Slashdot Mirror
Crypto Show on the History Channel Tonight (9/12)
aegrumet writes "The History Channel is doing a show tonight at 9pm EDT on WW2 crypto called "The Ultra Enigma". The blurb on their program listing reads "British codebreaking and capture of the German military's super cipher machine, the Enigma, enabled the Allies to pull off one of the greatest campaigns of deception in military history, and changed the course of World War II." This will be especially interesting to those who, like me, are reading or have recently finished Neal Stephenson's book Cryptonomicon. "
Whenever I see topics like this (um, history) I can't help but wonder what the History Channel will be doing specials on in like ten or twenty years...
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"Rise and Fall of an Empire: The Microsoft Story"
"The Penguin Cronicles: Why the Inter(pla)net runs Linux"
Or mebbe I'll just be watching the SlashDot channel...
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Churchill didn't withhold Ultra stuff to accelerate our entry into the war, he withheld it because it was the single most secret secret on the planet. Churchill more than once allowed Britich troops to die to hide the fact that Ultra could read Enigma transmissions, when they thought the Germans would deduce that the only way for the Brits to have known something was codebreaking. Every bit of intel ever released from Ultra had a cover from some other intel source. In fact, hiding Ultra decodes as intercepted paper, first hand leaks, etc was a major part of British Intelligence work during WWII A useful side effect of this was that the Nazi counterintelligence program spent much of the war chasing non-existent spies.