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @08:41AM (#614223) Homepage
    How do we know that they actually caught the guy and got the machine back. This might be a bigger part of the complex plot to nab the real guy and get the real machine back. I think that this is just another coded message to the thief. Or not.

    Also....this would make an excellent movie or novel...did anyone buy the rights to it yet? /me is thinking George Lucas should handle this and take some creative liberties by adding a lightsaber battle or two.
    i didn't know exciting stuff happened in the UK. whoa.

  • Read about Purple here [aol.com]

    Anyway, there were two codes used by the Japanese. There was the JN25 codes, which were based on a traditional codebook system, and were deciphered by a 325 man team at the NSA. The other system was called Purple (by the Americans). From the site:

    The Japanese had obtained an Enigma machine from Germany, and decided to use the same principle to encode their messages. Rather than using rotors operated by keypresses from the keyboard, they employed electro-mechanical "stepping switches". An electromagnet, acting through a pawl and ratchet mechanism, caused rotating contacts to pass over banks of electrical contacts. The overall machine, although constructed differently, was equivalent to a four-rotor Enigma with electric typewriters on each side. A message was entered on one typewriter, and printed out, encoded, on the second. Although this eliminated some errors in copying an encode from illuminated light bulbs, the weight of the stepping switches and typewriters made it far less portable than the German field Enigma. The Japanese machine was called "97-shiki o-bun in-ji-ki," or informally "J." The Americans called their diplomatic code "Purple" and the intercepts "magic."

    KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.

  • "Ghost of Hitler Sues Allies under DMCA..." (Score:3)

    by the real jeezus ( 246969 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @08:47AM (#614225)
    reprinted with permission from Der Tag...

    (Berlin) -
    Yesterday, attorneys for the long-dead Fuehrer filed a lawsuit in The Hague, alleging that the governments of the United States ("the Colonies") and the United Kingdom violated article 23 of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) by reverse-engineering the Enigma machine.

    When the Allies broke the Enigma's complex coding scheme, they were able to intercept and decrypt strategic Nazi communiques, eventually leading to Herr Hitler's suicide and an Allied victory.

    Herr Doctor Spelunkenzweis, primary counsel for the late Hitler, claims that such blatant disregard of the creator's exclusive rights to his Intellectual Property is intolerable and that the perpetrators must be used as an example.

    The late Hitler is seeking an already-controversial list of damages, including ownership of all assets of modern England, France, Austria, Italy, Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Poland, Libya, and Ethiopia, as well as a written apology from the ghosts of the Right Honorable Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt.



    In 1999, marijuana [smokedot.org] killed 0 Americans...
  • it is a piece of history. if it weren't for the silent capture of the enigma it may have been a much longer road to the defeat of the Germans...

    just b/c it is has moetary value at auction does NOT mean it isn't greatly valueable...


  • When this failed, a further message in The Times told the letter writer to "click with Alice".

    That Bitch Alice! Why is everything always sent to her! grrrr...Foiled Again!

    /Eve
  • let me think about this....oh..interesting...they got the enigma back a month ago. Yes..we know this already..but what about the 3 rotors? and i don't recall anyone being arrested yet back during that article. This is NOT a repeat article...even though you might think it is. Look a little deeper next time and read the actual articles.

    and remember, i know where you live. Just because you are a coworker doesn't mean i have to be nice to you.

  • In fact the machine taken from Bletchley wans't even stolen from Germany, it was presented to them in 98 as a gift from the German government.

    Obviously the ones captured in the war were stolen, like the naval enigma and code book the British Navy captured from U571.
  • More than fifty years after the engima machines were built to fight the Nazis

    No the enigma machines were BUILT by the Nazis.

    the descendants of Churchill are doing nothing to help recover works of art stolen by those same Nazis, stolen from homes of the people they liquidated.

    Churchill was the British Prime Minister at the time and was never a Nazi. His descendants are honourable decent men and are alos not related to the Nazi's

  • What the hell was that? (Score:3)

    by pheonix ( 14223 ) <slashdot@i b l o v iate.org> on Sunday November 19, 2000 @09:45AM (#614231) Homepage

    That was about the worst piece of writing I've ever seen.

