WWII Colossus Codecracker Outdone by a German 182
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. (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps because they wanted him to "crack" it?
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Where's the hacking?
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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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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.
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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.
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-Rick
True. (Score:2)
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There are some really weird misconceptions out there about Germany, both present and past.
-Rick
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Because the sky is gray here.
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Good thing you didn't mention the war.
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(Finger under nose, goose stepping out the door)
Godwinned?
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Well, there goes my (Score:3, Funny)
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http://www.forumpix.co.uk/uploads/1195233120.jpg [forumpix.co.uk]
Vee Haf (Score:3, Funny)
Irony? (Score:3, Informative)
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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?
No-how and Contrariwise. (Score:2)
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It's still a disputed meaning, to be sure, but then I remember hearing "ain't is not a word!" growing up. I never hear that at all anymore. Now it's informal. I imagine most contractions were at one point.
English is not a dead language.
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But how does this fall under "unexpected outcome of events"? Is there some reason that a German was uniquely unlikely to crack to code? I thought Germans were generally pretty good at math and computing. This doesn't fit under ANY definition of irony that I can think of.
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A German cracking an "uncrackable" code used by the German forces in WWII on a computer the British used to crack the same code when the Allied cracking of German "uncrackable" codes helped lead to Allied victory is.
If you don't see it, though, I'm afraid I can't help you in your semantic crusades.
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A German cracking an "uncrackable" code used by the German forces in WWII on a computer the British used to crack the same code when the Allied cracking of German "uncrackable" codes helped lead to Allied victory is.
Why? I mean, the signal for this challenge was transmitted from Germany! Germans were in a prime position to receive the signals to be cracked.
If you don't see it, though, I'm afraid I can't help you in your semantic crusades.
Or maybe the irony just isn't there, if you can't adequately explain it?
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No. He would only be an anal pedant if we assume that he is correct, and the original juxtaposition was not technically ironic. I reject this assumption, and thus conclude that it is your post that not only begs the question, but does so ironically. Unless you or I, but not both, are being sarcastic. No, really.
The determination of whether something is ir
duh! (Score:2)
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So it would be significantly more amazing if someone OTHER than a German cracked it.
-Rick
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Time travel hero wannabe (Score:4, Insightful)
Just have to remember not to ask for "pepsi, free"...
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Although the fact is that the game only really makes
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I suppose you could bring a supply of gold/precious stones, though they might b
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And taking the scrolls is
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In short, they'd have to be some convincingly damn
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If you bring back something no one has ever seen before, then you are much more likely to draw attention to yourself. It's bad enough if you show up with a cache of some extremely pure, extremely valuable commodity.
I think the answer is more to visit Africa at a time when you can pick up diamonds off the beach, and then bring them back here.
Go back in time, get rich (Score:2)
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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I suspect, like the US, it is not closed to tourism. However if your not a US resident, you can't legally just Yacht up to a beach in Boston tie off, and walk into town to do some shopping.
So I think they were allowed to forgo a official visit and a Visa application fee...
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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 (Score:5, Funny)
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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
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source code (Score:5, Informative)
Most of it is written in Ada.
racism? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Bad definitions. Race != Ethnicity (Score:2)
"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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Heh! I know, that's probably an abuse of the language too. You reminded me why I put an asterisk next to "Caucasian;" I was actually going to make a footnote kind of like your comment.
You're right, it's pretty superficial in the end; Caucasian really means, "looking white," whatever that means. And the Caucasus as a region is actually a great example. Midway along the Silk Road, you run into real difficulties with racial classification.
Another example of how we twist language to deal with our discom
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It's called "irony". Jesus! It's not that complicated.
TWW
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-Rick
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Except for the fact that it's actually already ironic for a German to be even trying to break a German WWII code, let alone beating an English team. It would make a good illustrative example for dictionaries to use for the word "irony".
TWW
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So, one would expect that if you were to advertise a competition in Germany, to Germans, in which, the Germans contestants were using modern technology to crack a cipher, and that their competition was a couple of Brits using almost 70 year old technology, the expectation would be that the Germans, using modern technology would win.
