The Working-Class Hero of Bletchley Park You Didn't See in the Movies
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The Guardian article highlights Tommy Flowers, a working-class hero who built Colossus, the world's first digital electronic computer, at Bletchley Park during WWII, sparking discussion on his contributions and the representation of historical figures.
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Yeah, he also helped shorten the war which saved a whole lot of lives.
Rommel's Afrika Korps was also defeated by Enigma, because Rommel also refused to believe it was cracked. Enigma pointed out when and where Rommel's supply ships were.
No matter how secure your encryption method is, one should always assume it is cracked. Me, I would have backed it up with one-time pads.
Whereas:
~ https://www.ciphermachinesandcryptology.com/en/enigmauboats....~ https://uboat.net/technical/enigma_ciphers.htm
There were multiple Enigma variations, based on rotor choice pool sizes, number of fittable rotors, time cycles to changing procedures, etc. Some naval enigma variations were broken, others weren't.
ಠ _ ಠ
Even one-time pads are subject to the efforts used to counter Enigma, such as so-called gardening. I fully agree that layers are better than a single method like Enigma was many times in practice, which is usually all-or-none with no failsafe, at least until later in the war, when Enigma variants started being used in combination with coded messages and code words on top of the Enigma cipher machines themselves, but those efforts were foiled by the dedication and planning of the gardeners’ known-plaintext attacks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardening_(cryptanalysis)
> In cryptanalysis, gardening is the act of encouraging a target to use known plaintext in an encrypted message, typically by performing some action the target is sure to report. It was a term used during World War II at the British Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, England, for schemes to entice the Germans to include particular words, which the British called "cribs", in their encrypted messages. This term presumably came from RAF minelaying missions, or "gardening" sorties. "Gardening" was standard RAF slang for sowing mines in rivers, ports and oceans from low heights, possibly because each sea area around the European coasts was given a code-name of flowers or vegetables.
> The technique is claimed to have been most effective against messages produced by the German Navy's Enigma machines. If the Germans had recently swept a particular area for mines, and analysts at Bletchley Park were in need of some cribs, they might (and apparently did on several occasions) request that the area be mined again. This would hopefully evoke encrypted messages from the local command mentioning Minen (German for mines), the location, and perhaps messages also from the headquarters with minesweeping ships to assign to that location, mentioning the same. It worked often enough to try several times.
With 1940s technology, generating a practical one time pad generator would have been an interesting engineering project. I would have simply used a newspaper. Even if your enemy knew you were using Die Zeitung, with the computer technology at the time it would have been tough to brute force which date and which article was used.
The first is that such keys will have all the statistical regularities of the German language, which I believe is problematic, even though I don’t know how one would go about exploiting it.
The second is the matter of how much encrypted text had to be transmitted every day, by the German military as a whole. If it significantly exceeded the daily output of Germany’s newspapers (and I would guess it did) there would seem to be considerable key reuse under this scheme.
For submarines and other units not receiving newspapers daily, there also seems to be a key-distribution issue. I don’t know if there is a better way to guarantee that communication can be maintained through a patrol than to depart with the equivalent of a stack of old newspapers. Is this a problem? I don’t know, but if the allies had figured out the broad outlines of the scheme, I imagine they might be able to do some preparation in anticipation of messages being intercepted.
This discussion started with a proposal to back up Enigma with one-time pads, but harshreality pointed out that OTPs are not vulnerable to anything except compromise of the OTP itself. This has the unstated corollary that if you are using a true OTP system, adding Enigma to the process does nothing to improve security (unless your pre-shared keystream is compromised - and even then, capturing one U-boat's OTP will not compromise any other's communication.)
You then raised the concern of generating keys in sufficient quantity, which is certainly part of the problem (though I suspect that an electro-mechanical solution for that problem was well within the capabilities of contemporary technology, especially as, by then, Konrad Zuse had produced the first digital computer.) If, however, we are restricting our source of keys to the amount of text in a daily newspaper (or even all of the Third Reich's daily newspapers combined), that is something that could be achieved by a corps of dice-rollers, if it came to that, which would avoid one of the other problems of using newspapers: the statistical regularities of newspaper text.
