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Stolen Enigma Machine Recovered In Style
glomph writes: "A priceless Enigma crypto device (only three exist) was stolen this spring
from a museum in the UK. The Sunday Times describe in fascinating detail how they fully recovered the item. Codewords hidden in the newspaper, buried video tapes, meetings in dark misty cemeteries and other cloak-n-dagger stuff were used. The Bad Guy was also nabbed. A must-read tale."
How do we know that they actually caught the guy and got the machine back. This might be a bigger part of the complex plot to nab the real guy and get the real machine back. I think that this is just another coded message to the thief. Or not.
/me is thinking George Lucas should handle this and take some creative liberties by adding a lightsaber battle or two.
Also....this would make an excellent movie or novel...did anyone buy the rights to it yet?
i didn't know exciting stuff happened in the UK. whoa.
The anti-salmon
(Berlin) -
Yesterday, attorneys for the long-dead Fuehrer filed a lawsuit in The Hague, alleging that the governments of the United States ("the Colonies") and the United Kingdom violated article 23 of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) by reverse-engineering the Enigma machine.
When the Allies broke the Enigma's complex coding scheme, they were able to intercept and decrypt strategic Nazi communiques, eventually leading to Herr Hitler's suicide and an Allied victory.
Herr Doctor Spelunkenzweis, primary counsel for the late Hitler, claims that such blatant disregard of the creator's exclusive rights to his Intellectual Property is intolerable and that the perpetrators must be used as an example.
The late Hitler is seeking an already-controversial list of damages, including ownership of all assets of modern England, France, Austria, Italy, Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Poland, Libya, and Ethiopia, as well as a written apology from the ghosts of the Right Honorable Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt.
In 1999, marijuana killed 0 Americans...
Ewige Blumenkraft!
That was about the worst piece of writing I've ever seen.
I've read the stupid article about 5 times now, and much of it STILL makes no sense. Why did they do all of these seemingly pointless things to get it back? What was the point? The entire article read like a gigantic run-on sentence with no point displayed anywhere in there.
Hint for moderators: It's neither a flame nor a troll, nor baiting for flames, so -1 Flamebait or -1 Troll wouldn't be appropriate; however, -1 Offtopic or -1 Overrated would both apply.
Maybe Egypt should invade England and retrieve the stone. Isn't this what guns are for? Use 'em!
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
These have got to be some of the dumbest crooks ever. First they steal something with no resale value, then they play childish cloak and dagger games with the cops that leave all kinds of ways of tracing their identity. Aside from the fact that the cops will trace every hit to the so called "secret" Bletchley park web page, agreeing to go to an isolated, deserted place at a specific time is pretty stupid. Thanks to the war on druges, the cops now have cameras that can track a gnat's ass at midnight from so high in the air you'd never hear the helicopter.
Even if you spill the beans on your identity, you don't leave the goods where the coppers can just walk in and pick them up, nailing you dead to rights. The cops up here in Boston believe they've figured who's behind the Gardner Museum heists, but they can't prove it until they recover the goods -- and the perps aren't talking.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Didn't it get stolen from the Germans first? They're going to prosecute a man, for stealing something, that is itself, stolen. And people got killed when it was originally stolen. From what I know, it was stolen with no lives lost. Maybe they're mad because he was able to accomplish the theft in a more efficient manner.
Someone call Alanis.
a 1971 UN agreement says anything stolen as war booty before 1971 is finders keepers. and the country that stole it can keep it. Same thing as the Rosetta Stone.. its from Egypt.. Egypt wants it back.. its in ENgland.. england stole it as war booty and refuses to return it because of the same 1971 agreement saying because of that agreement IT now owns the stone.
What was like receiving that box full of stolen Enigma? Read my interview with infamous BBC announcer Jeremy Paxman... here!
Heh, there's also the Joy of Tech cartoon about it... here!
Self promotion yes, but at least it's topical.
The movie U571 is a complete work of fiction. Only in Hollywood's dreams did the American Navy seize an Enigma machine from a German Sub early in WWII. The movie is loosly based on the capture of U110 by the British destroyer Bulldog on May 9, 1941, more than 7 months before Germany declared war on the US. The real U571 was sunk by an Australian Sunderland aircraft.
I reckon that the article itself was a secretly encoded message, hence its unreadability. I'll have to run it through my cryptoanalyzer.
"Orange pigs fly south for winter, aunt Betty misses you, please call the hat shop." Ahem.