    I've read the stupid article about 5 times now, and much of it STILL makes no sense. Why did they do all of these seemingly pointless things to get it back? What was the point? The entire article read like a gigantic run-on sentence with no point displayed anywhere in there.

    Hint for moderators: It's neither a flame nor a troll, nor baiting for flames, so -1 Flamebait or -1 Troll wouldn't be appropriate; however, -1 Offtopic or -1 Overrated would both apply.

  • Maybe Egypt should invade England and retrieve the stone. Isn't this what guns are for? Use 'em!
  • hehe.. I'm in the same boat. I was hungover and read this and I was like.. ok.. not as exciting as say Mission Impossible..

    JOhn

  • he's paying in canadian currency, and converting it to US for you.

    --
  • No kidding. The "a must-read tale" comment at the end certainly had me expecting a much more interesting article.

    Pete

  • The Enigma code was what all German subs communicated with, and most Axis commanders in power assumed the code was unbreakable, communicating as many as 70 times a day with ONE sub. Enigma was a blessing for a time, but when the Allies finally adopted the convoy system for the navy, Enigma actually worked AGAINST the German submariners. A couple ships would triangulate the origin of German messages, and near the end of the war, the death rate for German submariners was 80%.
  • ok, it is wonderful to have this important piece of history back where it belongs, and the theif caught, but was it really necessary to go through such lengths?

    The article was a trifle longwinded, I agree, and what ruffled my feathers even earlier was the self-aggrandizing tone in which it is written. Ok, so they took part in the process of recovery. Well, just think about why they were given the chance: someone steals something, decides to contact some papers to negotiate with for the return, which papers is he going to write to? My guess would be, the papers he reads anyway.

    So the implication is, that people who do that kind of thing read that kind of paper. Not an association I'd like to crow about. Then again, it takes all sorts, but don't quote me on that. (I'm thinking the kind of paper that uses no big words, just big lettering, and colour photos of boobies on as many pages as possible, right?)

    Stefan.
    It takes a lot of brains to enjoy satire, humor and wit-

  • they are looking for somebody who stole an item from them... an item they stole from somebody else!

    shouldnt these things be returned to germany? i mean thats who they actually belong to.

    john
  • Yes, this is correct. When I worked in Ottawa for the "Security Services" division of R.C.M.P., I was sent on a COMSEC course at the Communications Security Establishment. They had a "museum" with somewhere between 25 and 30 of them sitting in rows. Many had been pulled out of subs in WW2.

    They kept them secret and locked up because, at that time, many poorer countries still used Enigmas for encrypting traffic between foreign consulates and The Mother Ship back home...

  • That link still misses the end. What happened in the graveyard, after they finally got to set up their rendez-vous? Did they look into their server logs to see who accessed the page? What about the video tape, and how did they get back the missing rotors eventually? It just stops right before it would get interesting. And the "next" link points to background information about what the role the machine played in WWII. But the crucial part of how they did get back the missing rotors is... as missing as said rotors.
  • These have got to be some of the dumbest crooks ever. First they steal something with no resale value, then they play childish cloak and dagger games with the cops that leave all kinds of ways of tracing their identity. Aside from the fact that the cops will trace every hit to the so called "secret" Bletchley park web page, agreeing to go to an isolated, deserted place at a specific time is pretty stupid. Thanks to the war on druges, the cops now have cameras that can track a gnat's ass at midnight from so high in the air you'd never hear the helicopter.

    Even if you spill the beans on your identity, you don't leave the goods where the coppers can just walk in and pick them up, nailing you dead to rights. The cops up here in Boston believe they've figured who's behind the Gardner Museum heists, but they can't prove it until they recover the goods -- and the perps aren't talking.

  • Isn't it ironic (Score:5)

    by empesey ( 207806 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @07:49AM (#614242) Homepage
    Didn't it get stolen from the Germans first? They're going to prosecute a man, for stealing something, that is itself, stolen. And people got killed when it was originally stolen. From what I know, it was stolen with no lives lost. Maybe they're mad because he was able to accomplish the theft in a more efficient manner.

