Bill Tutte founded the Department of Combinatorics & Optimization in 1962 at the University of Waterloo (the year I was born!). No one knew about his Bletchley Park work until 1985; later in 2001 he was awarded the Order of Canada (he passed away the following year aged 84). I was amongst the usual group of often confused undergraduates in his C&O classes ... his mind just
operated on a level that few of us mere mortals could ever understand!
I took graph theory with a professor who talked about Bill Tutte a lot. A lot of theories were proved by him. You could see his name all over in the index of the back of our textbook. This professor always pointed out that Bill was a chemist too. This is a well known graph theorist who was in awe of him.
My grandfather worked with Flowers at the Post Office. They worked on many aspects of digital telecoms for the decades after the war, leading to the world's first digital PCM telephone exchange 'Empress' in London around 1968, and System X nationally in 1980.
Around 1986 my high school class did a trip to the town telephone exchange to see the building full of mechanical rotary switch gear that was about to be thrown out, to be replaced by a single 19" rack that contained the digital equivalent.
I have copies of some of Grandpa's UK patents including baud rate conversion and other essential components.
Like the early hackers, he made things. In Flower's case, he made things than enabled hackers (eventually). While theory is important and interesting, actually making sh*t that works moves things forward.
Yeah, he also helped shorten the war which saved a whole lot of lives.
The U-Boot commanders all knew that the Enigma had been cracked, but Admiral Doenitz refused to believe it.
Rommel's Afrika Korps was also defeated by Enigma, because Rommel also refused to believe it was cracked. Enigma pointed out when and where Rommel's supply ships were.
No matter how secure your encryption method is, one should always assume it is cracked. Me, I would have backed it up with one-time pads.
Not true. There was some suspicion on the part of both Dönitz and his men (which is why they added a code wheel) but none of the U-boat memoirs published before ultra was declassified mention concerns about enigma except in passing.
In contrast they attributed getting attacked after sending in a position report to radio triangulation equipment allies had, called huff-duff.
And in most cases huff-duff was the reason they were attacked. Bletchley Park was too slow to provide an actionable attack vector off a position report. Instead ultra was used to route convoys around the u-boats. They experienced ultra as empty ocean they they hoped they would find a convoy.
The one exception was the "milk cows". These were resupply subs that were to rendezvous with u-boats in the open ocean. Dönitz would send orders for a rendezvous, bletchley would decrypt and send orders to a "hunter killer" group consisting of an aircraft carrier and destroyers to attract the two subs while resupplying.
I remember reading that the commanders were very suspicious because every time they rendezvoused with a milk cow, there was Allied equipment waiting for them.
Rommel attributed the attacks on his secret convoys to spies.
> all knew that the Enigma had been cracked, but Admiral Doenitz refused to believe it.
Whereas:
The dropping results made Admiral Dönitz suspicious. Although reassured by the Abwehr, the German Foreign Intelligence, that Enigma was unbreakable, he insisted on improving the security of Enigma. On 1 February 1942 the famous Enigma M4 model with four rotors and new key sheets were introduced.
There were multiple Enigma variations, based on rotor choice pool sizes, number of fittable rotors, time cycles to changing procedures, etc. Some naval enigma variations were broken, others weren't.
> Me, I would have backed it up with one-time pads.
Even one-time pads are subject to the efforts used to counter Enigma, such as so-called gardening. I fully agree that layers are better than a single method like Enigma was many times in practice, which is usually all-or-none with no failsafe, at least until later in the war, when Enigma variants started being used in combination with coded messages and code words on top of the Enigma cipher machines themselves, but those efforts were foiled by the dedication and planning of the gardeners’ known-plaintext attacks.
> In cryptanalysis, gardening is the act of encouraging a target to use known plaintext in an encrypted message, typically by performing some action the target is sure to report. It was a term used during World War II at the British Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, England, for schemes to entice the Germans to include particular words, which the British called "cribs", in their encrypted messages. This term presumably came from RAF minelaying missions, or "gardening" sorties. "Gardening" was standard RAF slang for sowing mines in rivers, ports and oceans from low heights, possibly because each sea area around the European coasts was given a code-name of flowers or vegetables.
> The technique is claimed to have been most effective against messages produced by the German Navy's Enigma machines. If the Germans had recently swept a particular area for mines, and analysts at Bletchley Park were in need of some cribs, they might (and apparently did on several occasions) request that the area be mined again. This would hopefully evoke encrypted messages from the local command mentioning Minen (German for mines), the location, and perhaps messages also from the headquarters with minesweeping ships to assign to that location, mentioning the same. It worked often enough to try several times.
Of course. And that's why one shouldn't rely on a single layer of encryption.
With 1940s technology, generating a practical one time pad generator would have been an interesting engineering project. I would have simply used a newspaper. Even if your enemy knew you were using Die Zeitung, with the computer technology at the time it would have been tough to brute force which date and which article was used.
The method described by you had been in use since the 19th century (typically using a designated book as the one-time pad), but it was cracked at the end of WWI, in 1918, by an American cryptographer, William Frederick Friedman, who was thus the first who has demonstrated that it is not enough for the encryption mask stream to be non-periodic, but it must also be random, otherwise it is still possible to decrypt the message by statistical analysis.
This fact proved by Friedman in 1918 has become widely known a few years later, in 1926, when Gilbert Sandford Vernam has published an article "Cipher Printing Telegraph Systems For Secret Wire and Radio Telegraphic Communications" in a journal.
While Vernam mentioned the help from Friedman, he gave no details and the works written by Friedman for the education of American cryptographers have remained classified for many decades.
Because of this, secure one-time pads have been referred frequently as the Vernam cipher, but this is wrong, as he is not its inventor, but only the first who has mentioned it in the non-classified literature.
Vernam (as a Bell Labs engineer) had a very important contribution to cryptography, but of a different kind. He has invented enciphering by modulo-2 sum (a.k.a. XOR), which is cheaper to implement in hardware than the integer addition used previously.
You are correct, but I doubt that computers in WW2 were fast enough to do that job on top of cracking Enigma. Enigma messages had a short duration of having value.
I don’t know much about encryption, but I can see a couple of concerns about such a scheme.
The first is that such keys will have all the statistical regularities of the German language, which I believe is problematic, even though I don’t know how one would go about exploiting it.
The second is the matter of how much encrypted text had to be transmitted every day, by the German military as a whole. If it significantly exceeded the daily output of Germany’s newspapers (and I would guess it did) there would seem to be considerable key reuse under this scheme.
For submarines and other units not receiving newspapers daily, there also seems to be a key-distribution issue. I don’t know if there is a better way to guarantee that communication can be maintained through a patrol than to depart with the equivalent of a stack of old newspapers. Is this a problem? I don’t know, but if the allies had figured out the broad outlines of the scheme, I imagine they might be able to do some preparation in anticipation of messages being intercepted.
By itself, yes, the newspaper would not be a great one time pad. But in conjunction with Enigma, it could be enough to make it not practical to brute force Enigma with the available compute technology.
I feel it is important to recognize that schemes like this are not OTP, and drawing an analogy between the two risks inducing false intuitions.
This discussion started with a proposal to back up Enigma with one-time pads, but harshreality pointed out that OTPs are not vulnerable to anything except compromise of the OTP itself. This has the unstated corollary that if you are using a true OTP system, adding Enigma to the process does nothing to improve security (unless your pre-shared keystream is compromised - and even then, capturing one U-boat's OTP will not compromise any other's communication.)
You then raised the concern of generating keys in sufficient quantity, which is certainly part of the problem (though I suspect that an electro-mechanical solution for that problem was well within the capabilities of contemporary technology, especially as, by then, Konrad Zuse had produced the first digital computer.) If, however, we are restricting our source of keys to the amount of text in a daily newspaper (or even all of the Third Reich's daily newspapers combined), that is something that could be achieved by a corps of dice-rollers, if it came to that, which would avoid one of the other problems of using newspapers: the statistical regularities of newspaper text.
