Colossus Cracks Again

BOfH writes "The BBC is reporting that following a 14-year rebuild project, the Colossus computer is once again cracking codes at Bletchley Park." They will crack WWII-era encrypted messages, and compete against modern PCs. Fun stuff for crypto nerds and history buffs.

The real question is....

[zappepcs]

will it be able to detect dupes?

Even more important than that . . .

[SpeedyGonz]

. . . Will it blend?

Re:

[Pseudonym]

You jest, but counting dupes is actually what it does [bromage.org].

How long

[Steeltalon]

until someone ports Quake to it?

Re:

[somersault]

And less importantly, will it run Vista?

Re:

[rvw]

And less importantly, will it run Vista?

They tried. Vista got cracked. Now it's broken. Microsoft is preparing a lawsuit.

Link to Bletchley Park

[fantomas]

At least provide a link to the Bletchley Park museum itself!

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/ [bletchleypark.org.uk]

It's a great visit. Go check it out. They don't get a lot of funding so they are very dependent on visitors (and volunteers if you live nearby) to help keep things going. They had to sell off some of their land recently to keep going (this is now getting turned into a local housing estate).

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Not all of us are fortunate neough to be able to travel to London. But earlier this year when I was obsessively reading about Colossus, I contented myself with Paul Gannon's Colossus: Bletchley Park's Greatest Secret [amazon.com] . It does a great job of explaining how that whole big centre of operations worked. It made me wonder, though, how similar today's military codebreaking centres like Ft. Mead are in terms of comaraderie.

Re:Link to Bletchley Park

[Bloke down the pub]

Not all of us are fortunate neough to be able to travel to London.

Not a problem, it's in Milton Keynes.

Re:

[Bertie]

Nobody who's ever been to Milton Keynes would say it wasn't a problem.

One of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen was Milton Keynes by the rear-view mirror.

Re:

[tehcyder]

Not all of us are fortunate neough to be able to travel to London.

Not a problem, it's in Milton Keynes.

Most of us are fortunate enough not to live in Milton Keynes either.

Re:

[Stooshie]

... It made me wonder, though, how similar today's military codebreaking centres like Ft. Mead are in terms of comaraderie ...

What military code breaking centres? There are none!

Re:

[pev]

I had an amazing day there a few years back - one of the most amazing things was that many of the volunteers were connected to Bletchley Park originally and you could talk to them to get their stories first hand. There are very few opportunities for such things these days and well worth taking the opportunity to meet them (and have a nice cup of tea!)

Re:

[afroborg]

I'm going there this weekend - was going anyway, now nothing will keep me away!

Re:

[digitig]

They had to sell off some of their land recently to keep going (this is now getting turned into a local housing estate).

To be fair, they probably had a lot more land than they needed. I did my apprenticeship there in the 1970s; there was a huge field at the back where we had a whole pile of aviation navigation aids set up, as well as far more squat brick-built huts than anybody could want in peacetime. Of course, the issue with selling off the land is that it means they're living on capital rather than revenue, which I suppose is a problem.

Not as fast as it used to be.

[RandoX]

The machine is only running at about 30% of the speed it did originally. It appears that their ISP is throttling their packets for some reason. Comcast cited DMCA violations as the reason for the packet shaping.

Re:

[aproposofwhat]

Of course it's being throttled - it's encrypted!

And as any fule kno, encryption==piracy.

Didn't know BT could use Lorentz encryption, though - hardcore!

Re:

[Basehart]

I found a really old photo [wikipedia.org] of it with its operator. Amazing how old this thing really is.

Old classics

[ashitaka]

Oh God, my dad has that album.

And of course the Herb Alpert classic [franklarosa.com].

Re:

[Kazoo the Clown]

Not as fast, eh? Time to check the relays for moths...

And how is this different. . .

[smooth wombat]

than this article [slashdot.org] from 2 days ago?

Re:

[FredDC]

This is the decrypted version?

Re:

[skoaldipper]

Oops. I must have missed my mark in drawing a parallel between this work and the article. Which, I guess the mod didn't read? The gold edifice is in honor of helping the franchise financially with it's base - beneficial to both creator and any derivative work. You might have been a little too quick on the trigger there in your judgement of my prior wording. No worries.

Linux port

[Gothmolly]

Any word on the Debian port ?

Re:

[thefergus]

They must be slower than the NetBSD crowd.

Cracking codes again

[ettlz]

Oh, is this anything to do with that earlier RIPA all-your-keys-are-belong-to-us story?

Colossus & Guardian live

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/ [imdb.com]

So should we be running for cover?