    Someone call Alanis.
  • What is the story (no pun intended) with Sunday Times web site? Why is it half blank?
    Am I missing something or do most people not like to look down the middle / have there media go from one side to the other?
    We should start a save the electrons campaign because this is most assuredly a great waste of them.........
    :wq!
  • I'm an optimist... I look at the page and see it as half full...
  • As written in the article, "The missing machine [was sent to the office of the BBC Newsnight presenter] last month. However, the rotors had been removed" part of the equipment was recovered last month.

    It was only yesterday that anyone was apprehended.
  • And then _Mustang says to the on-coming car... "I've wasted my life."
  • I know what you mean! I'm always reading the personals in the Telegraph for the same reason, ever since they had a dialogue with the Mardi Gras Bomber in their personals. They alway seem to have a 1920's conspiracy type style about them, and look like this:

    Cerberus:
    Please connect Thor, 700. Thanks, Stephan.

    Apparantly London is a hot bed of intrigue because it is the first Major English speaking City with a reasonable proximity to Europe, Middle East, America etc. I've read that lots of fanatic Middle East terrorist groups organise from London in particular, including old Bin Laden's.

    Thing is, most of the messages are probably just adulterers ;)

    KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.

  • What the fuck are you talking about? Enigma was a German machine, not British. All of the Enigmas England owns were stolen from the Germans during WWII. When Germany was defeated most of the works of art that you are talking about ended up in the Hermitage in Russia and in private hands in the US. Haven't you heard of lawsuits in the US where some old Jewish people sue some other Americans for a "stolen" work of art that their ancestors owned back in Germany?

  • actually... (Score:4)

    by Cobol God ( 157835 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @08:01AM (#614249) Journal
    a 1971 UN agreement says anything stolen as war booty before 1971 is finders keepers. and the country that stole it can keep it. Same thing as the Rosetta Stone.. its from Egypt.. Egypt wants it back.. its in ENgland.. england stole it as war booty and refuses to return it because of the same 1971 agreement saying because of that agreement IT now owns the stone.

  • What was like receiving that box full of stolen Enigma? Read my interview with infamous BBC announcer Jeremy Paxman... here! [geekculture.com]
    Heh, there's also the Joy of Tech [geekculture.com] cartoon about it... here! [geekculture.com]


    Self promotion yes, but at least it's topical. ;-)

  • Re:Who do the Brits think they are? (Score:4)

    by Railroader ( 139848 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @09:55AM (#614252)
    The movie U571 is a complete work of fiction. Only in Hollywood's dreams did the American Navy seize an Enigma machine from a German Sub early in WWII. The movie is loosly based on the capture of U110 by the British destroyer Bulldog on May 9, 1941, more than 7 months before Germany declared war on the US. The real U571 was sunk by an Australian Sunderland aircraft.
  • Not at all... the Enigma in question was presented to GCHQ in 1998 by the Germany government, it wasn't stolen from WWII operations.

    The article states something like this at the bottom of the article, however it isn't quite right.
  • The stolen G312 machine, valued at £100,000, is one of only three similar machines known to exist..
    Perhaps a bit of exageration there on your part timothy..
  • I believe this one was not "stolen" but Nazi booty taken after the war. If it were made of gold they'd no doubt be paying reparations to Holocaust survivors for it, but otherwise this sort of thing seems to be vae victis.
  • Exceptions occur, for instance the "Stone of Scone", a slab of sandstone which was the seat of Scottish Kings until 1296 when the English "stole" it and placed it in Westminster Abbey (under the seat in which English monarchs are coronated, I believe). The stone was returned to Scotland in 1996 after much campaigning (700 years of it, arguably).

    So there's hope for the Rosetta Stone after all. It just might take another 600 years. :-)

    Personally I'd rather the Germans had the Enigma, if they'd only take better care of it than we have. The neglect of Bletchley Park since WW2 is a sad sad story, especially if you're a geek...

    (More info on the Stone of Scone here [foreignwire.com].)
  • That was more Monty Python than James Bond. I'm not quite sure who you sell a £350 million diamond to without making the buyer suspicious though. Its not like it might have fallen off the back of a lorry.