Even then, you still have the problems of key reuse [1] and key distribution, and another which I think might be by far the hardest: training people to use it. Even just considering the submarine fleet, at least one person on each U-boat would have to be trained in properly using the technique. This would delay implementation, and once deployed, even with no mistakes, it would be slow in use.
Alternatively, a machine to do the work might have been developed (together with another to generate physical machine-readable keys), but that itself would have meant considerable delays in implementation.
In view of this, I feel that the measure actually adopted - adding another rotor position to the Enigma machine - was one of the better options (though it would have been even better if the additional rotor were interchangeable with the others.) This took time to implement and was ultimately defeated, but anything other than an OTP system would likely have the latter problem, and all would have had the former.
[1] Maybe not so much of an issue if one is only dealing with submarine communication, given that most of this was with the U-boat High Command in Germany, and assuming that it was of sufficiently low volume for each U-boat to be be given its own unique set of keys for each patrol.
I mentioned also that coordinates and times could be offset by a predetermined amount, and be different for each U-Boot.
This fact proved by Friedman in 1918 has become widely known a few years later, in 1926, when Gilbert Sandford Vernam has published an article "Cipher Printing Telegraph Systems For Secret Wire and Radio Telegraphic Communications" in a journal.
While Vernam mentioned the help from Friedman, he gave no details and the works written by Friedman for the education of American cryptographers have remained classified for many decades.
Because of this, secure one-time pads have been referred frequently as the Vernam cipher, but this is wrong, as he is not its inventor, but only the first who has mentioned it in the non-classified literature.
Vernam (as a Bell Labs engineer) had a very important contribution to cryptography, but of a different kind. He has invented enciphering by modulo-2 sum (a.k.a. XOR), which is cheaper to implement in hardware than the integer addition used previously.
In the book they used bingo style mechanical RNGs, by hand.
However, in the fullness of time and with research into and with declassification of wartime intelligence thereof since the war of the now-known semi-regular failures to key and operate the Enigma machine properly, the hypothetical serially encoded (Enigma + one-time pad) materials would possibly be able to be attacked due to operator errors/failures of key rotation independently of and/or combined with known-plaintext attacks, but I will defer to you on the actual cryptanalysis and mathematical modeling.
I humbly admit that am not well-versed in this field, and I am not anything other than a fan of you and your work in the computing field, as it is mostly over my head.
Another simple method would be to add an offset to the "rendevous at XX longitude and YY latitude" coordinates and time.
All of this is to say that I’m not sure that inconsistencies couldn’t be intentionally introduced in even the printed material to throw off encryption attempts if the source of the one-time pad were to have leaked. Knowing what is public knowledge regarding Crypto AG being compromised, I’m not willing to bet that a newspaper would be a safe bet for source material. A King James Version Bible, perhaps.
On the other hand, you have more fingers, and the long arm of the law casts an even longer shadow in wartime. Multi-armed bandits exist.
In contrast they attributed getting attacked after sending in a position report to radio triangulation equipment allies had, called huff-duff.
And in most cases huff-duff was the reason they were attacked. Bletchley Park was too slow to provide an actionable attack vector off a position report. Instead ultra was used to route convoys around the u-boats. They experienced ultra as empty ocean they they hoped they would find a convoy.
The one exception was the "milk cows". These were resupply subs that were to rendezvous with u-boats in the open ocean. Dönitz would send orders for a rendezvous, bletchley would decrypt and send orders to a "hunter killer" group consisting of an aircraft carrier and destroyers to attract the two subs while resupplying.
Rommel attributed the attacks on his secret convoys to spies.
It’s a sad commentary on western culture that being in a movie seemingly has the importance that it seems to.
If it's sad then it matters, if it doesn't matter then it isn't sad.