Re:

[NoPantsJim]

damn, beat me to it. Good lord do I ever love that movie. Hopefully Ron Howard's remake can do it justice. http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=19966 [comingsoon.net]

Re:

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I liked the book better. I'm still curious if the choice of the name "Colossus" was a coincedence, or a nod to the truth. Bletchley Park was only revealed in the 70's, but the book was published in 1966. But the author, D.F. Jones [wikipedia.org], was a WWII naval commander...

Re:

[ashitaka]

I wouldn't get your hopes up. There is something "pandering to the masses" about modern mainstream film making that will kill any chance of a remake having the seriously negative ending of the original.

When Dr. Forbin says "Never!" he tries to project some hope but his face shows that he realizes it's probably futile and that mankind will have the "peace" they have long sought after.

Only on Colossus's terms.

Goddamn that movie was scary.

Re:

[NoPantsJim]

You know the scariest part of that whole movie? The damn colossus voice. They did an amazing job with that. It could have been saying "I like bunnies and rainbows" and it still would have been fucking terrifying.

Re:

[ashitaka]

Be frightened again:

http://www.the-earchives.com/earframe.asp?c=Colossus:%20The%20Forbin%20Project [the-earchives.com]

Re:

[ashitaka]

Amazing!

I just found out that Paul Frees, who did the voice of Guardian (processed of course), also did Boris Badenov the Russian agent from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show as well as: (Gasp!)

The Pillsbury Doughboy!!!!

I Want a Babbage Engine, Dammit!

[R2.0]

I'm a mechanical engineer, and I demand the construction of a full scale Babbage engine, simply for bragging rights. ...grumble grumble...fucking EE's think the sun shines out their asses...grumble...

Re:

[andrewbaldwin]

Try looking in the Science Museum (Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects/computing_and_data_processing/1992-556.aspx?keywords=babbage [sciencemuseum.org.uk]

Re:I Want a Babbage Engine, Dammit!

[BigBadBus]

There is a full scale replica, at London's Science Museum, made by their own technicians. Its a lovely mesh of bronze and brass cogs and gears, and yes, it does work. I worked there years ago and was told something interesting: Bill Gates funded the construction of the display model on the condition that afterwards, they build him one too. Which I presume they did.

Re:

[rs232]

It's also interesting to note that Baggabes machine didn't work either ..

"Bill Gates funded the construction of the display model on the condition that afterwards, they build him one too"

Do you have a citation for this interesting recollection ..

Re:I Want a Babbage Engine, Dammit!

[tsjaikdus]

He also required the printer to have a blue pen the could fill in large surfaces.

Re:

[BigBadBus]

Sorry, this is rubbish. It is a full sized replica of how the difference engine/machine would have looked. I was told the information by a security guard with whom I was friendly in the museum. This would have been in 2003, when I worked as an assistant at the Titanic artefact exhibition.

Re:

[johnw]

Bill Gates funded the construction of the display model on the condition that afterwards, they build him one too. Which I presume they did.

I don't know about Bill Gates, but when I was last there (about a year ago) the second one was at an advanced stage of construction. I got talking to a man who was oiling the big steam engine and said I'd noticed they were building a second one. His response was, "Actually, I'm building a second one". His explanation was that when they'd built the first one, enough parts had been machined for two and now they were putting together the second one to go to an American museum.

Re:

[uglyduckling]

Do you mean a Difference Engine?

See if it can crack this one

[Huntr]

epud

First result...

[dbosso]

There is another system.

Reading the RSS title ...

[StarfishOne]

I initially had this amazing vision in my mind of a huge Greek mythical hero in the sky ... with a huge hammer (perhaps borrowed from Thor!) and an anvil to match... picking up numbers and cracking them with huge force one by one.... causing all kinds of wild lightning like effects that scared all mortals on the ground.

Then I realized I have some code to debug. ;-)

Re:

[StarfishOne]

For the record: I've never even touched WoW.

The only visuals I've seen of it were on TV or in a YouTube movie...

I've just got my creative moments every now and then! ;P

The first message cracked

[albeit unknown]

Be sure to drink your ovaltine

Re:

[ozbird]

"Try the fish."

But...

[sznupi]

...does it run Linux?

Re:

[sznupi]

(I was shocked BTW; so many comments, not one with the _truly_ relevant question...)

Re:

[JasterBobaMereel]

Probably not ... It's is not Turing Complete, it was designed and built for one purpose (but turned out to be amazingly flexible)

It could theoretically be rebuilt to run Linux... but the boot times would be a bit slow? The nearest thing it has to a clock speed is the input rate (that was the limiting factor in decoding) normally 5000 characters/second, was run up to 9700 c/s but it effectively did parallel processing so....

