Slashdot Mirror
PGP Leads Corporate Efforts To Save Bletchley Park
blake182 writes "CNET reports that PGP, together with IBM and other technology firms, is mounting a fundraising effort to benefit the ailing Bletchley Park, home of the Station X codebreaking efforts in World War II. 'We're calling attention (to the fact that) Bletchley is falling into disrepair, and that, probably, the world owes a debt of gratitude to that place,' said Phil Dunkelberger, chief executive of PGP."
That's Dunkin' Donuts answer to the Hamburgler, right?
We owe lots of stuff to lots of things from the second world war. Nice to see corporations like this getting involved; then again, this is part of PGP's history.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
I read the Slashdot summary, the entire news.com article, the second article in the news.com article linked from the first article and I still don't know how much they need.
But at least I know that there's a problem and two separate foundations have turned them down for grant money. I guess that's a start.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I'm glad that they're helping out. It's not about the war... but keeping history alive. Especially being about the history of computing with it being /. and all (naturally).
"The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec^2" -Marcus Dolengo
For some reason that name for a business just cracks me up. Or have they re-tooled the acronym to something like Pervasive Grid Privacy to sound more 'industrial strength'?
In May 2008 it was announced that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation turned down a request for funds because the foundation only funds Internet-based technology projects.
/...
IBM was merrily outfitting the Nazis with equipment to help them manage their concentration camps (completely ignorant of their application, naturally) while Bletchley park was breaking Nazi codes. I wouldn't be surprised if, at the time, IBM was viewed as an adversary or, at the very least, completely untrustworthy.
IBM's future would be built on top of key advances made at Bletchley Park, but they probably didn't know BP even existed at the time. BP, on the other hand, probably wouldn't have pissed on IBM to put out a fire. So the upshot is that, now that BP is irrelevant to IBM's future, IBM is offering aid to them, but back when BP was laying the foundation for IBM's future, IBM was completely oblivious to their existence. On top of that, had IBM known what was going on at BP and tried to invest in their own future, BP wouldn't have *wanted* anything to do with IBM!
Somebody at IBM really appreciates irony.
Why do they have so few visitors? Because the site is presented in what I have to say is a very boring fashion. Yes, I have been there.
If you know your history, and if you can carry your own commentary round in your head, then it rocks seeing a place that's so important historically, but if not then its not even slightly appealing as a location for a day trip.
When I was there I saw a lot of extremely bored kids. If they'd added in some enthusiastic guides with a flair for storytelling they would have been able to draw on enough information to keep those kids engaged, but there was only a very sedate and, to be honest, bland, tour on offer.
I'm not denying that its important to preserve this historical location, but what they really need is to make it more interesting to visitors.
Historical importance alone is not enough, it has to be fun too if they want to survive as a tourist location.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
This way the site will be saved AND we will not see another Indy-against-the-Russians film. Plus, maybe, maybe, it would erase Indy IV from our memory. I would pay for that. A lot.
Consider purchasing a pocket enigma, or making a donation (link from their home page or as part of order).
Loose lips lose spit.
The British newspaper The Independent started a campaign to save Betchley Park on 20 August 2008. I wonder if these are connected ?
Sounds like a great cause - it should definitely be preserved.
Little point in asking the govt for funding - they are too busy pouring cash into a 3 week sports festival in 2012 -- a complete waste of money.
A company who provides security by cryptography is trying to maintain a monument to an organisation that tried to break crypto?
I laughed.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Did anyone forget that IBM was running tracking systems for the Nazis during the war effort?
IBM and the Holocaust
"Although IBM actively worked with the Hitler regime from its inception in 1933 to its demise in 1945, IBM has asserted that since their German subsidiary came under temporary receivership by the Nazi authorities from 1941 to 1945, the main company was not responsible for its role in the latter years of the holocaust.[23] Shortly after the war, the company worked aggressively to recover the profits made from the many Hollerith departments in the concentration camps, the printing of millions of punchcards used to keep track of the prisoners, the custom-built punchcard systems, and its servicing of the Extermination through labour program. The company also paid its employees special bonuses based on high sales volume to the Nazis and collaborator regimes. As in many corporate cases, when the US entered the war, the Third Reich left in place the original IBM managers who continued their contacts via Geneva, thus company activities continued without interruption."