> I don’t understand why it matters whether someone was in a movie or not.
This is calling into question that it matters in the first place, essentially muddying the waters of the discussion. I think you are mistaken; they didn’t say it doesn’t matter directly but they imply that whether it matters or not is irrelevant, which is the entire point of the whole post and thread, so it’s not encouraging thoughtful discussion, either. I did appreciate the discussion anyway, but I believe every silver lining has its cloud, and vice versa. It’s all a matter of perspective, expectations, intent, and effort.
I’m determined to give a good faith reply to every comment that merits one from me, but I usually am of the opinion that others are better able to wring some meaning from the content than I am, so I’m content not to post much most of the time.
That said, I believe youre honestly mistaken about what they said or meant. It’s not really ambiguous that they were nebulous about the comment that they replied to, but their word choice and approach made clear their disapproval or disagreement with their interlocutor.
> their word choice and approach made clear their disapproval or disagreement with their interlocutor.
Certainly it's disapproval, but this is a non sequitur that doesn't contradict my statement.
Note that he wrote
> It’s a sad commentary on western culture that being in a movie seemingly has the importance that it seems to.
... again stating that it matters to people. He's sad that it does. I simply pointed out that he didn't say that it doesn't matter--I didn't pass judgment on whether he's correct.
I won't respond further to people so confused about the clear meaning and logic of a comment.
P.S.
> Have you considered the distinct possibility that you might be honestly wrong also?
Good grief ... I certainly won't deal with this sort of extremely bad faith offensive whataboutism. Of course I consider whether I might be wrong, on every single occasion.
> HN isn’t a place for adversarial tones, so take your bad attitude and ill manner with you as you go.
Is it even possible to be more hypocritical than this?
Cultural artifacts such as films are as legitimate as the letters and scratchings thereof. It’s a fine thing that folks use the tools at their disposal to communicate the meaning of the days and times.
> > has the importance that it seems to.
> ... again stating that it matters to people. He's sad that it does. I simply pointed out that he didn't say that it doesn't matter--I didn't pass judgment on whether he's correct.
It’s fine and good that movies move people. It’s easier to find fault than it is to build, and I take issue with your suggestion that motion pictures don’t matter, the implication being that you both know better, and I am saddened myself to see folks discount their importance to individuals and to the wider culture.
> I won't respond further to people so confused about the clear meaning and logic of a comment.
To withdraw from a discussion is fine, but to declare victory as if this is an argument tips your hand. HN isn’t a place for adversarial tones, so take your bad attitude and ill manner with you as you go.
P.S. if you want to reply to this comment, make a new reply (click the timestamp). You’ve been editing away, but I’m only responding upthread, whereas you are replying below, which is bad faith, the same you baselessly accuse me of.
I'm sorry if this doesn't make sense to you but the intent here is quite unambiguous. It's nothing more than an attempt at moral posturing without a basic understanding of how culture propagates.
Like it doesn't take a genius to understand that one of the most widely consumed cultural product in history is going to influence who the public recognizes and pretending otherwise is just performative ignorance.
Note that he wrote
> It’s a sad commentary on western culture that being in a movie seemingly has the importance that it seems to.
... again stating that it matters to people. He's sad that it does. I simply pointed out that he didn't say that it doesn't matter--I didn't pass judgment on whether he's correct, but you have a lot to say about that.
> Like it doesn't take a genius to understand that one of the most widely consumed cultural product in history is going to influence who the public recognizes and pretending otherwise is just performative ignorance.
This comment is a strawman and extremely rude and offensive.
I won't respond further to people so confused about the clear meaning and logic of a comment.
> There was no need for you to involve yourself in the discussion to begin with given that you misunderstood every single comment that has been made, it's for the best that you refrain from further involvement.
There are evil people here.
It’s relevant whether or not they were depicted in a movie because that is the context of this thread, because that is the topic of the fine article itself.
