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Colossus Cracks Again
BOfH writes "The BBC is reporting that following a 14-year rebuild project, the Colossus computer is once again cracking codes at Bletchley Park." They will crack WWII-era encrypted messages, and compete against modern PCs. Fun stuff for crypto nerds and history buffs.
will it be able to detect dupes?
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until someone ports Quake to it?
Regards, Ian
At least provide a link to the Bletchley Park museum itself!
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/
It's a great visit. Go check it out. They don't get a lot of funding so they are very dependent on visitors (and volunteers if you live nearby) to help keep things going. They had to sell off some of their land recently to keep going (this is now getting turned into a local housing estate).
The machine is only running at about 30% of the speed it did originally. It appears that their ISP is throttling their packets for some reason. Comcast cited DMCA violations as the reason for the packet shaping.
than this article from 2 days ago?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
This is the decrypted version?
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63
Strange. Did Bill Gates authorize the unlicensed works of Windows for Dummies? If anything, Andy Rathbone should have his character likeness etched in gold edifice in the halls of Redmond.
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
Any word on the Debian port ?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Oh, is this anything to do with that earlier RIPA all-your-keys-are-belong-to-us story?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/
So should we be running for cover?
I'm a mechanical engineer, and I demand the construction of a full scale Babbage engine, simply for bragging rights. ...grumble grumble...fucking EE's think the sun shines out their asses...grumble...
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
epud
There is another system.
Then I realized I have some code to debug.
Be sure to drink your ovaltine
. . . Will it blend?
...does it run Linux?
One that hath name thou can not otter
I, for one, welcome our restored cryptography overlords.
They want their computer back.
Modern computer... It's a PII, and running a simulator!
I thought Harvey Keitel captured an enigma machine from U-571 2000 .. :)
davecb5620@gmail.com
OK so I was there a few months ago and it is indeed an impressive beast - it's HUGE. About the size of a small data centre.
Also is doesn't crack the codes, merely gives the key to crack the codes from Enigma machines. Needs a separate machine to run the de-cypher...
I believe that Colossus was largely built from telephone exchange parts. It was probably mostly Plessey exchange registers. On the old exchanges, even with slow rotary dialling, if you dialled a number really fast, then it had to be stored somewhere while the selectors turned. The storage was also required when making long distance calls which could take a while to set up.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
..if you have Beowulf cluster of them?
Boom*Tish!
I'll be here all night..... (unfortunately)
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
...my father worked somewhere in Bletchley Park spying on the Japanese, now I'm working in Japan on cryptography-related subjects, and talking to someone working in a division of GCHQ.
Had to.
Colossus ran as fast as the tape reader could scan and compare tapes. They estimated that the unit could do as much as 10,000 to 15,000 Characters Per Second (CPS). Material issues kept the machine running dependably at 5,000 CPS. As the story goes, the inventor cranked the tape scanner up to 10,000 CPS and the paper tape failed, sending ribbons flying across the room. At 60MPH, paper flies very fast!
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
(On topic and properly executed, complete with exclamation point. Amateurs, take note.)
"They will crack WWII era encrypted messages, and compete against modern PCs."
I like those odds.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
They have rigged the contest, by using Pentium II as a "modern" PC. I'd say they need to use at least a Pentium III, and a truly modern chip like an AMD 64 would bury this machine. Still, it's impressive that it can keep up with a Pentium II. Of course this is really comparing apples and granite, and they've further handicapped the challenge by running a virtual Colossus inside the Pentium II, rather than using a modern decryption tool. It looks like they've done everything they could to make this Colossus look better than it is. Remember also that it was a single purpose computer. I could build, using OTS components something that would bury this machine in the dust from whence it came. However, I'll not deny there's some serious geek fun in rebuilding this dinosaur. So what's next? Shall we rebuild an old UNIVAC. Anyone have a spare warehouse to build it in, with a 10,000 ton air-conditioner to cool it off?
Oh God, my dad has that album.
And of course the Herb Alpert classic.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Generous of the chaps in Germany to encypher (you'd think the whole affair would pain them). Note that it's for the Lorenz 'teleprinter-thing', not the Enigma. But I recall that in either case the usual starting-point for decryption was defects in operating procedures at the sending end (which allowed plaintext bits to be guessed). Without that, which was the result of great volume and fixed procedures, what convincing chance is there for a significant comparison of decryption now?
That I've been meaning to go re-read Cryptonomicon.
Everything I know about World War II crypto I learned from Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse.
I would imagine that all the encrypted messages from WWII that were worth decrypting have already been decrypted.
What's left? Hilter's laundry list?
As the headline said: "Colossus Cracks Again"
- Peder
"Colossus wasn't used against Enigma"
.. :)
Don't be a bloody pedant, the work on cracking Enigma went into designing Colossus. Who's going to play Alan Turing in the movie, Jeff Goldblum, or no wait, Turing was a woofter, it would have to be Harvey Fierstein.
Incidentally, Goldblum got the part of Seth Brundle in the Fly because he once played James Watson in a BBC documtary, once a mad scientist always a mad scientist appariently
was Re:didn't Harvey Keitel crack Enigma
davecb5620@gmail.com