It would be ironic if the B
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No, that would be in line with the "natural order" or expectation: Brits cracking a WWII German code - that's what normally happened with Enigma codes: the Germans didn't have to. Germans breaking a German WWII code before the Brits is ironic because it was the intent of Enigma to allow Germans to read messages while keeping them hidden from the Brits, so Germans even trying to break the code is ironic. The fact that they beat a British machine specifically designed to b
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But it's not.
The expectation should be that modern technology will kick the ass of WWII technology.
To think this is ironic is to exist in some sort of hyperbolic fantasy were current reality has no value.
-Rick
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The irony was not in the technology used.
Okay, let's just accept that you have no idea what the word "irony" means and leave it at that, shall we?
TWW
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If you remove all context from the situation and look at this as purely "Germans crack German code faster than Brits!" then yes, there is irony.
But, in context, there is no irony.
-Rick
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So a German beat an English attempt to crack a German code from WWII and that's not ironic? What are you people, fucking dumb? Just having the Germans cracking an Enigma code is ironic!
From the OED:
TWW
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Sometimes, in a moment of weakness, I think that might be the most brilliant song ever written.
The real irony is that nothing mentioned in the song is actually ironic. But wait - that's ironic!
Of course, if it was meant to be that way, then it isn't ironic, since irony is when you have the opposite of the intended or expected effect.
I think I broke my mind.
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Try "radio ham" (US) or "radio amateur" (UK).
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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
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Yes, how dare he use a language named after the lady friend of Sir Charles Babbage (Ada Lovelace) who was a pioneer of mathematical, algorithmic notation and thought!
Of course, the language was designed for use by that well known white supremisist organisation, the British Ministry of Defence, for use in suspressing other races, such as those with red flags during the cold war.
get that man a time machine quick!! (Score:5, Funny)
What was that about secret svcs? (Score:5, Interesting)
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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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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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! (Score:5, Funny)
Boss-Nass? (Score:2)
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Please give the Nazi jokes a rest (Score:2, Interesting)
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You must live here in the US. Only Americans think that 200 years is a long time.
A couple of generations? Pah! That's nothing. There's some guy in a funny hat pulling some fatarsed westerner around in a rickshaw that old someplace on the planet right now.
Why irony? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Well Yeah (Score:2)
operating system: NetBSD (Score:2)
``The PC used was a laptop with 1.4 GHz CPU, using NetBSD as the operating system'' - so much for being dead.
- Hubert
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1941-12-07
Try -08. The Japanese military ran off Tokyo time, not local time.
Re:Never underest. Nazi brains - Hitler had syphil (Score:3, Insightful)
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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That's highly debatable. A lot of technology developements were accelerated during WWII, but at the cost of nearly 60 million1 human lives and the destruction of several cities and urban centers. There's no way of telling how many writers, artists, scientists (or anyone who could have made their contribution to mankind) were ki
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The first one was detonated in the US. We already knew what it would do as far as blast.
Those two bombs would have been used on Germany if they had been ready in time. No question there. And look up the firebombing of Dresden if you wonder about the will of the allies to commit to the destruction of an entire city.
Yes, there was a racist component in the atomic bombing of Japan, as it was already known that Japan was likely to surrend
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Besides, I wasn't talking about immediate gain
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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.
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No, they were not. It was pretty evident early on, especially at the eastern front, that the war wasn't sustainable.
If by "early on" you mean "early during the war", well.... the war went on for six years. That is certainly "sustainable" if not winnable.
As for WW2 and your proposal; nuking a highly populated area is genocide.
You make many assumptions, not least the fact that the first targets would be highly-populated areas. ("Highly populated" is a matter of opinion, so this is open to debate, however.)
You're also incorrect that "nuking a highly populated area" is in itself genocide. It would only be genocide if it was part of a concerted effort to entirely annihilate the German people (
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Yes, the factories were built to build thousands of bombs (and are still building them today) but the enrichment technologies weren't ready for that kind of production.
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I can see this one being a Godwin-magnet
I don't know why you say that. What, are you the resident slashdot meme-fascist...
...SHIT!
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The North pole is not in Holland.