Re-elect Blue Chip IBM in 1984!!!
...as they demolished a historical building after railroading about every obstacle in town, and putting some remains in an obscure spot.
Had Bletchley Park been in the US(and next to the named university), they'd have let a local university just roll the town over and demolish it after buying the land from NCR for $1.
It's a shame that PGP, IBM, and friends couldn't have come sooner to save NCR's Building 26.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The British Computer Society, GCHQ (if they aren't to PR adverse!) and ultimately the National Trust should be involved.
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It is a site of National Significance and should be preserved.
Facebook is a woodpecker tapping on the skull of Humanity, Forever.
Who only decrypted Nazi radio traffic. Those people at Bletchley Park who spent untold hours decoding fragments of Nazi radio traffic probably saved hundreds, if not thousands, of Allied lives. To allow such a place to fall into the state of disrepair that Bletchley Park is currently in, is completely disrespectful to the sacrifice that those who served there made.
Sig this!
OK, I'll feed the troll.
VR sims are nowhere near ready for prime time. If the best we've got is exemplified by a 360 degree quicktime tour of a house like on most realty sites, there's no reason to bother at all. Those blow like a $2 Bangkok streetwalker.
If you're going to take that particular attitude, at least make an effort to preserve it until decent virtualization recording equipment exists.
John
What constitutes "important" and "worth saving" is a matter of nostalgia and self-aggrandizing for those who engage in it.
I don't know about "worth saving" but it's hard to overstate how "important" that location is historically. Not only did the work done there have a major effect on the outcome of the war (those U-Boats weren't screwing around,) but they also built a lot of the foundations of computer science and engineering that stand to this day.
... also, I can kill you with my brain.
Agreed, it seems like a really shoddy place and it would be best to go on tour with the pieces or donate them to a museum. Best just give it to the Smithsonian but they might want to keep it in their country.
Many WW2 structures are being left to fall apart and will not be repaired, even many of the beach landing defense structures are crumbling.
The portions of the international arms control treaties of the postwar era dealing with encryption (the same ones that Phil Zimmerman violated when he first released PGP to the world) came about because the allies saw firsthand how encryption can change the face of war (and how they need to make sure that the new breed of computer based encryption was something THEY had but the bad guys did not)
The PGP page for the effort wasn't up yet when the CNET story broke, but it is now. More information there.
But isn't IBM rich enough to buy place thirty times over? Mounting a fundraising effort when you can just fund it yourself seems silly.
The preservation of iconic history is one of the most important cultural and institutional tasks that the intelligence community can perform to ensure the continued relevance of its traditions as an intellectual pursuit among the generations of professions which follow. A shadowed profession needs more than most the few tangible symbols of what it is we stand for, what we have accomplished, and what we ought to emulate â" if not in strict form or function, than in spirit and ideal. It is these few tokens (and their stories) â" whether the odd item somehow passed down from those that were there, or the unique place which by virtue of the accidents of geography and function became key to a major program or structure â" that also help to cement a shared vision of an increasingly distributed profession.
Many IC leaders agree to this principle in theory. Yet when the heart of the World War II cryptanalytic effort at Bletchley Park was left to decay, the international intelligence community of the Allied powers paid little attention. Of course, this is not a new problem, but efforts to preserve the history of intelligence have ranked low on the priority list in the face of unprecedented wartime demands coupled with the critical need to re-capitalized aging operational infrastructure neglected during the lean years of the 1990â(TM)s. And while some might say this is strictly a British problem, the long history of the special relationship â" and particularly the key role played by shared signals intelligence efforts in creating that relationship â" dictates American concern (and like concern for the rest of the Five Eyes partners).
Thus we find privatization emerging in a new and unexpected manner.....
http://kentsimperative.blogspot.com/2008/09/privatization-of-intelligence-history.html
...is Bletchley Park, though currently they are in need of funding to stop it going to ruin.
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/