Even then, you still have the problems of key reuse [1] and key distribution, and another which I think might be by far the hardest: training people to use it. Even just considering the submarine fleet, at least one person on each U-boat would have to be trained in properly using the technique. This would delay implementation, and once deployed, even with no mistakes, it would be slow in use.
Alternatively, a machine to do the work might have been developed (together with another to generate physical machine-readable keys), but that itself would have meant considerable delays in implementation.
In view of this, I feel that the measure actually adopted - adding another rotor position to the Enigma machine - was one of the better options (though it would have been even better if the additional rotor were interchangeable with the others.) This took time to implement and was ultimately defeated, but anything other than an OTP system would likely have the latter problem, and all would have had the former.
[1] Maybe not so much of an issue if one is only dealing with submarine communication, given that most of this was with the U-boat High Command in Germany, and assuming that it was of sufficiently low volume for each U-boat to be be given its own unique set of keys for each patrol.
Also, there weren't that many U-Boots, and I expect (but am not sure) that the communications with U-Boots would be pretty short. The shorter the message, the harder it would be to do a statistical attack.
I mentioned also that coordinates and times could be offset by a predetermined amount, and be different for each U-Boot.
The German navy did not use latitude and longitude in their messages; it had a coded grid system (the Gradnetzmeldeverfahren.) As you guessed, they also used secret offsets which were changed periodically. Nevertheless, by making use of captured material, the allies became quite successful at figuring out the actual coordinates, suggesting that the German navy was somewhat complacent about the effectiveness of these measures.
As for times, my understanding that they would, at least sometimes, specify them in the form of so many hours after a specific trigger message was received. This seems to require the U-boat to be surfaced (or maybe just at periscope depth?) from the start of the window for this message until it was received.
None of this addresses the training issue from earlier. The thing is, if you are thinking of using a newspaper-based scheme only for U-boats, you might as well go the extra distance to implement a true OTP system, which seems feasible at that scale and which would turn the use of Enigma in series into an academic exercise.
Of courses, a OTP would be better. But there are problems with generating them (I doubt a bingo ball would be fast enough) and then you've got a courier problem (hope your courier isn't a spy), etc. With a newspaper, you just have to supply a date, which can be memorized.
BTW, I've used dice rolls to generate passwords, but the dice would always fall off my desk and roll into an inaccessible corner, and I soon tired of that. It also only worked for 6 digits! So I switched to a real RNG.
The point that your scheme requires just one date to select single newspaper as a key for one U-boat per patrol underscores how feasible it would be for an organization with the resources of the German navy to generate the same sized random keys, your personal experience with key generation notwithstanding.
As for key interdiction, it would have to be at massive scale, as having a handful of random keys does not enable industrial-scale decryption, which is what the allies needed (and had, some of the time) for signals intelligence to be useful against U-boats. In contrast, the leaking of one date would compromise the entirety of the communications conducted under it (i.e., at least those for one U-boat for the duration of the patrol), especially given that German newspapers were readily available in neutral and occupied countries. OTPs are, in fact, way more resistant to espionage than your newspaper scheme.
The failure of the location-shifting scheme (as mentioned in my previous post) to stop the allies interdicting rendezvous, despite its periodic changes, also suggests that one date per patrol is not going to be good enough.
We have reached the point where the alleged superiority of your newspaper scheme hangs on the tendency of dice to roll off your desk!
I would agree in the ideal case, that with diligent usage of the Enigma machine with fresh keys/pads for each transmission, one’s transmissions would likely be secure, at least from the means and methods available to the Allies at the time.
However, in the fullness of time and with research into and with declassification of wartime intelligence thereof since the war of the now-known semi-regular failures to key and operate the Enigma machine properly, the hypothetical serially encoded (Enigma + one-time pad) materials would possibly be able to be attacked due to operator errors/failures of key rotation independently of and/or combined with known-plaintext attacks, but I will defer to you on the actual cryptanalysis and mathematical modeling.
I humbly admit that am not well-versed in this field, and I am not anything other than a fan of you and your work in the computing field, as it is mostly over my head.
I’m reminded by your newspaper suggestion that I once read that Dread Pirate Roberts aka Ross Ulbricht had part of their setup infected by a 0-day delivered via a news website, possibly via a third party ad network, but I don’t remember the details and don’t have a source at hand, nor do I know as a matter of fact that this occurred or was merely reported or rumored.
All of this is to say that I’m not sure that inconsistencies couldn’t be intentionally introduced in even the printed material to throw off encryption attempts if the source of the one-time pad were to have leaked. Knowing what is public knowledge regarding Crypto AG being compromised, I’m not willing to bet that a newspaper would be a safe bet for source material. A King James Version Bible, perhaps.
On the other hand, you have more fingers, and the long arm of the law casts an even longer shadow in wartime. Multi-armed bandits exist.
> in a generational act of intellectual virtuosity, designs and builds the world’s first computer to crack Enigma, allowing the U-boats to be neutralised and the war ultimately to be won. This is why Turing is known as the father of computing.
Huh? I thought he was known as the father of computing because he literally defined the concept of a machine being Turing complete and what that meant you could and couldn’t do on a Turing-complete machine. That and the halting problem work (and to a lesser extent the Turing test), at least to me, are what make him the father of computing.
The Enigma stuff is an impactful and vital short term impact he had while he was alive, but relatively fleeting and not very impactful on the broader field of cryptography. It’s the other contributions that are eternal and foundational to the field.
This reads like someone who watched the movie about his life but didn’t actually understand the broader scope of what he did and why it was important.
J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchley used to be considered the real fathers of computing. They were the architects of the ENIAC, which was close to being a stored-program general purpose digital computer, and, eventually, when a memory unit was bolted on, became one. When the Moore School of Electrical Engineering wanted the patent rights to any new work Eckert and Mauchley did, they quit and formed a startup - Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. That became UNIVAC.
The big question at the time was whether the sheer complexity of something like a UNIVAC would be cost-effective. Watson of IBM opined that there might be a market for six computers. IBM was building a few computers for the Atomic Energy Commission and such, and they were seen as niche products. The Turing/Von Neumann line of development all fed into that defense niche.
UNIVAC was bought by Remington Rand, which had a competing line of tabulating machines.
(Entirely mechanical. Almost completely forgotten.[1]) Unlike IBM, Remington Rand saw electronic digital computers as the next step to the future.
Remington Rand not only had the UNIVAC I, the Eckert-Mauchly machine, built. They built all the
peripherals for data processing - the tape drive (the UNISERVO), the line printer, the typewriter-sized printer, the card to tape converter, the tape to card converter, and the keyboard to tape device (the UNITYPER) So, while it was expensive, the UNIVAC could do routine data processing, far faster than the tabulating machines.
UNIVAC then sold the US Census Bureau two UNIVAC I computers. Census was, at the time, the largest tabulating machine customer of IBM, and rented several acres of tab machines. They were all on 30-day rental, that being what IBM insisted upon. Once the UNIVAC I machines were running, most of them became unnecessary, and the rental was cancelled. This was a huge shock to IBM as a corporation. (And the IBM salesman, paid on commission.) That's what kicked IBM into getting serious about computers.
Maybe practical real world computers but then I’d actually put Schokley and co as the true fathers having invented the transistor which is the only reason we have more than 6 computers - IBM otherwise would have been right because the energy and space requirements really would only have allowed for a small number of computers to have otherwise been built.
But ENIAC wouldn’t have been possible without Turing’s foundational research on what it means to build a computation machine in the first place and ENIAC was even preceded by Z3 although it was the first electronic Turing complete machine (Z3 was electromechanical).
They’re all important contributions but Turing literally defined the theoretical field. It’s like calling Townes, Schawlow, and Basov the fathers of the laser even though they just showed how to build the laser that Einstein predicted decades before. It’s important foundational work but most people know Einstein + laser whereas the names of the inventors of the first laser are less known. Einstein defined that it was even possible and how it would work. Others figured out how to achieve that through foundational science and engineering.
I thought ENIAC and Turing aren't really connected and independent to each other? And then again for development of physical computer, seems like Neumann have more claim to him because of his architecture.