  • Actually.... (Score:4)

    by BlueHexahedron ( 216552 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @11:16AM (#614258)
    I reckon that the article itself was a secretly encoded message, hence its unreadability. I'll have to run it through my cryptoanalyzer.

    "Orange pigs fly south for winter, aunt Betty misses you, please call the hat shop." Ahem.

  • Well, compared to the Japanese, the Germans have actually dealt with war atrocities in a fairly forthright manner.
    --
  • Well naturally dear chap, what did you expect? One does not have a formal British education to be beaten by Americans who cannot even spell the name of the country to which they wish to aspire. I would like to take this opportunity to remind the Americans reading /. of the Revocation of Independence, a reply published to a recent post. Those readers interested in such a revocation will have enough motivation to find the relevant reply, and therefore there is little point in my including a link.
  • hehe..I went to the same high school as the writer of U571, and I know I had some of the same teachers, and I assure you there is no way in hell u751 was factual. you could say our history teachers weren't as good as you would hope for..

    did that make sense?....damnit. I wanted to make a joke, but it didn't work...

  • Thanks for pointing out the full article.

    However, what is even stranger, on each page, the index numbers appear to be decreasing, e.g.:

    page1: stinwenws02039.html
    page2: stinwenws02038.html
    page3: stinwenws02037.html ...

    Just the loony British and their custom CMS? Or is this also a secret message? <grin>

  • Enigma Stuff (Score:3)

    by philj ( 13777 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @06:58AM (#614263)
    There's a silmulation of it here [att.co.uk] and another here [jhu.edu].
    &l t;BR>Also, How does the enigma work? [jhu.edu] and a short history [jhu.edu] of the Enigma Machine,
  • I mean, what happened to the James-Bond type villains that always left when the hero is in some sort of trap, giving him a chance to escape? Crime should be more fun these days. Just imagine if Bill Gates did something fun like this.... oh I don't know, like stopping his usage of ruthless tactics to dominate the operating system market?
  • > Germany would probably incinerate the machine. Or put in in a trash compactor. They're really touchy (maybe the word is ashamed) about the war, and go to great lengths to destroy anything that has anything to do with it.

    That's odd. Today I saw that PBS special about the lost U-Boat, and it showed a German museum dedicated to the U-Boats, filled to the brim with information about the boats, the crews, and the histories. Also briefly shown was a German memorial to the U-Boatmen, complete with the names of the lost sailors, very reminiscent of the USA's Vietnam memorial.
  • Now if this happened in America, we would just spend a couple billion dollars and find someone to blame real quick, afterwards there would be a bunch of press conferences and we would claim that they destroyed the enigma. The criminals would then hire the "dream team" and sue the government for pointing guns at them.

    Damn British always doing things backwards!

  • very glad but... (Score:5)

    by garcia ( 6573 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @06:55AM (#614267)
    ok, it is wonderful to have this important piece of history back where it belongs, and the theif caught, but was it really necessary to go through such lengths?

    the way that the artcile was written on /. made it seem like it was REALLY interesting. I read the article (and even though I am a bit hungover still) it really wasn't that great and I was rather annoyed w/it. There were very few exciting details and in fact it really didn't say much other than it was recovered...

    Just my worthless whining for this morning :)
  • "[The investigation] soon be-came an extraordinary battle of wits, involving as many as 50 officers from the Thames Valley police, the National Crime Squad and the National Criminal Intelligence Service."

    So, 50 cops and several reporters against one thief? Heh. I can't decide if that's sad or funny.
    --
  • /me is thinking George Lucas should handle this

    Oh, great. We're going to find out that the machine was stolen by Jar Jar, acting as an agent for the Ewoks.

  • Times (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've often wondered how many of those weird announcements in The Times were actually criminal conspiracies, spy ring communications etc. It gives me a cheap thrill when I'm having my breakfast :)
  • Universal Pictures and the creators of U-571 bring you "G312", the true story of the recovery of the stolen Enigma code machine by a heroic American force including the LA Times, the LAPD, and the FBI!
    BASED ON A TRUE STORY! ACTION! SUSPENSE! FULL FRONTAL NUDITY! Rated R.
  • You remember Alice...
    This is a song about Alice!

