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WWII Code-Breaker Dies At Age 95 (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes an article from the Washington Post:
Jane Fawcett, a British code-breaker during World War II who deciphered a key German message that led to the sinking of the battleship Bismarck -- one of Britain's greatest naval victories during the war -- died May 21 at her home in Oxford, England. She was 95... Fluent in German and driven by curiosity, Mrs. Fawcett -- then known by her maiden name, Jane Hughes -- found work at Britain's top-secret code-breaking facility at Bletchley Park, about 50 miles northwest of London. Of the 12,000 people who worked there, about 8,000 were women. Bletchley Park later became renowned as the place where mathematician Alan Turing and others solved the puzzle of the German military's "Enigma machine," depicted in the 2014 film "The Imitation Game"...
The sinking of the Bismarck marked the first time that British code-breakers had decrypted a message that led directly to a victory in battle... Mrs. Fawcett's work was not made public for decades. Along with everyone else at Bletchley Park, she agreed to comply with Britain's Official Secrets Act, which imposed a lifetime prohibition on revealing any code-breaking activities.
Meanwhile, volunteers from The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park finally tracked down an original keyboard from the Lorenz machine used to encode top-secret messages between Hitler and his general. It was selling on eBay for 10 pounds, advertised as an old machine for sending telegrams.
The sinking of the Bismarck marked the first time that British code-breakers had decrypted a message that led directly to a victory in battle... Mrs. Fawcett's work was not made public for decades. Along with everyone else at Bletchley Park, she agreed to comply with Britain's Official Secrets Act, which imposed a lifetime prohibition on revealing any code-breaking activities.
Meanwhile, volunteers from The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park finally tracked down an original keyboard from the Lorenz machine used to encode top-secret messages between Hitler and his general. It was selling on eBay for 10 pounds, advertised as an old machine for sending telegrams.
A 95 year old woman dies. Is this what "news for nerds" has become?
No matter how interesting her early life, the death is hardly news, and not the best starting point for a nerdy discussion. So I will just moan about the editors instead.
Maybe NASA can find the Apollo 11 tapes on eBay.
Table-ized A.I.
Greetings from Poland. Our enigma clone and hard work of our best code breakers is yours for free. You can forget us later. Or better still, make us the bad guys when you make a film about all this.
EVC
"We said 'Thank you very much, how much was it again?' She said '£9.50', so we said 'Here's a £10 note - keep the change!'"
The ethics of doing that, as opposed to informing the owner that she has a possibly valuable artifact are murky for me. I'm not questioning legality, but morality. I think that, in some way, Mr. Wetter tricked that woman out of the difference between 10 pounds and whatever she could have gotten at an auction not in eBay but at Sotheby's.
One can argue that she didn't do her due diligence, but the piece was a very specialized one. One can argue that Mr. Wetter's efforts in getting his specialized knowledge grants him the possible boons of that knowledge, like in the joke of the engineer and the 10.000 dollar bill for turning a screw. One can argue that Mr. Wetter didn't want profit himself, but wanted to preserve the artifact for the community. All these are valid points.
But in the end, the basis of morality boils down to "Do unto others". I know I wouldn't like that happening to me, and so wouldn't Mr. Wetter, I'd guess.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
....it's only the Muricans that did all that stuff !
All the movies say so..........
WW2 was merely escapades by a bunch of bumbling fools until the US charged in over the hill to save the day all by itself !
Golly, those silly Brits and Canadians and Australians and New Zealanders and South Africans and remnants of the French and Polish forces must have been so grateful when the US arrived to capture all those U Boats and decode the Enigmas and single-handedly invade Europe and Win Everything All By Itself !!!!
Hurruh !!!
But how can we encourage more women and minorities to join stem fields?
...that led to the sinking of the battleship Bismarck -- one of Britain's greatest naval victories during the war...
