Slashdot Mirror
Man Pleads Guilty to Stealing Enigma Machine
Adler writes: "A man has pleaded guilty to to 'handling' the stolen Enigma machine in the UK. Its a short piece, but says that some vital parts of the machine are still missing. A longer BBC News piece is here." You may remember when this was first stolen, then held for ransom, then recovered -- this is the mopping up part.
Only time will tell.
If only he had wrapped it in a better conundrum ...
...he could've stolen U-571 before the audiences were forced to watch that crap.
;)
I'd have to give him a medal if he did that.
-- MarkusQ
As the US government now demands that a backdoor be put into this World War II relic ... it WAS considered 'strong' encryption in World War II anyway ...
How do you know the UK hasn't just imposed a backdoor to the Enigma encryption algorithm to protect us from terrorists?
AC's cheerfully ignored
Where are your priorites!
Pearl Harbor was just attacked 57 years ago and you people are talking about some crappy shit noone cares about!
Dont they have a bunch of rotors but no enigma somewhere? Of the many enigmas made wouldn't there be some rotors left over?
I know it's not the same as the entire recovered machine that was captured and used to defeat the natzi germany forces but like the crown jewels on display, noone will know they are fake or not the real ones.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Certainly.
The Engima story is quite interesting and complex; volumes can and have been written about it and it's beyond the scope of a Slashdot post to relay the full history. But I've provided some links if you're curious.
It should be noted that Bletchley Park's work in deciphering the Enigma codes - used by the Germans to direct operations including U-boat attacks on Allied convoys - proved vital to the outcome of the WWII.
Bletchley Park, code-named Station X, employed teams of mathematicians, linguists and chess champions during the war.
By the end of 1945, 10,000 people worked there.
With the help of decoding machines, the army of experts were able to crack the German code Enigma, which Berlin believed to be unbreakable.
The work carried out at the top-secret centre is believed to have shortened the war by several years and was kept secret until 1967.
The stolen device, an Abwehr Enigma G312, is a rare four-rotor version, one of only three still known to be in existence.
If you have a problem with my views, REPLY, don't moderate!
Unless he's reverse engineering the thing and still hasn't mapped out the wheel connections? ;-)
.. there are more ethical (not to mention legal) ways to get this information, but maybe he was trying to get a really good look at what was inside .. who knows?
It may be old technology, but I certainly would enjoy having a copy of an Enigma on the coffee table for guests to play with
73 de N5VB (ex-KD5BIV) AR SK
Let's get it straight that Poland cracked Enigma and built working devices from scratch, long before Turing automated the the decryption process at Bletchley, or Matthew McConaughey recovered the secret Death Star plans from R2-D571.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Obviously if there are only 3 in the world, htis machine was prety valuable (10000 pounds, i think?). The article was sparse with details, but i think it was stolen during public viewing day(?). That was clearly a bad idea, given the rarity of the item.
Also, IANAL but since the machine was returned sans vital parts, the guy could've been charged with some other stuff, like vandalism or defacing government property or something similar. Stealing it was not a bright idea, since a machine like that is hard to sell without arousing suspicion, and is useless for anything else.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Is the enigma machine still a useful method of encryption? If not, wouldn't it fit better into some section about crime & punishment, antiques, historical objects, etc.?
My basic question is, can you actually use the enigma for secure communications still?
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
.sig
Hmmm... interesting. The Yahoo article claims it is worth 10,000 pounds and the BBC article claims it is worth 100,000 pounds. Do journalists simply assign any value they want?
There is a movie about Enigma out now in the UK. Unfortunately the movie is all fiction and gets many of the facts horribly wrong. One of the movies misrepresentations is "forgetting" that it was Polish scientists who first broke the Enigma encription and not the British. The other (which is quite disturbing) portrays one Polish guy as a traitor who tries to tell the Germans about the success of breaking Enigma. The movie caused a small scandal in Poland and will almost certainly hurt those remaining Poles who fought in the battle of Britain who still live in the UK and are now being portrayed in such ways. Bad Brittons! Bad!
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
There are links to many downloadable simulations here, including an Abwehr Enigma sim for Windows. There even appears to be one written for Palm Pilot.
You're using her as bait, Master!