Turing literally defined the mathematical underpinning of what it meant to build a computer in the first place and what operations it needed to support (the language and the computer instruction itself being indistinguishable at the time). Without this work we don’t have any kind of meaningful understanding of how to translate algorithms into something that can run on a machine.
Neumann’s contributions were valuable and notable as they proposed to make machines more flexible than how the ENIAC worked, but these are largely just “applied engineering” improvements not foundational theoretical CS concepts; the Harvard architecture is equally valid and flexible as Neumann’s design, even preceding Neumann’s idea of not differentiating code and data. It just that the simplicity at the time of Neumann machines won out even though today we pay for their penalty in other ways. But without Neumann or Harvard architectures you still end up building machines and likely these ideas would eventually have been proposed and tried by others without any meaningful delay in development. Without Turing’s work it’s possible that computers would have been delayed by decades until someone else figured this stuff out.
Without the transistor computers would just be an odd curio that’s in use in some places and basically the entire field wouldn’t exist (cryptography wouldn’t be a really thing, AI, databases, programming languages etc).
I think that's right. The ENIAC people were working on ballistics for large guns, and needed to crunch numbers and create printed tables.
The Turing team was working on key-testing, like a Bitcoin miner. Colossus was a key tester, trying patterns zipping by on endless loops of tape, and recording matches. Any general purpose machine today can do both, but the early machines were specialized.
What general purpose architecture should roughly look like was known all the way back to Babbage. Some kind of long list of instructions, with unconditional and conditional branches. Zuse and Atanasoff both got there before WWII.
The big hangup was memory. All early computing struggled with memory limitations, as I mention occasionally. CPUs and instruction decoding came long before enough memory to store programs. Memory was still a million dollars a megabyte in the mid-1970s.
No general purpose compute was not known during Babbage’s time. He happened to have been in the process of building a Turing complete machine, but that’s largely accidental - he didn’t understand why it could do so many things and it wasn’t until the work of Hilbert, Gödel, Turing and Church that the picture really came into focus and these machines really started to get built consistently and reliably with a key understanding of what features the machine needed to have.
Z3 wasn’t Turing complete and z4 can’t start Turing’s work
You're misreading ... that's the fictional story from the movies. Later in the article it says
> ... Turing – did, in what is now one of the most famous academic papers ever written, On Computable Numbers. This is the actual reason Turing is “the father of computing”.
People who have visited Bletchley Park or are into early computing history know of Tommy Flowers. Few others do.
He should have been involved in 1950s computing. But he went back to the Post Office Research Station to work on phone switches again. He did good work on phone switches.[1] But vacuum tubes in phone switches were never a good idea, and
the technology of phone switches was its own little world. Fully electronic phone switches were several decades away.
I suppose knowing that they cracked Enigma (and what it is) there and knowing who Alan Turing is qualifies as less than a “tiny” amount because I had no idea who he is, and I would wager that’s more than a large majority of the public know.
I was under pretty much all the false impressions mentioned in the article, it was a nice introduction for me. The name comes up, but I never connected the dots.
If you asked me for some names in early computing, I'd come up with Babbage, Ada, Turing, Zuse, Eckert and Mauchley, perhaps Atanasoff and Berry. I don't think I'd have come up with Flowers.
I'll do my best to right that wrong, but it really takes effort to rewrite history when something's declassified. In the same way that we all celebrated the SR-71 when in fact, the A-12 flew higher and faster, earlier, but it was classified, there's a mountain of material out there still claiming the SR-71 held all those firsts, when in fact not a single one of them was true.
Until Flowers' name rolls off the tongue as easily as Turing's, we have work to do.
When someone says "I don't understand why FOO matters so much..." it's usually understood that the author is trying to say "FOO doesn't matter". When the author then follows up with "It's sad that FOO is seen as so important." it kind of makes it clear what the author really intended to say.
I'm sorry if this doesn't make sense to you but the intent here is quite unambiguous. It's nothing more than an attempt at moral posturing without a basic understanding of how culture propagates.
Like it doesn't take a genius to understand that one of the most widely consumed cultural product in history is going to influence who the public recognizes and pretending otherwise is just performative ignorance.
No, it's not misunderstood that way by literate logical people.
Note that he wrote
> It’s a sad commentary on western culture that being in a movie seemingly has the importance that it seems to.
... again stating that it matters to people. He's sad that it does. I simply pointed out that he didn't say that it doesn't matter--I didn't pass judgment on whether he's correct, but you have a lot to say about that.
> Like it doesn't take a genius to understand that one of the most widely consumed cultural product in history is going to influence who the public recognizes and pretending otherwise is just performative ignorance.
This comment is a strawman and extremely rude and offensive.
I won't respond further to people so confused about the clear meaning and logic of a comment.
> There was no need for you to involve yourself in the discussion to begin with given that you misunderstood every single comment that has been made, it's for the best that you refrain from further involvement.
There was no need for you to involve yourself in the discussion to begin with given that you misunderstood every single comment that has been made, it's for the best that you refrain from further involvement.
> I don’t understand why it matters whether someone was in a movie or not.
This is calling into question that it matters in the first place, essentially muddying the waters of the discussion. I think you are mistaken; they didn’t say it doesn’t matter directly but they imply that whether it matters or not is irrelevant, which is the entire point of the whole post and thread, so it’s not encouraging thoughtful discussion, either. I did appreciate the discussion anyway, but I believe every silver lining has its cloud, and vice versa. It’s all a matter of perspective, expectations, intent, and effort.
I’m determined to give a good faith reply to every comment that merits one from me, but I usually am of the opinion that others are better able to wring some meaning from the content than I am, so I’m content not to post much most of the time.
That said, I believe youre honestly mistaken about what they said or meant. It’s not really ambiguous that they were nebulous about the comment that they replied to, but their word choice and approach made clear their disapproval or disagreement with their interlocutor.
> their word choice and approach made clear their disapproval or disagreement with their interlocutor.
Certainly it's disapproval, but this is a non sequitur that doesn't contradict my statement.
Note that he wrote
> It’s a sad commentary on western culture that being in a movie seemingly has the importance that it seems to.
... again stating that it matters to people. He's sad that it does. I simply pointed out that he didn't say that it doesn't matter--I didn't pass judgment on whether he's correct.
I won't respond further to people so confused about the clear meaning and logic of a comment.
P.S.
> Have you considered the distinct possibility that you might be honestly wrong also?
Good grief ... I certainly won't deal with this sort of extremely bad faith offensive whataboutism. Of course I consider whether I might be wrong, on every single occasion.
> HN isn’t a place for adversarial tones, so take your bad attitude and ill manner with you as you go.
Is it even possible to be more hypocritical than this?
Have you considered the distinct possibility that you might be honestly wrong also?
Cultural artifacts such as films are as legitimate as the letters and scratchings thereof. It’s a fine thing that folks use the tools at their disposal to communicate the meaning of the days and times.
> > has the importance that it seems to.
> ... again stating that it matters to people. He's sad that it does. I simply pointed out that he didn't say that it doesn't matter--I didn't pass judgment on whether he's correct.
It’s fine and good that movies move people. It’s easier to find fault than it is to build, and I take issue with your suggestion that motion pictures don’t matter, the implication being that you both know better, and I am saddened myself to see folks discount their importance to individuals and to the wider culture.
> I won't respond further to people so confused about the clear meaning and logic of a comment.
To withdraw from a discussion is fine, but to declare victory as if this is an argument tips your hand. HN isn’t a place for adversarial tones, so take your bad attitude and ill manner with you as you go.
P.S. if you want to reply to this comment, make a new reply (click the timestamp). You’ve been editing away, but I’m only responding upthread, whereas you are replying below, which is bad faith, the same you baselessly accuse me of.
Art imitates life, except when it doesn’t accurately depict the lived reality and efforts of those who did the work and won the war, in which case it’s arguably closer to myth making. The original author of the James Bond series of books, for example, engaged in this kind of propaganda, arguably with good intentions and positive impact.
It’s relevant whether or not they were depicted in a movie because that is the context of this thread, because that is the topic of the fine article itself.
