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Bletchley Park Codebreaker Honored
Rambo Tribble writes "England has awarded Raymond Roberts, one of the nine cryptanalysts responsible for breaking the Nazi Tunny code machine, (also known by the German designation Lorenz cipher machine) the MBE. Roberts is the last surviving member of the team which cracked the German army's cipher machine functionality, much like others at Bletchley broke the better-known Enigma machine."
Who gives a fuck?
Anyone with an interest in history, technology, mathematics, and honoring under-recognized individuals who made a crucial contribution to society. Clearly not you.
Seriously, given that the UK probably would not exist today if not for this man's work, an MBE is too little too late.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
While probably somewhat known among Slashdotters, I think it is worthwhile to remind people of Alan Turing, mathematician, logician, WWII code breaker and father of computer science (as well as being a victim of cruel injustice by the state).
He's unfortunately by far less recognized than people like Steve Jobs (probably because turing machines don't have rounded corners by design). It's a bit like the story of Tesla vs. Edison. One was a genius scientist, the other one an asshat making lots of money, without contributing nearly as much to the field, but still being more famous and celebrated.
People who's lives were saved because of this, dickface.
What, is it not moe or call of duty enough for you? Go back to high school, chump.
Tunny was broken because of a test message that had to be resent, and was re-encoded with the same key. The cryptographer was bored, and he made some abbreviations in the second encoding (which was manually typed). That put them out of phase, which meant that the message could be broken in crab-fashion. (Guess a word in the cipher text. If you are correct that gives you a little of the key and thus the decryption of the same block of characters in the other text. That, if you are lucky, will reveal another word, which gives more characters in the second text, which yields more in the first, making the entire decrypt fairly straightforward once you get going.) Breaking that message was enough to reveal how the machine worked, it was reverse engineered, and in operational use it was broken by computer basically from the start.
All of this because one operator got sloppy on one test message that wasn't even intrinsically important anyway. But, i think it is fair to say that more crypto is broken by sloppiness than by advanced math (not that the math might not be useful in exploiting the break).
Bletchley Park could have probably gotten by without any one or two of the code breakers, but as a group they had a significant effect on the course of WWII, and thus deserve these honours. If the people at Bletchley Park had not been as successful as they were it is possible that WWII in Europe would have lasted a lot longer than it did. It is also quite plausible that the European portion of the war would have ended with the Soviet Union extending to the Atlantic.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Using my google de-encryption method, the MBE Acronym appears to stand for the "Multi State Bar Exam" - a degree for Yankee lawyers practicing across state lines. Why on earth did they give that to this poor gentleman?
Welcome to the search filter bubble.
MBE stands for Member of the British Empire. It's the lowest of 5 ranks in the Order of the British Empire.
(emphasis mine)
And also why the leader "England has awarded Raymond Roberts" is a trifle inaccurate. Never mind anthropomorphising a country; like computers, they hate that.
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
I remember a talk about Bletchley Park where I asked whether the germans had any codebreaking work. I still have not heard nor seen a word of it anywhere at all.
I read an account recently about German cryptanalysis of the US M-209 machine, which happens to be one of my favorites. I don't remember where I read it, though. I'll reply again if I find the link before my mind wanders too far. It is my understanding that Allied forces were aware that Germany could break the M-209 cipher, but used it for low-level traffic because the machine was so convenient for widespread field use, where we wouldn't want to risk capture of our higher level cryptosystems. Low-level tactical information often is only of value to an enemy for a short period of time; i.e., a message about a small troop movement that will happen in an hour isn't very useful the following day after it has already happened. Thus, if you believe that your enemy requires a day to break one of your codes, that code can still be useful for messages that would only be of value to them for a few hours.
If I recall correctly, Germany did do codebreaking work against the Allies, but didn't achieve the same level of success that the Allies did against their codes.
If you would like to try your hand at cryptanalysis of the M-209 and related machines, take a look at this ongoing M-209 Crypto Challenge. I solved the first problem in the series, but then had to quit working on the challenge because of other stuff that came up. I may go back and work through the other problems when I have some free time.
While most of the work they did could have gone on fairly uninterrupted with the loss of any one particular person, there are some specific counter-examples. Tuttle took over researching a german goof in using their Lorenz set that had stumped a team there for three months, and single-handedly identified a 41 character patten that led to the breaking of Lorenz. Without his accident/brilliance, Lorenz either would have lasted much longer, or possibly never been broken by Bletchley. (that member that was interviewed speculated the Lorenz's early break had shortened the war by 2 years, saving 20,000,000 lives)
While this is the only specific example I can quickly quote, I would wager there are at least a handful of other points in Bletchley's history that hinged on a single member coming through with a hail-mary for the team.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I have had the great pleasure of corresponding with Captain Roberts over the past couple of years. Not only did he and his team make an extraordinary contribution to winning WWW II, he has worked tirelessly since the declassification of the Tunny work to get recognition for the many others who contributed heroically and anonymously. It's quite amazing to talk with someone who had the experience of decrypting Adolph Hitler's personal communications, hours after they were sent. Note that most of the work done by Capt. Roberts and his team was done by hand. Colossus eventually helped with some steps, but not at first, and even then many steps remained to be done manually. At 92 Capt. Roberts remains very engaged and passionate about the work done at Bletchley. If there's a concern, it's that he should have been recognized for his work then, as well as for his recent publicity efforts, and one can make the case that MBE doesn't nearly recognize the magnitude of his contribution. Congratulations, Jerry!