    (A. Guthrie)

  • this guy encrypted his email using enigma encryption.

    my 0.02 cents
  • Really weird behaviour on the part of the criminals. Did they find that the Enigma had no resale value, because of its uniqueness? If you go the trouble of stealing something, you do something with it. Duh.

    Oh, and I'm the sixth cousin three times removed of Alan Turing (who broke the Enigma code) :-) Genealogy freak in the house...

    --Remove SPAM from my address to mail me

  • Better version of the story (Score:3)

    by swordgeek ( 112599 ) on Monday November 20, 2000 @07:12AM (#614275) Journal
    The BBC has even newer news here [bbc.co.uk]. Also, they're a bit more cognisant of the english language than the Times. (i.e. tabloid trash)
  • I should know, I submitted this story days ago...
    FP.
  • ... a robots.txt page.

    The artical mentioned linking to a 'secret page' , basically just an unobvious link on the regular page. This is fine, but if you don't want your page indexed and cached by Google, you better have a robots.txt page or meta tag the stops the agents from indexing the page. To the casual viewer, the link is hard to find, to the robot, its just another page in the tree.
  • so does this mean that all that stuff stolen from the jew's and not recovered befor 1971 belongs to whoever now has it? or is this a one way thing for britian only?

    john
  • It is somehow appropriate that the people who were involved in the theft would want to make the exchange in the most complicated and convoluted manner possible. It seems very typical of wanna be spook types. Not that real spooks would ever do anything like that. (ha!)

    just what we need, another failed example of over complicated solutions to a problem ....

  • An American praising Britain! Now come on, what have you done with the real slashdot?

    KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.

  • >For a start, the machines have 4 rotors. They are the ones used on the subs (like the ones the BRITS, NOT THE YANKS, got the codebook for on U571)

    If you'd read, rather than skimmed, the article, you'd have seen that the device in question DID have four wheels, and the box was returned with one still attached and 3 missing.

    These things are just as easy to get right you know.

  • Who do the Brits think they are? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This article gives the impression that the Brits captured the enigma machine from the German U-boats. This is false. In fact it was the US navy that obtained the machines from sinking U-boats. Now if there's any justice in this world, the machines would be returned to their rightful owners ie, the USA.
  • As a matter of fact, you're right.

    --
    Q: How does a Unix guru have sex?
    A: unzip;strip;touch;finger;mount;fsck;more;yes;umoun t;sleep
  • Given the subject matter, I can see that the chances of an invocation of Godwin's law is high. What was it that was said earlier about British education vs American education? Dude, don't rely on Hollywood for your history: subscribe to Reader's Digest, or something if you want to improve your mind... What blows me away is how there were times when British lives could have been saved as a result of the codebreaking, but no action was taken in order to keep the fact that the codes were being broken secret. How does any make a call like that? Ironically enough, it was the fact that the grovelling pointhaired German radio operators used to start their messages with the words "Hiel Hitler!". Encode it as much as you like, but if you start each message the same... (Damn, there I go mentioning the H* word! I'd better shut up.)
  • Churchill, Stalin, and the British people thought they won the war
    Hmm I'm sure the Americans on /. won't thank you for omitting their major contribution to the war effort.

    Your argument is flawed...Whilst the Germans have learnt from the past and are committed to a united peacful Europe, they more than anyone else should have a moral duty to help restore those stolen artworks to their rightfull owners.

    England should not be responsible for acts committed by the Nazi's after all we fought to free Europe not to enslave it.

    British people thought they won the war
    We only won the war militarily.

    Economically it helped Germanys industry in the long term, most of their industry got flattened and we helped rebuild their infrastructure after the war.

    Our economy was so drained by then that it cost us our empire and Germany ended up being the economic centre of Europe...so who really won ?

  • So did the Axis powers manage to crack the corresponding US/UK/French codes?

    (Of course, that sort of matter is probably still classified information...)
  • The aricle is dated today and says the guy was arrested last night. They're probably just a bit behind.