If you asked me for some names in early computing, I'd come up with Babbage, Ada, Turing, Zuse, Eckert and Mauchley, perhaps Atanasoff and Berry. I don't think I'd have come up with Flowers.
I'll do my best to right that wrong, but it really takes effort to rewrite history when something's declassified. In the same way that we all celebrated the SR-71 when in fact, the A-12 flew higher and faster, earlier, but it was classified, there's a mountain of material out there still claiming the SR-71 held all those firsts, when in fact not a single one of them was true.
Until Flowers' name rolls off the tongue as easily as Turing's, we have work to do.
He should have been involved in 1950s computing. But he went back to the Post Office Research Station to work on phone switches again. He did good work on phone switches.[1] But vacuum tubes in phone switches were never a good idea, and the technology of phone switches was its own little world. Fully electronic phone switches were several decades away.
[1] https://www.communicationsmuseum.org.uk/emuseum/electronicsw...
Also, his grandson often sits in front of my Mum and Dad at football matches! Although I only found that out a lot later.
I disagree. The amount of value companies like Microsoft and Apple have given the world is many many orders of magnitude than what this guy did. It's hard to have 1 person compete against the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people. Just being early to field of computing shouldn't automatically make someone a "great."
>If Tommy Flowers didn't exist we might have lost the war.
I don't think achievements in computing should be based off geopolitical achievements. Hypothetically he could not exist and the war is lost, but there would be someone else who would iterate upon computers.
The geopolitical achievement of winning the war (and the consequences of that) was the whole purpose of building the machine, so it doesn't make sense to dismiss it as you did.
That's said, I wonder how many more forgotten working class heroes we have that powers that be decided to bury.
Well done for Guardian writing about this.
Huh? I thought he was known as the father of computing because he literally defined the concept of a machine being Turing complete and what that meant you could and couldn’t do on a Turing-complete machine. That and the halting problem work (and to a lesser extent the Turing test), at least to me, are what make him the father of computing.
The Enigma stuff is an impactful and vital short term impact he had while he was alive, but relatively fleeting and not very impactful on the broader field of cryptography. It’s the other contributions that are eternal and foundational to the field.
This reads like someone who watched the movie about his life but didn’t actually understand the broader scope of what he did and why it was important.
The big question at the time was whether the sheer complexity of something like a UNIVAC would be cost-effective. Watson of IBM opined that there might be a market for six computers. IBM was building a few computers for the Atomic Energy Commission and such, and they were seen as niche products. The Turing/Von Neumann line of development all fed into that defense niche.
UNIVAC was bought by Remington Rand, which had a competing line of tabulating machines. (Entirely mechanical. Almost completely forgotten.[1]) Unlike IBM, Remington Rand saw electronic digital computers as the next step to the future.
Remington Rand not only had the UNIVAC I, the Eckert-Mauchly machine, built. They built all the peripherals for data processing - the tape drive (the UNISERVO), the line printer, the typewriter-sized printer, the card to tape converter, the tape to card converter, and the keyboard to tape device (the UNITYPER) So, while it was expensive, the UNIVAC could do routine data processing, far faster than the tabulating machines.
UNIVAC then sold the US Census Bureau two UNIVAC I computers. Census was, at the time, the largest tabulating machine customer of IBM, and rented several acres of tab machines. They were all on 30-day rental, that being what IBM insisted upon. Once the UNIVAC I machines were running, most of them became unnecessary, and the rental was cancelled. This was a huge shock to IBM as a corporation. (And the IBM salesman, paid on commission.) That's what kicked IBM into getting serious about computers.
[1] https://www.museumwaalsdorp.nl/en/museum-waalsdorp-2/history...
But ENIAC wouldn’t have been possible without Turing’s foundational research on what it means to build a computation machine in the first place and ENIAC was even preceded by Z3 although it was the first electronic Turing complete machine (Z3 was electromechanical).
