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For £70,000, You Might Be Able to Own an Enigma

Posted by timothy on from the buy-a-riddle-to-wrap-it-in dept.

In 2007, we mentioned the eBay sale of an Enigma machine; now, The Guardian reports that another one is to be auctioned off next week, with an expected selling price of about £70,000 (at this writing, that's about $108,000). According to the article, "The machine being offered for sale, which dates from 1943 and currently belongs to a European museum, will go under the hammer at Sotheby's in London on Tuesday." The new owner may have need of a restoration manual and some reproduction batteries.

3 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Cool. by o_ferguson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I know a guy who worked at Bletchley Park, and he said that they could never crack the luftwafe code because it was a true OTP implimentation. The pilots were literally issued a little one-time pad before flight, with letters on a grid of co-ordinates, and then instructions sent from ground ops would simply be pairs of x/y co-ordinates so the pilots could just look at the pad and see the message out. For each new message they would tear off one page and have a new arrangement of letters.

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    - In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
  2. Don't buy it! by BitterOak · · Score: 5, Funny

    Don't buy this. It's all part of a GCHQ conspiracy to foist weak encryption on the populace. The Enigma has been cracked. I repeat, the Enigma HAS been cracked! You have been warned.

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    If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
  3. Just one? by davstok · · Score: 5, Funny

    Don't you need two?