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The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

bbc.co.uk

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Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

#51

Post by tygorius »

sliverstorm wrote: post #12
anarchitect wrote: post #7

From the headline I thought this was going to be about Operation Mincemeat ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat ) which is a pretty amazing story.

I thought the same thing, and was very skeptical about all this 'published for the first time!' as I could swear there was a fictional-historical movie made around the 60's based on the premise of Operation Mincemeat!

Perhaps you're thinking of "36 Hours", where German psychologist Rod Taylor tries to convince drugged and captured Army officer James Garner that the war is long over, the Nazis vanquished, but he's suffering from amnesia that occurred years later. As part of your therapy to recover your memory, if you could just confirm that you remember where and when the invasion occurred... Mincemeat is offstage, but I think it was part of the set up.

Saw it in a theater when I was a lad -- too young to properly appreciate Eva Marie Saint, alas.

Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

#53

Post by stcredzero »

oiuytghyujki wrote: post #41
stcredzero wrote: post #20

I from a crypto history book I read in high school: in WWI, German intercepts of Russian transmissions have the Russians illusions of German tactical genius. Somehow, Germans would often be in position to confound the Russians. The reason for this: Russian code clerks were badly trained. Sometimes there would be a couple of attempts to send a message followed by a plain-text transmission by the frustrated code clerk.…

It wasn't a nonce as such - it was a key exchange, slightly more like a salt in modern terms. One of the main failings of the Germans was their love of formal introductions and sign offs in official messages, especially by the navy which otherwise had rather better crypto than the other branches. However if you are already stuck with a language that has a very fixed word and sentence structure you don't help by signi…

It wasn't a nonce as such - it was a key exchange, slightly more like a salt in modern terms.

The way we think about ciphers has almost completely changed with the advent of cheap computation. Also, I read that book in High School and haven't thought much about Enigma in about 16 years, so it's entirely possible I got that a bit wrong.

However if you are already stuck with a language that has a very fixed word and sentence structure you don't help by signing all your messages with the same 40 character long formal greeting.

So, if you want to keep secrets, it doesn't pay to have a stick up your...

Another way to put it: it pays to be more like Snoop Dogg and less like Colonel Klink.

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