But he did achieve a huge thing, that's the point of the article. So not sure your point is valid.
Seems a wild jump to say that because the person working on a project was working class then the government would classify it. Evidence welcome...
Did you confuse "classism" with "classfying"? You aren't responding to the point made at all. Yes, he achieved a huge thing, but he was "working-class", and not celebrated for it. The comment says the last two things are related.
>He should be up there with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and all the rest of them, one of the great figures of the history of computing. He should have made as much money as they did
I disagree. The amount of value companies like Microsoft and Apple have given the world is many many orders of magnitude than what this guy did. It's hard to have 1 person compete against the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people. Just being early to field of computing shouldn't automatically make someone a "great."
The value that companies such as Microsoft & Apple provide is supplied by all their thousands of employees, not just their CEO's. So its not a fair comparison to compare the output of Microsoft & Apple with the output of a single person (Tommy Flowers). Furthermore there are plenty of alternatives to Microsoft & Apple: if Bill Gates & Steve Jobs didn't exist we'd be probably be running Unix, Linux or one of the many other operating systems that lost out to Windows & MacOS for market share. If Tommy Flowers didn't exist we might have lost the war.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs made a lot of money due to owning the company. Being able to own something being built by a lot of people is how its possible.
>If Tommy Flowers didn't exist we might have lost the war.
I don't think achievements in computing should be based off geopolitical achievements. Hypothetically he could not exist and the war is lost, but there would be someone else who would iterate upon computers.
Exactly, in your words: "being built by a lot of people", i.e. not just Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. If Bill Gates & Steve Jobs didn't exist those employees would be working for different computer companies such as IBM, Olivetti, Apricot, Xerox (who invented the point & click windows system) or one of many others, and we would have similar products under different names.
The geopolitical achievement of winning the war (and the consequences of that) was the whole purpose of building the machine, so it doesn't make sense to dismiss it as you did.
Furthermore, there is no evidence that anyone else had the idea of using thermionic valves to greatly increase the speed of the code breaking computer, so if Tommy Flowers didn't exist it probably wouldn't have been discovered until much later (i.e. too late to help the war effort).
Of course CEO's such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have made important individual contributions to society, but they were not as pivotal as that of Tommy Flowers, and furthermore they have been rewarded in money (many would say too much), whereas Tommy Flowers has received very little reward or recognition for his achievement.
Do you also feel the same way about J. Paul Getty? Is he the "hero" of oil production, or, as many believe, a robber-baron who would stop at nothing to enrich himself?
LLMs are great at stripping propaganda out of articles like this.
Tommy Flowers created Colossus. Alan Turing created Bombe.
Colossus was classified for a long time. Bombe was not. Turing ends up being well known, Flowers not.
Both men were humble and didn't make a big deal out their work.
To twist that into a story of working class victim hood requires an unfortunate amount of intention.
Sad how far the Guardian has fallen. Even writing about the history of computing needs to be politicised.
After reading this post, I fear that LLMs and their ilk will make humans terrible at reading and comprehension, and impair their ability to think, much as how the advent of a car-first society resulted in many humans following a sedentary lifestyle to the detriment of their health.
Great, but why?
For some things I want to think, but for some things I want the information with subjectivity taken out of it. I think it depends on intention.
For newspapers and other sources with known biases, I think there's value.
As with many things, information rarely exists in a vacuum. In this case if we don't think with intention about the framing of such an article, then we've already outsourced part of our thinking to the authors who intend to shape it.
You're concerned about the author's bias contaminating your thinking, so the solution is to outsource your thinking to the LLM, because it's impossible for one of them to have any sort of bias at all.
This, instead of actually thinking yourself, and examining your own biases - or those of the people who wrote what you read
stripping something down to the objective parts isn't that hard for an llm as it's all about language. Sure they can and do have biases, although in this case it's a relative matter, and undoubtably the guardian is well known as left wing (in case somehow it isn't obvious just from looking at this article). So I'd say it's more steps forward than backwards.
It's not either or. Removing subjective fluff from such a language is a function of thinking for oneself.
using an llm to remove bias doesn't mean you need to then say "ok and now it's 100% objective".
I recommend chomsky on the subject, who for instance purposely speaks in monotone so as not to infuse emotion into what he's saying.
enjoy thinking what somebody else decided for you.
or even; Turing modified the Bomba design, created by Rejewski, later incorporating significant refinements from W.G.Welchman and Max Newman, relying upon Harold Keen for the engineering design and construction.
I have to say, the structure of that article is a perfect example of elitist exclusionary literature. Hang on: the introduction is wonderful, accessible language that most people can read. Then, the very first sentence of the actual meat of the article:
"On a sun-drenched weekday in August, Bletchley Park is the soul of pleasantness: a stately home flanking a lake codebreakers skated on in winter between battling a constantly evolving phalanx of electromechanical encryption machines used to scramble messages between leaders of the Third Reich."
That's a masterwork of elitist language. Drive away every non-explicit intellectual or specific to this topic participate (such as software engineers.)
What a failure of publication. I guess the initial click is all they really care about, because such language drops off 99% of those interested clicks. Fools? Shortsighted? WTF
If you made it to the end, you may have noticed that the bulk of the story is lifted from a book, which accounts for a change in tone. If someone buys or borrows a book and sits down to read the whole thing, they're expecting a different style of writing from a newspaper article. Also, this is very obviously a weekend magazine article aiming to satisfy a combination of intellectual interest, reader vanity, and curiosity.
For different reasons I agree the article is trash. There is far too much about Turing and Enigma, perhaps because they are better known, but Enigma is to Colossus as the first airplanes were to orbital rockets, but just years apart, not decades, and without thousands learning from each other.
I know, it's not a great analogy, but what the Tunny team did was so far beyond the Enigma team in terms of a) no prior knowledge of the actual system, b) the development of new cryptanalytic techniques, c) the educated guesses as to how the OKW system probably worked, and d) the sheer brilliance and vision of building a bleeding edge electronic system to do the heavy lifting, that its story, and Flowers', do deserve to be better known.
I will agree that the first sentence is ill-considered (if nothing else it could've been broken up with one extra phrase), but it's really the worst offender. In my opinion the prose in rest of the article is perfectly reasonable. For anyone interested in the subject matter but discouraged by this awkward beginning, I would urge you to press on.
And the article hasn't yielded the style all the way to the end. It was not fun to read with English being my second language; but I think now that's expected of The Guardian - little information spread out extensively with flowery language.
most people who click a random article from an unknown author don't sign up to read an essay worth of purple prose to get the (actually tiny amount of) useful information teased in the headline.
the OP is right - (virtually) no one is reading all that shit.
I maintain my point: it's prose, not even too complicated at that. The fact that many people have a hard time understanding it, is understandable, but not a good state of affairs.
Bill Tutte founded the Department of Combinatorics & Optimization in 1962 at the University of Waterloo (the year I was born!). No one knew about his Bletchley Park work until 1985; later in 2001 he was awarded the Order of Canada (he passed away the following year aged 84). I was amongst the usual group of often confused undergraduates in his C&O classes ... his mind just operated on a level that few of us mere mortals could ever understand!
I took graph theory with a professor who talked about Bill Tutte a lot. A lot of theories were proved by him. You could see his name all over in the index of the back of our textbook. This professor always pointed out that Bill was a chemist too. This is a well known graph theorist who was in awe of him.
My grandfather worked with Flowers at the Post Office. They worked on many aspects of digital telecoms for the decades after the war, leading to the world's first digital PCM telephone exchange 'Empress' in London around 1968, and System X nationally in 1980.
Around 1986 my high school class did a trip to the town telephone exchange to see the building full of mechanical rotary switch gear that was about to be thrown out, to be replaced by a single 19" rack that contained the digital equivalent.
I have copies of some of Grandpa's UK patents including baud rate conversion and other essential components.
Like the early hackers, he made things. In Flower's case, he made things than enabled hackers (eventually). While theory is important and interesting, actually making sh*t that works moves things forward.
Yeah, he also helped shorten the war which saved a whole lot of lives.