Really? Sinking one dreadnought, that was one of the highlights of British WWII naval operations? I realise that there wasn't much traditional dreadnought on dreadnought action for the British surface fleet in the European theatre of operations during WWII since the Germans hardly bothered to build any dreadnoughts but the importance of the hunt for the Bismarck has quite frankly been blown up to quite ridiculous proportions. This epic conflict between the Bismarck and the Royal Navy is a bit like the epic football rivalry between Germany and Britain, it's very important to the British while the Germans hardly know it exists (They are obsessed with beating the Dutch). To the Germans the Bismarck was just another warship that was sunk during WWII albeit a pretty big and expensive one but it's not the national trauma that you'd think given what an epic status the Bismarck hunt has attained in the UK. The Norwegian campaign proved once and for all that he who rules the seas is he who can project the most air power over strategic distances, not he who owns lots of battleships because aircraft will slaughter dreadnoughts in the absence of carrier cover; so why build dreadnoughts? Germany, with a tiny surface navy, occupied Norway in a series of amphibious and airborne operations that left it painfully clear that even if the British fleet had the firepower to intervene they were not able to do so because the fleet lacked even the airpower to simply figure out what was going on let alone challenge the Luftwaffe for air superiority over the battlespace. Even if the Royal Navy had had a couple more carriers available during the Norway campaign the Germans still would have swept their aircraft from the skies because the Luftwaffe would still have outnumbered the Royal Naval Air Arm by 5:1, they could project way more airpower over strategic distances. If there was anybody left who believed that dreadnoughts were still part of the future of modern navies (Ronald Reagan was one of the last hold-outs I think) then that illusion was dispelled by Pearl Harbour, Midway and other carrier battles in the Pacific. The Bismarck was just one more nail in the coffin of the dreadnought and the death of the big battleships hit the British quite a lot harder than the Germans if only because they had invested ridiculous amounts of money in them. The Americans on the other hand quite matter of factly phased the dreadnought out in favour of carriers and, apart form Reagan bringing the USS Missouri out of mothballs for a while in a fit of romanticism and nostalgia, they never looked back. Of course the Americans could afford that in the aftermath of WWII while the British could not afford to modernise and transition to a carrier navy that could hold a candle to the old dreadnought navy in terms of size and relative firepower.
RIP
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
she agreed to comply with Britain's Official Secrets Act, which imposed a lifetime prohibition on revealing any code-breaking activities.
Somehow it seems that could work in WW-II, but today it wouldn't, even under wartime conditions. You'd have people blabbing about everything on Facebook and posting selfies of themselves and the equipment.
It might have been a strategic victory, but a very pyhric one.
The Hood went down with only 3 survivors
Code breaking was more important in the fight against U-Boats
The Official Secrets Act still exists, and people still sign it. The fact that you thought it was some relic of WW2 proves that it's still effective - because people are NOT blabbing about their work or posting images of their equipment. For one thing, anyone who's invited to sign it has probably already been vetted and proven to be not that kind of person, and second, if they ever did do something of the sort, you can bet they'd be out of a job within less than 12 hours, at the very least, and most likely on a charge of some sort.
Every one knows America did eveything to win the war despite the Russians , the Brits, the French, the Aussies and numerous other peoples. Hollywood told me it was a little old african american woman names Rosa parks decoded all the messages afetr Jessie Owens delivered them straight from Hitler by sneaker net.
Lots of jobs require you to sign The Official Secrets Act some times it can depend on simply whom you work for as they may have military contracts as well. Sadly my office job was never deemed important enough the soviets deployed Natashia the gorgous honey pot spy to seduce me.
someone has to do the typing, and the men are off saving the country from the Hun. Again!
She delayed the unification of Europe under German rule by half a century. All hail the glory of Europe! SIEG HEIL!
--
.nosig
A computer was someone who performed bulk computations ob paper or adding machine. Many were employed by military and insurance companies. During th first World War the profession shifted to female and stayed that way. The first machine computers in the 1940s where called electronic computers to distinguish from people. Then the bare word shifted meaning to just the machine. Some human computers became early coders, perhaps the highest fraction of females ever in that profession than any later time.