Re:

[martin]

no but it'll run netbsd ;-)

Ooh, I get to do it this time!

[Grimbleton]

I, for one, welcome our restored cryptography overlords.

The 1940s called.

[iceZebra]

They want their computer back.

didn't Harvey Keitel crack Enigma

[rs232]

I thought Harvey Keitel [nndb.com] captured an enigma machine from U-571 [imdb.com] 2000 .. :)

bloody pedant .. :)

[rs232]

"Colossus wasn't used against Enigma"

Don't be a bloody pedant, the work on cracking Enigma went into designing Colossus. Who's going to play Alan Turing [slashdot.org] in the movie, Jeff Goldblum [imdb.com], or no wait, Turing was a woofter, it would have to be Harvey Fierstein [imdb.com].

Incidentally, Goldblum got the part of Seth Brundle in the Fly [imdb.com] because he once played James Watson [nobelprize.org] in a BBC documtary, once a mad scientist always a mad scientist appariently .. :)

was Re:didn't Harvey Keitel crack Enigma

Pedant

[martin]

OK so I was there a few months ago and it is indeed an impressive beast - it's HUGE. About the size of a small data centre.

Also is doesn't crack the codes, merely gives the key to crack the codes from Enigma machines. Needs a separate machine to run the de-cypher...

Re:Pedant

[jeremyp]

Not Enigma.

They used bombes to crack Enigma. Colossus was for a completely different cipher called Lorenz

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/machines.rhtm [bletchleypark.org.uk]

Phone exchange registers

[flyingfsck]

I believe that Colossus was largely built from telephone exchange parts. It was probably mostly Plessey exchange registers. On the old exchanges, even with slow rotary dialling, if you dialled a number really fast, then it had to be stored somewhere while the selectors turned. The storage was also required when making long distance calls which could take a while to set up.

Does Colossus work faster

[maroberts]

..if you have Beowulf cluster of them?

Boom*Tish!

I'll be here all night..... (unfortunately)

In strange quirks of fate...

[KNicolson]

...my father worked somewhere in Bletchley Park spying on the Japanese, now I'm working in Japan on cryptography-related subjects, and talking to someone working in a division of GCHQ.

Re:

[Luke the Obscure]

You can avoid quirks by making sure you've properly defined your doctype. Don't worry, it's a common mistake.

OMG!!!

[Crystalmonkey]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster!!!!11

Had to.

One of The First Clockless Systems

[TheHawke]

Colossus ran as fast as the tape reader could scan and compare tapes. They estimated that the unit could do as much as 10,000 to 15,000 Characters Per Second (CPS). Material issues kept the machine running dependably at 5,000 CPS. As the story goes, the inventor cranked the tape scanner up to 10,000 CPS and the paper tape failed, sending ribbons flying across the room. At 60MPH, paper flies very fast!

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

At 60MPH, paper flies very fast!

At almost sixty miles per hour, one might assume.

Slight mismatch.

[EddyPearson]

"They will crack WWII era encrypted messages, and compete against modern PCs."

I like those odds.

Not competing against modern PCs

[celtic_hackr]

They have rigged the contest, by using Pentium II as a "modern" PC. I'd say they need to use at least a Pentium III, and a truly modern chip like an AMD 64 would bury this machine. Still, it's impressive that it can keep up with a Pentium II. Of course this is really comparing apples and granite, and they've further handicapped the challenge by running a virtual Colossus inside the Pentium II, rather than using a modern decryption tool. It looks like they've done everything they could to make this Colossus

Re:

[Viol8]

"Remember also that it was a single purpose computer."

It was built for a single purpose , but it wasn't hardwired for that purpose , it was programmable. In theory its CPU could have played chess instead (though the memory limitations would probably preclude that).

Operating errors essential

[GerryHattrick]

Generous of the chaps in Germany to encypher (you'd think the whole affair would pain them). Note that it's for the Lorenz 'teleprinter-thing', not the Enigma. But I recall that in either case the usual starting-point for decryption was defects in operating procedures at the sending end (which allowed plaintext bits to be guessed). Without that, which was the result of great volume and fixed procedures, what convincing chance is there for a significant comparison of decryption now?

Enoch Root is Not Impressed

[Bilby Baggins]

Everything I know about World War II crypto I learned from Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse [wikipedia.org].

I would imagine

[rholland356]

I would imagine that all the encrypted messages from WWII that were worth decrypting have already been decrypted.

What's left? Hilter's laundry list?