There's a silmulation of it here and another here.
&l t;BR>Also, How does the enigma work? and a short history of the Enigma Machine,
Damn British always doing things backwards!
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
ok, it is wonderful to have this important piece of history back where it belongs, and the theif caught, but was it really necessary to go through such lengths?
/. made it seem like it was REALLY interesting. I read the article (and even though I am a bit hungover still) it really wasn't that great and I was rather annoyed w/it. There were very few exciting details and in fact it really didn't say much other than it was recovered...
:)
the way that the artcile was written on
Just my worthless whining for this morning
"[The investigation] soon be-came an extraordinary battle of wits, involving as many as 50 officers from the Thames Valley police, the National Crime Squad and the National Criminal Intelligence Service."
So, 50 cops and several reporters against one thief? Heh. I can't decide if that's sad or funny.
--
Communication is only possible between equals
You remember Alice...
This is a song about Alice!
(A. Guthrie)
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
this guy encrypted his email using enigma encryption.
my 0.02 cents
The BBC has even newer news here. Also, they're a bit more cognisant of the english language than the Times. (i.e. tabloid trash)
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
... a robots.txt page.
The artical mentioned linking to a 'secret page' , basically just an unobvious link on the regular page. This is fine, but if you don't want your page indexed and cached by Google, you better have a robots.txt page or meta tag the stops the agents from indexing the page. To the casual viewer, the link is hard to find, to the robot, its just another page in the tree.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
So did the Axis powers manage to crack the corresponding US/UK/French codes?
(Of course, that sort of matter is probably still classified information...)
In fact it was the US navy that obtained the machines from sinking U-boats.
That's nothing. I keep trying to get Fox Mulder (nice guy -- works for the X-Files division of the FBI) to investigate a time machine that was built using stolen plutonium as fuel during the mid-eighties. The Libyans were involved, and the guy who built the machine was shot and killed with a machine gun.
For some reason, the FBI keep returning my mail with "Not at this address" stamped on top of it.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Well, thanks to the article, we now know that Alice's last name is Fletcher. Hopefully this useful bit of information will allow us to quickly determine the identity of Bob, Carol and Dave.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Call me a cynic. I'm still not fully convinced that the real story behind the recovery of the 'stolen' Enigma machine isn't some publicity stunt, perhaps gone bad.
I'd check the parent company of the Sunday Times and see if they have a financial stake in any upcoming Engima movie/book (maybe the movie mentioned in the article, the one financed by Mick Jagger's production company)
Also, I'd see if the 'nabbed Bad Guy' really gets prosecuted. If so, who supports his defense.
Then again, sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction ...
According to the bletchley park webpage, the 3 rotors have still not been recovered.....
This particular model was one of only three 4-rotor models (according to the BBC). Other Enigma machines used three rotors and therefore were less secure.
I believe I have used this particular machine (before it was stolenThe Japanese code they call Purple was a Japanese invention all on its own, and had no relation to Enigma. This is the first I have heard that Germany shipped Enigma machines to Japan in 1937, and it seems doubtful -- wasn't the Axis tri-partite pact signed in 1940 or so? Makes me wonder how accurate the rest of the article is.
3 Personal ads in the London Times - 40 pounds Setting up a secret website - 80 pounds Prosecution fees - 5000 pounds The enigma machine? Priceless.
i hate to jump on the bandwagon with everybody saying how bad the writing was, but i'm going to. I thought the story itself was interesting, but like everyone else, i hate the writing itself. In most articles, you can skip a sentence and catch on later, but you couldn't in this one. the writer couldn't stick to one topic and kept digressing and jumping into new subtopics. In the beginning, it was all about the search for the thief, but then went on to be about the history of bletchley park, then on to the history of Enigma, and then on to more and more historical trivia. The whole article was inconsistent and couldn't stick with a fact. were there 3 rotors or 4 rotors? it said both throughout the article. first it said that the enigma was missing 3 of its 4 rotors, then missing all three implying that there were only three in the first place. who knows? i dont.
-"Hey, Baby. It's not a rash, it's textured love."
It seems to have gone unmentioned, for the most part, that the Sunday Times is Britain's equivalent of the National Enquirer. This article is most probably utter bullshit, I mean THE Sunday Times has negotiated secretly for weeks to ensure the safe return ... ??? And don't forget the Sunday Times was also the rag that brought Britain the Hitler Diaries.
;)
You Americans need to cultivate a healthy distrust of the media
:wq