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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.
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.
...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.
Because (roughly) half of all the people in the wold are women, and only an idiot wastes half of all his resources.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
No, worse. Dramatic Asperger's.
...
So, those women decided to choose other career fields. Does that mean they chose incorrectly? Does that mean those career fields are in some way inferior? Your statement assumes those resources aren't already put to good use, doing something that they actually desire instead of some politically correct idea that all women want to be like men.
Just another day in Paradise
Until we figure out, we just won't ever know. This is the entirety of the issue, which you seem to have missed entirely.
Yeah, maybe my 40+ years working in computing, with women, for women, and hiring women, makes me clueless. And fwiw, I was raised by a single mom, was a single dad with a daughter, and married a women who's in the field and makes more than me. So, no I'm sure I don't understand the issues...other than the fact that SJWs think they can change nature. I'm all in favor of giving women equal opportunities. What I'm not in favor of is doing so at the expense of others. Nor am I in favor of social experiments at the expense of others...until we "figure out" that we don't know what we were talking about in the first fucking place.
I see in my own company, women being hired over more qualified men, being given larger pay raises, and more promotions. All because of this perceived injustice. But nobody gives a shit that someone else has to pay for that. Am I bitter? Not at all, I've done very well for myself. But when I see people being promoted because of their sex or race instead of their skills, it pisses me off.
Just another day in Paradise
See, and I come from a slightly different social background, and here, women especially in computer science, physics and math are much more common. So apparently, you raise your daughters so differently from us, that you don't have that many women in STEM. And here is the point: What are you doing differently, and why do you think your way of doing things is somehow normal?
You are absolutely right. We are back to the original point. Giving promotion, pay raises, etc based on sex or race because we decided faked equality is more important than rewarding genuine talent is a huge waste of resources.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Yeah, why would the history of cryptography interest Slashdot readers?
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Good job, and thanks much for your valuable input.
Consider that if Slashdot pulled every article that some guy on the internet didn't think belonged there, there would be nothing.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
So, you don't care about historical geeky stuff. Then don't fucking read it.
But I think bitching about Slashdot stories is some folks major contribution.
Hard to imagine that early computing devices and the people that used them are considered not appropriate for Slashdot by some users.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Maybe history, codebreaking, and the passing of a generation of people who did amazing things seems neither interesting nor worthy to you, but trust me, your needless bitching is much less so.
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
--
.nosig
It's not location either, it's time. America had a lot more women in computer science, math, and engineering discliplines 30 years ago.