Basically, I'm completely pissed, so i am gonna post something completely offtopic, yet strangekly relevant.
Bletchley Park.
Thats where the war was won.
As much as the Somme....
I live in bletchley, MK
2 minutes walk to bletchley psrk.
And you wanna know abouth this place???
Man this ids the most boring dull, back end armpit of the earth, a hell hole full of inbreds who havent left this twon for 6 generations.
The IQ of the population lep 10fold when Alan Turing arrived (more offtopic-ness: why to gays (and i'm saying this an afectionate way, i love em even thou i aint one)... pick such bad role models..... ie steps, elton john, princess die, when they have someone like Turing to look up to), and since turing left, the town has gone ven further down hilll.
Anyways.... Any yanks coming over here..... avoid bletchley at all costs - at best, you will prbably come away with BSE
---- you think this is flaimbait - just wait till you come here ---
How can a group of people who stole the enigma machine in a murderous plot, have the balls to worry about some white collar crime involving a piece of technology that is long out-dated?
anigma?
It will soon be illegal to use one of these anyway.
Puhleeez, Slashdot, dramatic headlines are great, but when they come at the expense of truth, it gets to be a drag.
... to handling a stolen Enigma encoding machine". That's quite a bit different than admitting he stole them. It may well be a crime to handle stolen goods after the fact, and there's possibly a good story here also. But this guy didn't plead guilty to stealing it so the more interesting story of how/why it was stolen and by whom is still out there. Consider saving this headline for a later day...
Your headline reads: Man Pleads Guilty to Stealing Enigma Machine
The story itself states clearly several times in the first few sentences: that he "admitted handling stolen goods" and that he "pleaded guilty
...the country of Poland is being charged under the DMCA for creating a device capable of circumventing copyright. What they did was clear disrespect for the Nazi's intellectual property rights.
"First they tell you you're wrong and they can prove it; then they tell you you're right but it isn't important; then they tell you it's important but they knew it all along." -Charles Kettering
Maybe he can't spell and is looking for a way to wash out his own ass. Some people really have nothing better to do.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
If I remember correctly, the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine were two different beasts. The link you gave for colorado.edu is for a Difference Engine, not an Analytical Engine. I don't think an Analytical Engine has ever been built.
Again, if I remember correctly, the Difference Engine was a precursor to the Analytical Engine, and was to be used for generating tables of numbers (log tables, etc.), whereas the Analytical Engine was more general-purpose and programmable.
It's so funny that the media and historians say that the Enigma machine is rare. The german's had a lot of those, and many was recovered after the war.
I know for a fact that a military installations in Europe has at least 30 pieces of those machines stored in a warehouse.
So why do they keep'em secret? If you've ever encountered a ww2 militara collector, you'd know... (Imagine the worst linux zealot, multiply him by 20 and you got your average militaria collector.)
Score:1, Insightful
???
I think it should be -1, Stupid. Or at least offtopic.
mod me into oblivion. . .I don't really care, but you should know that the quote generator has a wrong quote.
It said: $100 invested at 7% interest for 100 years will become $100,000, at which time it will be worth absolutely nothing. -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
It should be: $100 placed at 7 percent interest compounded quarterly for 200 years will increase to more than $100,000,000--by which time it will be worth nothing. --Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
Get it right.
Screw karma. I'll post what's on my mind.
I have an old amiga 500 laying about somewhere if they want spare bits to replace the ones in their amiga... anyone know where to send them?
In the recent trend to link everything to Osama Bin Laden, many officals believe the Enigma was being used by Bin Laden as described before as his "High Tech Cryptography" that he switched to after he found out the US was monitoring his satellite phone conversations.
hey retard turing would have loved a backdoor in it.
iirc turing was killed because he was a homosexual. he was arrested and had his security clearance revoked. then someone poisoned him with cyanide. its very sad.
anyway if you care check out the alan turing homepage
"Tension is the great integrity" -- R. Buckminster Fuller
Hey, ho, to judgement day we go
True. The Analytical Engine was never built, and so far as I know, no replica exists. An artist's impression of the AE graces the cover of the William Gibson/Bruce Sterling collaboration The Difference Engine, making it easy to conflate the two.