    --
  • I'll have you know I *DID* read the artciels.. and this, just like a ton of other stories on slashdot is a repeat! SHESEH! This information was already posted prior to this aticle!

  • You're right, I thought this sounded like a familiar topic. Hey, maybe the old article is easier to read than the piece of crap the Sunday Times wrote.

  • Actually, this is because the web versions of The Times and The Sunday Times are in *boo, hiss* frames - lovely for navigating from the front page, less lovely if you happen to want to link to a specific story later on...

  • Well, I have heard/read about/seen Discovery Channel specials/etc. that the Japanese had all of the US codes cracked in the Pacific, until we utilized Navajo "code-talkers." The Japanese were never able to decode the Navajo language. Just my $.02US
  • shouldnt your sig be my 0.02 dollars
    or maybe youre really cheap
    just my 2 cents on the matter

  • Tsk...talk about a lost opportunity - I'd have properly grilled the bastard Newsnight stylee...

    GC: Come now, Mr. Paxman: are you trying to tell me that at no stage were you tempted to flog this to some rich American or Japanese collector? I mean, really, how much do the BBC pay you? And it never crossed your mind that there was a quick buck to be made? It's not as if anyone really watches University Challenge, is it?

    JP: I...I...

    Answer the question, Mr. Paxman...

    I...

    Simple answer: yes or no!


    ...and so on, ad nauseam...

  • Re:Hmm. (Score:2)

    by tbo ( 35008 )
    When the US and Britain were communicating about Enigma-related matters, they used their Enigma clones to encrypt the traffic. The Germans never guessed...

  • I thought that a page had to be reachable via a hyperlink to be indexed? The only way the search engine can hit a page is with HTTP (right?) and if it's not linked to from another page, or available in a directory listing, how is it going to be referenced?
  • this webpage was linked from another page that was publically available. the link was not all that apparant to people, but the crawlers just see it as another link while parsing html. so to get the crawlers to ignore the link you specify it in the robot.txt file. this file basically says ignore this, and most crawlers adhere to this convention. the "mystery person" was given a hint as to where the link was.

    john
  • Of course, if you want spiders to generally index your site, but absolutely not the Secret Link, you're screwed... A robots.txt file that does this will naturally be a big sign "THIS PAGE IS OUR SECRET LINK. DON'T LOOK BEHIND THE CURTAIN"

    *shrug* better to just not link it.
  • In fact it was the US navy that obtained the machines from sinking U-boats.

    That's nothing. I keep trying to get Fox Mulder (nice guy -- works for the X-Files division of the FBI) to investigate a time machine that was built using stolen plutonium as fuel during the mid-eighties. The Libyans were involved, and the guy who built the machine was shot and killed with a machine gun.

    For some reason, the FBI keep returning my mail with "Not at this address" stamped on top of it.

    Simon

  • Excellent - a leak of information (Score:3)

    by cpt kangarooski ( 3773 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @10:54PM (#614300) Homepage
    Well, thanks to the article, we now know that Alice's last name is Fletcher. Hopefully this useful bit of information will allow us to quickly determine the identity of Bob, Carol and Dave.
  • I suspect in order for that law to apply, you have to WIN the war in question. Not be subject to war reparations and all that (it probably excluded the Axis in any case).

    And, of course, there's that niggling little problem that Germany took a good portion of that stuff from German citizens... that UN law should only apply to international affairs, not domestic ones.
  • The original Enigma machine was a commercial product developed in the 1920s, and as far as I know available to all. The German military adopted it and modified it several times, producing their more "secure" (ha!) versions.
  • The article said the 57 year old man kept three of the rotors? Sounds like a conspiracy :)

  • Call me a cynic. I'm still not fully convinced that the real story behind the recovery of the 'stolen' Enigma machine isn't some publicity stunt, perhaps gone bad.

    I'd check the parent company of the Sunday Times and see if they have a financial stake in any upcoming Engima movie/book (maybe the movie mentioned in the article, the one financed by Mick Jagger's production company)

    Also, I'd see if the 'nabbed Bad Guy' really gets prosecuted. If so, who supports his defense.