The U-Boot commanders all knew that the Enigma had been cracked, but Admiral Doenitz refused to believe it.
Rommel's Afrika Korps was also defeated by Enigma, because Rommel also refused to believe it was cracked. Enigma pointed out when and where Rommel's supply ships were.
No matter how secure your encryption method is, one should always assume it is cracked. Me, I would have backed it up with one-time pads.
Not true. There was some suspicion on the part of both Dönitz and his men (which is why they added a code wheel) but none of the U-boat memoirs published before ultra was declassified mention concerns about enigma except in passing.
In contrast they attributed getting attacked after sending in a position report to radio triangulation equipment allies had, called huff-duff.
And in most cases huff-duff was the reason they were attacked. Bletchley Park was too slow to provide an actionable attack vector off a position report. Instead ultra was used to route convoys around the u-boats. They experienced ultra as empty ocean they they hoped they would find a convoy.
The one exception was the "milk cows". These were resupply subs that were to rendezvous with u-boats in the open ocean. Dönitz would send orders for a rendezvous, bletchley would decrypt and send orders to a "hunter killer" group consisting of an aircraft carrier and destroyers to attract the two subs while resupplying.
I remember reading that the commanders were very suspicious because every time they rendezvoused with a milk cow, there was Allied equipment waiting for them.
Rommel attributed the attacks on his secret convoys to spies.
typo, you did not mean attract
> all knew that the Enigma had been cracked, but Admiral Doenitz refused to believe it.
Whereas:
~ https://www.ciphermachinesandcryptology.com/en/enigmauboats....~ https://uboat.net/technical/enigma_ciphers.htm
There were multiple Enigma variations, based on rotor choice pool sizes, number of fittable rotors, time cycles to changing procedures, etc. Some naval enigma variations were broken, others weren't.
> Enigma variations
ಠ _ ಠ
> Me, I would have backed it up with one-time pads.
Even one-time pads are subject to the efforts used to counter Enigma, such as so-called gardening. I fully agree that layers are better than a single method like Enigma was many times in practice, which is usually all-or-none with no failsafe, at least until later in the war, when Enigma variants started being used in combination with coded messages and code words on top of the Enigma cipher machines themselves, but those efforts were foiled by the dedication and planning of the gardeners’ known-plaintext attacks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardening_(cryptanalysis)
> In cryptanalysis, gardening is the act of encouraging a target to use known plaintext in an encrypted message, typically by performing some action the target is sure to report. It was a term used during World War II at the British Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, England, for schemes to entice the Germans to include particular words, which the British called "cribs", in their encrypted messages. This term presumably came from RAF minelaying missions, or "gardening" sorties. "Gardening" was standard RAF slang for sowing mines in rivers, ports and oceans from low heights, possibly because each sea area around the European coasts was given a code-name of flowers or vegetables.
> The technique is claimed to have been most effective against messages produced by the German Navy's Enigma machines. If the Germans had recently swept a particular area for mines, and analysts at Bletchley Park were in need of some cribs, they might (and apparently did on several occasions) request that the area be mined again. This would hopefully evoke encrypted messages from the local command mentioning Minen (German for mines), the location, and perhaps messages also from the headquarters with minesweeping ships to assign to that location, mentioning the same. It worked often enough to try several times.
One-time pads are not vulnerable to gardening.
I can see gardening working against Enigma alone, or one time pads alone, but not with the two used serially.
OTPs are not vulnerable to anything except compromise of the OTP itself (the pre-shared keystream).
Of course. And that's why one shouldn't rely on a single layer of encryption.
With 1940s technology, generating a practical one time pad generator would have been an interesting engineering project. I would have simply used a newspaper. Even if your enemy knew you were using Die Zeitung, with the computer technology at the time it would have been tough to brute force which date and which article was used.
The method described by you had been in use since the 19th century (typically using a designated book as the one-time pad), but it was cracked at the end of WWI, in 1918, by an American cryptographer, William Frederick Friedman, who was thus the first who has demonstrated that it is not enough for the encryption mask stream to be non-periodic, but it must also be random, otherwise it is still possible to decrypt the message by statistical analysis.
This fact proved by Friedman in 1918 has become widely known a few years later, in 1926, when Gilbert Sandford Vernam has published an article "Cipher Printing Telegraph Systems For Secret Wire and Radio Telegraphic Communications" in a journal.
While Vernam mentioned the help from Friedman, he gave no details and the works written by Friedman for the education of American cryptographers have remained classified for many decades.
Because of this, secure one-time pads have been referred frequently as the Vernam cipher, but this is wrong, as he is not its inventor, but only the first who has mentioned it in the non-classified literature.
Vernam (as a Bell Labs engineer) had a very important contribution to cryptography, but of a different kind. He has invented enciphering by modulo-2 sum (a.k.a. XOR), which is cheaper to implement in hardware than the integer addition used previously.
You are correct, but I doubt that computers in WW2 were fast enough to do that job on top of cracking Enigma. Enigma messages had a short duration of having value.
I don’t know much about encryption, but I can see a couple of concerns about such a scheme.
The first is that such keys will have all the statistical regularities of the German language, which I believe is problematic, even though I don’t know how one would go about exploiting it.
The second is the matter of how much encrypted text had to be transmitted every day, by the German military as a whole. If it significantly exceeded the daily output of Germany’s newspapers (and I would guess it did) there would seem to be considerable key reuse under this scheme.
For submarines and other units not receiving newspapers daily, there also seems to be a key-distribution issue. I don’t know if there is a better way to guarantee that communication can be maintained through a patrol than to depart with the equivalent of a stack of old newspapers. Is this a problem? I don’t know, but if the allies had figured out the broad outlines of the scheme, I imagine they might be able to do some preparation in anticipation of messages being intercepted.
By itself, yes, the newspaper would not be a great one time pad. But in conjunction with Enigma, it could be enough to make it not practical to brute force Enigma with the available compute technology.
I feel it is important to recognize that schemes like this are not OTP, and drawing an analogy between the two risks inducing false intuitions.
This discussion started with a proposal to back up Enigma with one-time pads, but harshreality pointed out that OTPs are not vulnerable to anything except compromise of the OTP itself. This has the unstated corollary that if you are using a true OTP system, adding Enigma to the process does nothing to improve security (unless your pre-shared keystream is compromised - and even then, capturing one U-boat's OTP will not compromise any other's communication.)
You then raised the concern of generating keys in sufficient quantity, which is certainly part of the problem (though I suspect that an electro-mechanical solution for that problem was well within the capabilities of contemporary technology, especially as, by then, Konrad Zuse had produced the first digital computer.) If, however, we are restricting our source of keys to the amount of text in a daily newspaper (or even all of the Third Reich's daily newspapers combined), that is something that could be achieved by a corps of dice-rollers, if it came to that, which would avoid one of the other problems of using newspapers: the statistical regularities of newspaper text.
Even then, you still have the problems of key reuse [1] and key distribution, and another which I think might be by far the hardest: training people to use it. Even just considering the submarine fleet, at least one person on each U-boat would have to be trained in properly using the technique. This would delay implementation, and once deployed, even with no mistakes, it would be slow in use.
Alternatively, a machine to do the work might have been developed (together with another to generate physical machine-readable keys), but that itself would have meant considerable delays in implementation.
In view of this, I feel that the measure actually adopted - adding another rotor position to the Enigma machine - was one of the better options (though it would have been even better if the additional rotor were interchangeable with the others.) This took time to implement and was ultimately defeated, but anything other than an OTP system would likely have the latter problem, and all would have had the former.
[1] Maybe not so much of an issue if one is only dealing with submarine communication, given that most of this was with the U-boat High Command in Germany, and assuming that it was of sufficiently low volume for each U-boat to be be given its own unique set of keys for each patrol.
Also, there weren't that many U-Boots, and I expect (but am not sure) that the communications with U-Boots would be pretty short. The shorter the message, the harder it would be to do a statistical attack.
I mentioned also that coordinates and times could be offset by a predetermined amount, and be different for each U-Boot.