The link to John Walker's site, however, does contain software that emulates the AE. The colorado.edu link has a replica of a Difference Engine. So I suppose it's like showing a picture of an Intel 4004-based calculator to someone who wanted to see a picture of a computer. The raw materials (chips, PCB, keypad, display) are the same, so I guess it's a difference in degree, not kind. I guess.
Now you've got me confused.
All I can say is imagine a Beowulf ClustBZZZZT GAAAAAAHHHH!
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I cracked up when I read this. You moderators suck. All you want to do is bring people down. How about modding some gems up and having a sense of humor for a day? I'm tired of this crackhead moderating, personally.
Now, go ahead and mod me to -1, offtopic (or flamebait, whichever is "mod down excuse of the day") as well. I mean, obviously I'm as deservant as gusnz is.
Do you like German cars?
Perhaps slightly off-topic: Python has a builtin module, rotor , that provides rotor-based encryption. The documentation says: "The design is derived from the Enigma device, a machine used during World War II to encipher messages." Cool! Take it for a spin:
>>> import rotor
>>> r = rotor.newrotor('secretkey')
>>> print r.encrypt('squeamish ossifrage')
w&BYåÐmÒ®--"L
Andrew Wiles
a**n + b**n != c**n for n > 2
1) They're spinning madly away in the NSA's basement.
2) They're being boxed into Lego Mindstorm kits.
3) Or perhaps they're the driving force behind my own computer. No wonder my Seti@Home blocks take eight months each.*
4) Scattered amidst the spare parts behind a defunct Yugo factory.
* Consumer tip: Never buy a Celeron out of the back of a truck.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
..because I coulda sworn it said an "enema machine" was stolen....
Moderaters are screwed up tonight. What else can I say? :) Modding relevant posts as offtopic, and offtopic stuff as insightful! LOL
I seem to remember an article in scientific american back in 1992 about a british historical society having built a few stages of an analytical engine.
It was able to calculate factorials if I remember correctly.
"Pleaded" is not a word
good point
for a second there I was worried that Osama bin Laden would have access to the Enigma and be one step ahead of the CIA!
---
Authentic WWII encryption machines like the German Enigma as well as the Japanese and other code machines should be considered national treasures and treated as such. Equivalent to priceless ancient relics, artworks and historic documents.
IMHO, During WWII there was a life-and-death race to cracking the codes that those type of machines created. Hence, the essential need of stronger computational power to break Enigma. Turing, et al worked creating techniques against Enigma and thus our computer science was born. The world would be a vastly different place today if it were not for breaking of Enigma and the like. Think about it.
They are priceless examples of history and should be displayed with proper security.
=bcc
That this case should come to court the day before the Enigma movie opened in the UK.
Sounds like the movie is based on the novel "Enigma"
by Robert Harris. This also has the polish spy (somehow
weaving in a storry about the Katyn massacre on polish
officers).
But this book gets the part with the original invention
of the bombes by the polish engineers right.
There are some other smaller differences from tech
details in the book, but overall it gives a good
atmospheric idea about the time and proceedings.
Maybe we should prefer not to be annoyed by the way novels and
movies treat history, but too many people only hear
about history through movies and novels.
The feds took the enigma machine because they wanted the advanced crypto technology. If you look in side a carnivore you'll see cogs and bombe wheels and stuff... oh and it also has a little colossus emulator too. But then someone explained that terrorists genrally use quadruple-rot13 cyphers to plan their attacks, so the feds gave it back and now they use 'Bob's ROT-13 v1.0 Freeware'
How long until the press write a story linking Bin Laden and the terrorists, Crypto Backdoors, and blaim it on the Enigma machine?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
As 5 seconds at www.m-w.com would demonstrate. Moron.
/'plE-d&d/; or pled also plead /'pled/; pleading"
"Main Entry: plead
Pronunciation: 'plEd
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): pleaded
Yes it was in the Science Museum in London.
here.
If they try to decipher US commucations and succeed, they will get both a bombing and a DMCA suit.
Those are unlucky people...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Apparently most came off of captured WW2 submarines that were towed into Halifax harbour and disassembled for intelligence info. Canada kept the Enigmas but didn't bother to tell anyone. (They ended up at CSE in Ottawa.)
"I figure you're here 'cause you need some whacko who's willing to stick his finger in the fan. So who are we helping?
Actually, he committed suicide.