They’re all important contributions but Turing literally defined the theoretical field. It’s like calling Townes, Schawlow, and Basov the fathers of the laser even though they just showed how to build the laser that Einstein predicted decades before. It’s important foundational work but most people know Einstein + laser whereas the names of the inventors of the first laser are less known. Einstein defined that it was even possible and how it would work. Others figured out how to achieve that through foundational science and engineering.
What general purpose architecture should roughly look like was known all the way back to Babbage. Some kind of long list of instructions, with unconditional and conditional branches. Zuse and Atanasoff both got there before WWII.
The big hangup was memory. All early computing struggled with memory limitations, as I mention occasionally. CPUs and instruction decoding came long before enough memory to store programs. Memory was still a million dollars a megabyte in the mid-1970s.
Z3 wasn’t Turing complete and z4 can’t start Turing’s work
Neumann’s contributions were valuable and notable as they proposed to make machines more flexible than how the ENIAC worked, but these are largely just “applied engineering” improvements not foundational theoretical CS concepts; the Harvard architecture is equally valid and flexible as Neumann’s design, even preceding Neumann’s idea of not differentiating code and data. It just that the simplicity at the time of Neumann machines won out even though today we pay for their penalty in other ways. But without Neumann or Harvard architectures you still end up building machines and likely these ideas would eventually have been proposed and tried by others without any meaningful delay in development. Without Turing’s work it’s possible that computers would have been delayed by decades until someone else figured this stuff out.
Without the transistor computers would just be an odd curio that’s in use in some places and basically the entire field wouldn’t exist (cryptography wouldn’t be a really thing, AI, databases, programming languages etc).
> ... Turing – did, in what is now one of the most famous academic papers ever written, On Computable Numbers. This is the actual reason Turing is “the father of computing”.
If we're making a list of people with large impact add George Boole.
"On a sun-drenched weekday in August, Bletchley Park is the soul of pleasantness: a stately home flanking a lake codebreakers skated on in winter between battling a constantly evolving phalanx of electromechanical encryption machines used to scramble messages between leaders of the Third Reich."
That's a masterwork of elitist language. Drive away every non-explicit intellectual or specific to this topic participate (such as software engineers.)
What a failure of publication. I guess the initial click is all they really care about, because such language drops off 99% of those interested clicks. Fools? Shortsighted? WTF
the OP is right - (virtually) no one is reading all that shit.
I know, it's not a great analogy, but what the Tunny team did was so far beyond the Enigma team in terms of a) no prior knowledge of the actual system, b) the development of new cryptanalytic techniques, c) the educated guesses as to how the OKW system probably worked, and d) the sheer brilliance and vision of building a bleeding edge electronic system to do the heavy lifting, that its story, and Flowers', do deserve to be better known.
To twist that into a story of working class victim hood requires an unfortunate amount of intention. Sad how far the Guardian has fallen. Even writing about the history of computing needs to be politicised.
Edited: Bombe not Enigma.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe
This, instead of actually thinking yourself, and examining your own biases - or those of the people who wrote what you read
Right. Good luck!
stripping something down to the objective parts isn't that hard for an llm as it's all about language. Sure they can and do have biases, although in this case it's a relative matter, and undoubtably the guardian is well known as left wing (in case somehow it isn't obvious just from looking at this article). So I'd say it's more steps forward than backwards. It's not either or. Removing subjective fluff from such a language is a function of thinking for oneself. using an llm to remove bias doesn't mean you need to then say "ok and now it's 100% objective". I recommend chomsky on the subject, who for instance purposely speaks in monotone so as not to infuse emotion into what he's saying.
enjoy thinking what somebody else decided for you.
Good luck, again!
My point is that your claim is unsubstantiated.
Around 1986 my high school class did a trip to the town telephone exchange to see the building full of mechanical rotary switch gear that was about to be thrown out, to be replaced by a single 19" rack that contained the digital equivalent.
I have copies of some of Grandpa's UK patents including baud rate conversion and other essential components.
What about the Atanasoff-Berry-Computer from the US or the Zuse Z3 from Germany?
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