The German navy did not use latitude and longitude in their messages; it had a coded grid system (the Gradnetzmeldeverfahren.) As you guessed, they also used secret offsets which were changed periodically. Nevertheless, by making use of captured material, the allies became quite successful at figuring out the actual coordinates, suggesting that the German navy was somewhat complacent about the effectiveness of these measures.
As for times, my understanding that they would, at least sometimes, specify them in the form of so many hours after a specific trigger message was received. This seems to require the U-boat to be surfaced (or maybe just at periscope depth?) from the start of the window for this message until it was received.
None of this addresses the training issue from earlier. The thing is, if you are thinking of using a newspaper-based scheme only for U-boats, you might as well go the extra distance to implement a true OTP system, which seems feasible at that scale and which would turn the use of Enigma in series into an academic exercise.
Of courses, a OTP would be better. But there are problems with generating them (I doubt a bingo ball would be fast enough) and then you've got a courier problem (hope your courier isn't a spy), etc. With a newspaper, you just have to supply a date, which can be memorized.
BTW, I've used dice rolls to generate passwords, but the dice would always fall off my desk and roll into an inaccessible corner, and I soon tired of that. It also only worked for 6 digits! So I switched to a real RNG.
The point that your scheme requires just one date to select single newspaper as a key for one U-boat per patrol underscores how feasible it would be for an organization with the resources of the German navy to generate the same sized random keys, your personal experience with key generation notwithstanding.
As for key interdiction, it would have to be at massive scale, as having a handful of random keys does not enable industrial-scale decryption, which is what the allies needed (and had, some of the time) for signals intelligence to be useful against U-boats. In contrast, the leaking of one date would compromise the entirety of the communications conducted under it (i.e., at least those for one U-boat for the duration of the patrol), especially given that German newspapers were readily available in neutral and occupied countries. OTPs are, in fact, way more resistant to espionage than your newspaper scheme.
The failure of the location-shifting scheme (as mentioned in my previous post) to stop the allies interdicting rendezvous, despite its periodic changes, also suggests that one date per patrol is not going to be good enough.
We have reached the point where the alleged superiority of your newspaper scheme hangs on the tendency of dice to roll off your desk!
This was part of the plot of Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.
In the book they used bingo style mechanical RNGs, by hand.
I would agree in the ideal case, that with diligent usage of the Enigma machine with fresh keys/pads for each transmission, one’s transmissions would likely be secure, at least from the means and methods available to the Allies at the time.
However, in the fullness of time and with research into and with declassification of wartime intelligence thereof since the war of the now-known semi-regular failures to key and operate the Enigma machine properly, the hypothetical serially encoded (Enigma + one-time pad) materials would possibly be able to be attacked due to operator errors/failures of key rotation independently of and/or combined with known-plaintext attacks, but I will defer to you on the actual cryptanalysis and mathematical modeling.
I humbly admit that am not well-versed in this field, and I am not anything other than a fan of you and your work in the computing field, as it is mostly over my head.
The one-time pads could simply be a national newspaper on a particular date.
Another simple method would be to add an offset to the "rendevous at XX longitude and YY latitude" coordinates and time.
I’m reminded by your newspaper suggestion that I once read that Dread Pirate Roberts aka Ross Ulbricht had part of their setup infected by a 0-day delivered via a news website, possibly via a third party ad network, but I don’t remember the details and don’t have a source at hand, nor do I know as a matter of fact that this occurred or was merely reported or rumored.
All of this is to say that I’m not sure that inconsistencies couldn’t be intentionally introduced in even the printed material to throw off encryption attempts if the source of the one-time pad were to have leaked. Knowing what is public knowledge regarding Crypto AG being compromised, I’m not willing to bet that a newspaper would be a safe bet for source material. A King James Version Bible, perhaps.
On the other hand, you have more fingers, and the long arm of the law casts an even longer shadow in wartime. Multi-armed bandits exist.
> in a generational act of intellectual virtuosity, designs and builds the world’s first computer to crack Enigma, allowing the U-boats to be neutralised and the war ultimately to be won. This is why Turing is known as the father of computing.
Huh? I thought he was known as the father of computing because he literally defined the concept of a machine being Turing complete and what that meant you could and couldn’t do on a Turing-complete machine. That and the halting problem work (and to a lesser extent the Turing test), at least to me, are what make him the father of computing.
The Enigma stuff is an impactful and vital short term impact he had while he was alive, but relatively fleeting and not very impactful on the broader field of cryptography. It’s the other contributions that are eternal and foundational to the field.
This reads like someone who watched the movie about his life but didn’t actually understand the broader scope of what he did and why it was important.
J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchley used to be considered the real fathers of computing. They were the architects of the ENIAC, which was close to being a stored-program general purpose digital computer, and, eventually, when a memory unit was bolted on, became one. When the Moore School of Electrical Engineering wanted the patent rights to any new work Eckert and Mauchley did, they quit and formed a startup - Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. That became UNIVAC.
The big question at the time was whether the sheer complexity of something like a UNIVAC would be cost-effective. Watson of IBM opined that there might be a market for six computers. IBM was building a few computers for the Atomic Energy Commission and such, and they were seen as niche products. The Turing/Von Neumann line of development all fed into that defense niche.
UNIVAC was bought by Remington Rand, which had a competing line of tabulating machines. (Entirely mechanical. Almost completely forgotten.[1]) Unlike IBM, Remington Rand saw electronic digital computers as the next step to the future.
Remington Rand not only had the UNIVAC I, the Eckert-Mauchly machine, built. They built all the peripherals for data processing - the tape drive (the UNISERVO), the line printer, the typewriter-sized printer, the card to tape converter, the tape to card converter, and the keyboard to tape device (the UNITYPER) So, while it was expensive, the UNIVAC could do routine data processing, far faster than the tabulating machines.
UNIVAC then sold the US Census Bureau two UNIVAC I computers. Census was, at the time, the largest tabulating machine customer of IBM, and rented several acres of tab machines. They were all on 30-day rental, that being what IBM insisted upon. Once the UNIVAC I machines were running, most of them became unnecessary, and the rental was cancelled. This was a huge shock to IBM as a corporation. (And the IBM salesman, paid on commission.) That's what kicked IBM into getting serious about computers.
[1] https://www.museumwaalsdorp.nl/en/museum-waalsdorp-2/history...
Maybe practical real world computers but then I’d actually put Schokley and co as the true fathers having invented the transistor which is the only reason we have more than 6 computers - IBM otherwise would have been right because the energy and space requirements really would only have allowed for a small number of computers to have otherwise been built.
But ENIAC wouldn’t have been possible without Turing’s foundational research on what it means to build a computation machine in the first place and ENIAC was even preceded by Z3 although it was the first electronic Turing complete machine (Z3 was electromechanical).
They’re all important contributions but Turing literally defined the theoretical field. It’s like calling Townes, Schawlow, and Basov the fathers of the laser even though they just showed how to build the laser that Einstein predicted decades before. It’s important foundational work but most people know Einstein + laser whereas the names of the inventors of the first laser are less known. Einstein defined that it was even possible and how it would work. Others figured out how to achieve that through foundational science and engineering.
I thought ENIAC and Turing aren't really connected and independent to each other? And then again for development of physical computer, seems like Neumann have more claim to him because of his architecture.
Turing literally defined the mathematical underpinning of what it meant to build a computer in the first place and what operations it needed to support (the language and the computer instruction itself being indistinguishable at the time). Without this work we don’t have any kind of meaningful understanding of how to translate algorithms into something that can run on a machine.
Neumann’s contributions were valuable and notable as they proposed to make machines more flexible than how the ENIAC worked, but these are largely just “applied engineering” improvements not foundational theoretical CS concepts; the Harvard architecture is equally valid and flexible as Neumann’s design, even preceding Neumann’s idea of not differentiating code and data. It just that the simplicity at the time of Neumann machines won out even though today we pay for their penalty in other ways. But without Neumann or Harvard architectures you still end up building machines and likely these ideas would eventually have been proposed and tried by others without any meaningful delay in development. Without Turing’s work it’s possible that computers would have been delayed by decades until someone else figured this stuff out.
