Slashdot Mirror
A 1941 Paper-and-Pencil Cipher
Schneier's blog links to a photo of a 68-year-old code being employed in wartime, with a plausible explanation of what is going on in it. (The photo is from the Life Magazine archive we discussed when it went live.) "What you see here is a photo that never should have been allowed to be taken, and one which provides an amazing, one-of-a-kind glimpse into the world of WWII espionage and counter-espionage. As far as I can tell, what is shown in this picture is an FBI agent in New York encrypting a message, passed from 'DUNN'... through Sebold, prior to transmitting that message to Germany via shortwave radio. ... [T]his appears to be real cryptology at work."
Like this? http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/England-History/Crossword.htm
it's = it is
its = belonging to it
Oh, indeed, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer, they even did parallel computing :)
www.aleo.no
What is at work there is cryptography , not just "cryptology. It's actually the generation of encoded symbols, not just any practice connected to the study of hiding information.
--
make install -not war
Just because America was neutral doesn't mean the war hadn't started.
Back in the day of card punches in order to certify that a card punch was working properly a whole box (qty 2000) cards were fed, punched and read with only one error permitted. This was CDC equipment on the CDC 3100 and 3200 models.
If something was not quite adjusted properly usually a failure would occur much earlier in the cycle.
Sending out a new operating system was done with punch cards. A simple bootstrap program was keyed into the core and executed which would input from the card reader and a whole box of cards needed to be read without error.
The CDC card punch (can not remember the model number ... maybe 3114) also had a read station in it so that a read after write cycle could be employed. The error exit could be used to offset the card in the output deck about 1/4 of an inch so that the individual card could be easily located and re-punched.
Reading a lace card was a real dicey test. Usually we alternated rows and columns.
PCOD sounds about right.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
It is possible that this was a partial setup, but in this case it was the question of a deception message that was about to be sent using encryption that was probably already blown at the time.
And mind that the encryption wasn't US encryption, but German encryption so if the encryption was blown and the agent was already cold then it may have been a semi-arranged situation where it was real life data that already had cooled that was used.
And the whole setup could have been intentional from the intelligence point of view because in some cases you may want to double-deceive the counterpart. This means that the counterpart may have to think that they got false data, but the data was actually real, and then it was necessary to seed confusion. Be aware that this message may not be the message intended to be the one they wanted to obscure but another much more sensitive. Because if you reveal that you know of something then a lot of the earlier messages also will be cast in doubt.
So the question why this photo was taken may be revealed in another message, but we may never see an answer to that.
Espionage and counter-intelligence is never straight, it's full of deception and double-deception.
This actually leads to a story (I can't confirm it, but someone else may) that an intelligence officer with knowledge about the D-day landing sites was captured in France and when the Germans questioned him he did give them the correct info straight on, but they didn't trust that so after some torture he instead claimed that the beaches around Calais was the landing site.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.