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WWII Colossus Codecracker Outdone by a German
superglaze writes "The Colossus codecracker contest was a short-lived ordeal. Not only has it been outdone in a cipher-breaking challenge, but — irony of ironies — it was beaten by a German! From the story: 'The winner was Joachim Schüth, from Bonn, who completed the task using software he wrote himself. "[Schüth] cracked the most difficult code yesterday," said the museum's spokesperson on Friday. "We're absolutely delighted. He used specially written software for the challenge. Colossus is still chugging away, as we got the signals late. Yesterday the atmospheric conditions were such that we couldn't get good signals.'"
Perhaps because they wanted him to "crack" it?
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
"Colossus DRM System" project...
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Vee haf vays uf makink you drink more Ovaltine!
It's not irony! :(
Now I just need a copy of the software on my laptop and a time warping wormhole to 1942.
Just have to remember not to ask for "pepsi, free"...
He posted the source code on his hompeage at http://www.schlaupelz.de/SZ42/SZ42_software.html.
Most of it is written in Ada.
I could understand a stereotype tag, even a nationalism tag, but racism? Are the taggers implying that people from German are of different races than the rest of the world?
I RTFA and there is nothing racist in there. Just that a guy from Germany cracked the code using some software written in Ada.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
oh wait..
Heise security article says, "...British and German secret services initially had reservations about the cipher challenge."
I'd like to know more about what they said. Are they worried it will encourage kids to get interested in crypto? Where do they expect to pick up talented cryptographers anyway?
Das encryptmachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy wrecken der secrets, schnatchendatas und breakensecurity mit grossembrassen. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
I am officially gone from
If you're going to be pedantic, I will too.
1941-12-07
Try -08. The Japanese military ran off Tokyo time, not local time.
Infuriate left and right
It has been ~70 years now, hasn't it? A couple of generations.. At least keep the outdated references limited to cold war stuff.
The atomic bomb. It's easy to forget that it was developed in response to fears that the Germans might develop one first (which makes it ironic that it was the Japanese that it was ultimately used against). It might be easy in retrospect to say that they weren't realistically close to having one during WWII, but this wasn't so clear at the time.
And even if this *had* become known towards the end of the (prolonged) war, the Americans would have had the bomb by then, and- I suspect- little tolerance for letting the Germans prolong the war and giving Stalin a chance to sweep further across Europe (never was the difference between "friend" and "allie" more clear)- even if Germany couldn't win.
If the Nazis had still stood a plausible chance of winning- or even "drawing"- the war by the time the bomb was ready, then it's near-certain that at least one bomb would have been dropped on the country. It's the kind of thing that some people would say is terrible in retrospect. However, given what Nazi Germany *did* do (with the support of most of their people) and what they would have done had they won the war, I'd personally have considered it morally justifiable (and imperative) to use as many atomic bombs as necessary to bring the war to a swift conclusion.
As I said, they were damn lucky.
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Well, lucky are the few with such moral certitude as you. It's not clear at all that the Allies would have ever dropped a bomb over Germany, given the proximity of so many Allied countries. They had no qualms dropping them on Japan because of its geographic isolation. Besides, obliterating Germany that way would have prevented much of the technological looting after the war. The US in particular made out like bandits so to speak, and the war ended up being a net economic gain in the long run, both in terms of technology gained and new markets established.
That hardly applies to the US after WWII. While the war certainly cost the US a lot of money, they gained a massive captive market in Europe for several decades that wouldn't have been the same without the war, since Europe had had its own strong industrial competitors to the US. I would consider the US more like the glazier in the parable, since its costs were negligible compared to the benefits, as opposed to those borne by Europe and other parts of the world.
Besides, I wasn't talking about immediate gains from physical goods removed from Germany, which after all the destruction would have been somewhat anemic. I'm talking about intellectual property and patents, which benefited American companies for decades after the war. While it would be hard for various reasons to perform detailed studies of German reparations to the US--not least because most were in hard to calculate IP--some attempts were made. The most prominent one appears to be the book Science Technology and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany by John Gimbel, mentioned in the article I linked to above, which seems to be cited by others as well. I have read the Operation Paperclip book, which talks about rocketry specifically, but similar technology transfers happened in many branches of industry.
Again, I'm not listing any of this as a justification for the war, or a white washing of the war crimes, or anything like that. I still think Germany got away quite lightly in American hands, compared to the destiny that could have befallen it purely in European or Soviet hands. My point was simply that the US benefited enormously from WWII, and some have even suggested that it may very well not have been what it is today without the war.