    Then again, sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction ...

  • not recovered.... (Score:3)

    by nullset ( 39850 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @07:17AM (#614305)
    According to the bletchley park webpage, the 3 rotors have still not been recovered.....
  • Go eat a poisoned apple then...
  • The (Sunday) Times is owned by Murdoch's News Corporation [newscorp.com] - if they don't have a stake in some such money-spinner, I'd be amazed...

  • Re:Hmm. (Score:1)

    by mce ( 509 )
    Nope it's not classified.

    Yes, they broke some codes. For instance, the Germans read British naval traffic for most, if not all, of the war.

    But it's not as black-and-white as people usually put it. For instance, some German codes were never broken, despite Ultra. For more information, see this page at uboat.net [uboat.net]. No doubt something like this will also have been true in the other direction.

    --

  • here [mariner.org]. Click on the "Virtual Enigma" item in the menu on the left to use the simulation.

    There are also some interesting Enigma pages at uboat.net [uboat.net]. Unfortunately, that site seems to be having some database problems at the moment.

    --

  • There are definately more than three enigma machines. In fact, they only go for a few thousand dollars on the antiques market.

    There are probably only three of this particular model, but there are way more than three worldwide, and most people who own them are neither museums nor governments.

  • This particular model was one of only three 4-rotor models (according to the BBC [bbc.co.uk]). Other Enigma machines used three rotors and therefore were less secure.

    I believe I have used this particular machine (before it was stolen :-) and it was a little bit knackered anyway - a few of the output lights didn't illuminate.
  • The Slashdot article tells us the machine is "priceless". The Sunday Times says it is valued at UKP100,000.

    *insert funny MasterCard parody here*

  • Japanese crypto did NOT come from Germany (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Japanese code they call Purple was a Japanese invention all on its own, and had no relation to Enigma. This is the first I have heard that Germany shipped Enigma machines to Japan in 1937, and it seems doubtful -- wasn't the Axis tri-partite pact signed in 1940 or so? Makes me wonder how accurate the rest of the article is.

  • Re:Who do the Brits think they are? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Actually, the first Enigma that the UK recieved was stolen by Polish fighters, and passed to the UK a year or so after it was stolen. This one (The four rotor one), was not stolen by U-571 or any Americans, so don't even try that one.

    Besides, the Americans would have had to do some amazing temporal displacment to steal the Enigma before they even entered into the War in Europe.

  • So here's the mastercard parody (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    3 Personal ads in the London Times - 40 pounds Setting up a secret website - 80 pounds Prosecution fees - 5000 pounds The enigma machine? Priceless.
  • I dislike the use of the term "spastic". The term "spastic" is a clearly defined medical term to do with uncontrolled spasms in muscles. Try to cease being disablist as this disabled person dislikes, but never rules out, the use of the LART.
  • i hate to jump on the bandwagon with everybody saying how bad the writing was, but i'm going to. I thought the story itself was interesting, but like everyone else, i hate the writing itself. In most articles, you can skip a sentence and catch on later, but you couldn't in this one. the writer couldn't stick to one topic and kept digressing and jumping into new subtopics. In the beginning, it was all about the search for the thief, but then went on to be about the history of bletchley park, then on to the history of Enigma, and then on to more and more historical trivia. The whole article was inconsistent and couldn't stick with a fact. were there 3 rotors or 4 rotors? it said both throughout the article. first it said that the enigma was missing 3 of its 4 rotors, then missing all three implying that there were only three in the first place. who knows? i dont.

  • Ahem, The Sunday Mail? (Score:4)

    by nihilogos ( 87025 ) on Monday November 20, 2000 @02:37AM (#614327)
    It seems to have gone unmentioned, for the most part, that the Sunday Times is Britain's equivalent of the National Enquirer. This article is most probably utter bullshit, I mean THE Sunday Times has negotiated secretly for weeks to ensure the safe return ... ??? And don't forget the Sunday Times was also the rag that brought Britain the Hitler Diaries [syntac.net].

    You Americans need to cultivate a healthy distrust of the media ;)

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