Without the transistor computers would just be an odd curio that’s in use in some places and basically the entire field wouldn’t exist (cryptography wouldn’t be a really thing, AI, databases, programming languages etc).
I think that's right. The ENIAC people were working on ballistics for large guns, and needed to crunch numbers and create printed tables. The Turing team was working on key-testing, like a Bitcoin miner. Colossus was a key tester, trying patterns zipping by on endless loops of tape, and recording matches. Any general purpose machine today can do both, but the early machines were specialized.
What general purpose architecture should roughly look like was known all the way back to Babbage. Some kind of long list of instructions, with unconditional and conditional branches. Zuse and Atanasoff both got there before WWII.
The big hangup was memory. All early computing struggled with memory limitations, as I mention occasionally. CPUs and instruction decoding came long before enough memory to store programs. Memory was still a million dollars a megabyte in the mid-1970s.
No general purpose compute was not known during Babbage’s time. He happened to have been in the process of building a Turing complete machine, but that’s largely accidental - he didn’t understand why it could do so many things and it wasn’t until the work of Hilbert, Gödel, Turing and Church that the picture really came into focus and these machines really started to get built consistently and reliably with a key understanding of what features the machine needed to have.
Z3 wasn’t Turing complete and z4 can’t start Turing’s work
You're misreading ... that's the fictional story from the movies. Later in the article it says
> ... Turing – did, in what is now one of the most famous academic papers ever written, On Computable Numbers. This is the actual reason Turing is “the father of computing”.
The following two sentences: "It’s a great story. But, like a lot of great stories, it couldn’t be more wrong."
I would say this makes him one of the fathers of computer science as an intellectual field, not the father of computing.
Not to diminish his work, but you can build a perfectly fine computer without the theoretical stuff. In fact Babbage and Lovelace kind of did.
If we're making a list of people with large impact add George Boole.
> The world’s first digital electronic computer, forerunner of the ones reshaping our world today, was built in Britain
What about the Atanasoff-Berry-Computer from the US or the Zuse Z3 from Germany?
Pretty sure anyone who knows even a tiny bit of Bletchley Park history is well aware of Tommy Flowers.
People who have visited Bletchley Park or are into early computing history know of Tommy Flowers. Few others do.
He should have been involved in 1950s computing. But he went back to the Post Office Research Station to work on phone switches again. He did good work on phone switches.[1] But vacuum tubes in phone switches were never a good idea, and the technology of phone switches was its own little world. Fully electronic phone switches were several decades away.
[1] https://www.communicationsmuseum.org.uk/emuseum/electronicsw...
I suppose knowing that they cracked Enigma (and what it is) there and knowing who Alan Turing is qualifies as less than a “tiny” amount because I had no idea who he is, and I would wager that’s more than a large majority of the public know.
He's certainly in the histories I've read, but I guess most people don't read those.
Also, his grandson often sits in front of my Mum and Dad at football matches! Although I only found that out a lot later.
I was under pretty much all the false impressions mentioned in the article, it was a nice introduction for me. The name comes up, but I never connected the dots.
Ran across the name, perhaps.
If you asked me for some names in early computing, I'd come up with Babbage, Ada, Turing, Zuse, Eckert and Mauchley, perhaps Atanasoff and Berry. I don't think I'd have come up with Flowers.
I'll do my best to right that wrong, but it really takes effort to rewrite history when something's declassified. In the same way that we all celebrated the SR-71 when in fact, the A-12 flew higher and faster, earlier, but it was classified, there's a mountain of material out there still claiming the SR-71 held all those firsts, when in fact not a single one of them was true.
Until Flowers' name rolls off the tongue as easily as Turing's, we have work to do.
Did you ever see them or a character in their role in a movie?
I don’t understand why it matters whether someone was in a movie or not.
It’s a sad commentary on western culture that being in a movie seemingly has the importance that it seems to.
Doesn't make much sense to say it doesn't matter and also that it's sad.
If it's sad then it matters, if it doesn't matter then it isn't sad.
Read it again ... he didn't say that it doesn't matter.
When someone says "I don't understand why FOO matters so much..." it's usually understood that the author is trying to say "FOO doesn't matter". When the author then follows up with "It's sad that FOO is seen as so important." it kind of makes it clear what the author really intended to say.
I'm sorry if this doesn't make sense to you but the intent here is quite unambiguous. It's nothing more than an attempt at moral posturing without a basic understanding of how culture propagates.
Like it doesn't take a genius to understand that one of the most widely consumed cultural product in history is going to influence who the public recognizes and pretending otherwise is just performative ignorance.
No, it's not misunderstood that way by literate logical people.
Note that he wrote
> It’s a sad commentary on western culture that being in a movie seemingly has the importance that it seems to.
... again stating that it matters to people. He's sad that it does. I simply pointed out that he didn't say that it doesn't matter--I didn't pass judgment on whether he's correct, but you have a lot to say about that.
> Like it doesn't take a genius to understand that one of the most widely consumed cultural product in history is going to influence who the public recognizes and pretending otherwise is just performative ignorance.
This comment is a strawman and extremely rude and offensive.
I won't respond further to people so confused about the clear meaning and logic of a comment.
> There was no need for you to involve yourself in the discussion to begin with given that you misunderstood every single comment that has been made, it's for the best that you refrain from further involvement.
There are evil people here.
There was no need for you to involve yourself in the discussion to begin with given that you misunderstood every single comment that has been made, it's for the best that you refrain from further involvement.
No, you definitely read it wrong. You're in a hole and still digging.
Thank you. Not only that but his comments are in severe violation of the TOS.
So we’re all on the same page:
> I don’t understand why it matters whether someone was in a movie or not.
This is calling into question that it matters in the first place, essentially muddying the waters of the discussion. I think you are mistaken; they didn’t say it doesn’t matter directly but they imply that whether it matters or not is irrelevant, which is the entire point of the whole post and thread, so it’s not encouraging thoughtful discussion, either. I did appreciate the discussion anyway, but I believe every silver lining has its cloud, and vice versa. It’s all a matter of perspective, expectations, intent, and effort.
I’m determined to give a good faith reply to every comment that merits one from me, but I usually am of the opinion that others are better able to wring some meaning from the content than I am, so I’m content not to post much most of the time.
That said, I believe youre honestly mistaken about what they said or meant. It’s not really ambiguous that they were nebulous about the comment that they replied to, but their word choice and approach made clear their disapproval or disagreement with their interlocutor.
No, I'm not mistaken.
> their word choice and approach made clear their disapproval or disagreement with their interlocutor.
Certainly it's disapproval, but this is a non sequitur that doesn't contradict my statement.
Note that he wrote
> It’s a sad commentary on western culture that being in a movie seemingly has the importance that it seems to.
... again stating that it matters to people. He's sad that it does. I simply pointed out that he didn't say that it doesn't matter--I didn't pass judgment on whether he's correct.
I won't respond further to people so confused about the clear meaning and logic of a comment.
P.S.
> Have you considered the distinct possibility that you might be honestly wrong also?
Good grief ... I certainly won't deal with this sort of extremely bad faith offensive whataboutism. Of course I consider whether I might be wrong, on every single occasion.
> HN isn’t a place for adversarial tones, so take your bad attitude and ill manner with you as you go.
Is it even possible to be more hypocritical than this?
Have you considered the distinct possibility that you might be honestly wrong also?
Cultural artifacts such as films are as legitimate as the letters and scratchings thereof. It’s a fine thing that folks use the tools at their disposal to communicate the meaning of the days and times.
> > has the importance that it seems to.
> ... again stating that it matters to people. He's sad that it does. I simply pointed out that he didn't say that it doesn't matter--I didn't pass judgment on whether he's correct.
It’s fine and good that movies move people. It’s easier to find fault than it is to build, and I take issue with your suggestion that motion pictures don’t matter, the implication being that you both know better, and I am saddened myself to see folks discount their importance to individuals and to the wider culture.
> I won't respond further to people so confused about the clear meaning and logic of a comment.
To withdraw from a discussion is fine, but to declare victory as if this is an argument tips your hand. HN isn’t a place for adversarial tones, so take your bad attitude and ill manner with you as you go.
P.S. if you want to reply to this comment, make a new reply (click the timestamp). You’ve been editing away, but I’m only responding upthread, whereas you are replying below, which is bad faith, the same you baselessly accuse me of.
Art imitates life, except when it doesn’t accurately depict the lived reality and efforts of those who did the work and won the war, in which case it’s arguably closer to myth making. The original author of the James Bond series of books, for example, engaged in this kind of propaganda, arguably with good intentions and positive impact.
It’s relevant whether or not they were depicted in a movie because that is the context of this thread, because that is the topic of the fine article itself.
British classism is still live and kicking. You can't be achieving things if you were not in Oxbridge circle and don't have a trust fund /s
That's said, I wonder how many more forgotten working class heroes we have that powers that be decided to bury.
Well done for Guardian writing about this.
But he did achieve a huge thing, that's the point of the article. So not sure your point is valid. Seems a wild jump to say that because the person working on a project was working class then the government would classify it. Evidence welcome...
Did you confuse "classism" with "classfying"? You aren't responding to the point made at all. Yes, he achieved a huge thing, but he was "working-class", and not celebrated for it. The comment says the last two things are related.
>He should be up there with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and all the rest of them, one of the great figures of the history of computing. He should have made as much money as they did
I disagree. The amount of value companies like Microsoft and Apple have given the world is many many orders of magnitude than what this guy did. It's hard to have 1 person compete against the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people. Just being early to field of computing shouldn't automatically make someone a "great."
The value that companies such as Microsoft & Apple provide is supplied by all their thousands of employees, not just their CEO's. So its not a fair comparison to compare the output of Microsoft & Apple with the output of a single person (Tommy Flowers). Furthermore there are plenty of alternatives to Microsoft & Apple: if Bill Gates & Steve Jobs didn't exist we'd be probably be running Unix, Linux or one of the many other operating systems that lost out to Windows & MacOS for market share. If Tommy Flowers didn't exist we might have lost the war.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs made a lot of money due to owning the company. Being able to own something being built by a lot of people is how its possible.
>If Tommy Flowers didn't exist we might have lost the war.
I don't think achievements in computing should be based off geopolitical achievements. Hypothetically he could not exist and the war is lost, but there would be someone else who would iterate upon computers.
Exactly, in your words: "being built by a lot of people", i.e. not just Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. If Bill Gates & Steve Jobs didn't exist those employees would be working for different computer companies such as IBM, Olivetti, Apricot, Xerox (who invented the point & click windows system) or one of many others, and we would have similar products under different names.
The geopolitical achievement of winning the war (and the consequences of that) was the whole purpose of building the machine, so it doesn't make sense to dismiss it as you did.
Furthermore, there is no evidence that anyone else had the idea of using thermionic valves to greatly increase the speed of the code breaking computer, so if Tommy Flowers didn't exist it probably wouldn't have been discovered until much later (i.e. too late to help the war effort). Of course CEO's such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have made important individual contributions to society, but they were not as pivotal as that of Tommy Flowers, and furthermore they have been rewarded in money (many would say too much), whereas Tommy Flowers has received very little reward or recognition for his achievement.
Do you also feel the same way about J. Paul Getty? Is he the "hero" of oil production, or, as many believe, a robber-baron who would stop at nothing to enrich himself?
I feel nothing about him since I don't know who he is. He died long before I was born.
LLMs are great at stripping propaganda out of articles like this. Tommy Flowers created Colossus. Alan Turing created Bombe. Colossus was classified for a long time. Bombe was not. Turing ends up being well known, Flowers not. Both men were humble and didn't make a big deal out their work.
To twist that into a story of working class victim hood requires an unfortunate amount of intention. Sad how far the Guardian has fallen. Even writing about the history of computing needs to be politicised.
Edited: Bombe not Enigma.
After reading this post, I fear that LLMs and their ilk will make humans terrible at reading and comprehension, and impair their ability to think, much as how the advent of a car-first society resulted in many humans following a sedentary lifestyle to the detriment of their health.
Great, but why? For some things I want to think, but for some things I want the information with subjectivity taken out of it. I think it depends on intention. For newspapers and other sources with known biases, I think there's value. As with many things, information rarely exists in a vacuum. In this case if we don't think with intention about the framing of such an article, then we've already outsourced part of our thinking to the authors who intend to shape it.
You're concerned about the author's bias contaminating your thinking, so the solution is to outsource your thinking to the LLM, because it's impossible for one of them to have any sort of bias at all.
This, instead of actually thinking yourself, and examining your own biases - or those of the people who wrote what you read
Right. Good luck!
if you look for problems, you'll find them.
stripping something down to the objective parts isn't that hard for an llm as it's all about language. Sure they can and do have biases, although in this case it's a relative matter, and undoubtably the guardian is well known as left wing (in case somehow it isn't obvious just from looking at this article). So I'd say it's more steps forward than backwards. It's not either or. Removing subjective fluff from such a language is a function of thinking for oneself. using an llm to remove bias doesn't mean you need to then say "ok and now it's 100% objective". I recommend chomsky on the subject, who for instance purposely speaks in monotone so as not to infuse emotion into what he's saying.
enjoy thinking what somebody else decided for you.
I think you just proved my point - but hey, to each their own.
Good luck, again!
That should read "Turing created the Bombe"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe
or even; Turing modified the Bomba design, created by Rejewski, later incorporating significant refinements from W.G.Welchman and Max Newman, relying upon Harold Keen for the engineering design and construction.
Ah yes, thanks
I have to say, the structure of that article is a perfect example of elitist exclusionary literature. Hang on: the introduction is wonderful, accessible language that most people can read. Then, the very first sentence of the actual meat of the article:
"On a sun-drenched weekday in August, Bletchley Park is the soul of pleasantness: a stately home flanking a lake codebreakers skated on in winter between battling a constantly evolving phalanx of electromechanical encryption machines used to scramble messages between leaders of the Third Reich."
That's a masterwork of elitist language. Drive away every non-explicit intellectual or specific to this topic participate (such as software engineers.)
What a failure of publication. I guess the initial click is all they really care about, because such language drops off 99% of those interested clicks. Fools? Shortsighted? WTF
If you made it to the end, you may have noticed that the bulk of the story is lifted from a book, which accounts for a change in tone. If someone buys or borrows a book and sits down to read the whole thing, they're expecting a different style of writing from a newspaper article. Also, this is very obviously a weekend magazine article aiming to satisfy a combination of intellectual interest, reader vanity, and curiosity.
For different reasons I agree the article is trash. There is far too much about Turing and Enigma, perhaps because they are better known, but Enigma is to Colossus as the first airplanes were to orbital rockets, but just years apart, not decades, and without thousands learning from each other.
I know, it's not a great analogy, but what the Tunny team did was so far beyond the Enigma team in terms of a) no prior knowledge of the actual system, b) the development of new cryptanalytic techniques, c) the educated guesses as to how the OKW system probably worked, and d) the sheer brilliance and vision of building a bleeding edge electronic system to do the heavy lifting, that its story, and Flowers', do deserve to be better known.
I will agree that the first sentence is ill-considered (if nothing else it could've been broken up with one extra phrase), but it's really the worst offender. In my opinion the prose in rest of the article is perfectly reasonable. For anyone interested in the subject matter but discouraged by this awkward beginning, I would urge you to press on.
And the article hasn't yielded the style all the way to the end. It was not fun to read with English being my second language; but I think now that's expected of The Guardian - little information spread out extensively with flowery language.
I'd say it's more a failure of the educational system if 99% of people cannot interpret a sentence like that.
most people who click a random article from an unknown author don't sign up to read an essay worth of purple prose to get the (actually tiny amount of) useful information teased in the headline.
the OP is right - (virtually) no one is reading all that shit.
I maintain my point: it's prose, not even too complicated at that. The fact that many people have a hard time understanding it, is understandable, but not a good state of affairs.