21–30 of 46 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please reply your take when you are 99% of the way through
I had the exact same thought. There is no feeling like the frustration of a disappointing ending after being engrossed in a Neal Stephenson book. When they were paper books at least you could throw them across the room. Now that would break my phone.
Tangent, but Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson[1] is a good novel that touches on WWII cryptography topics really well, going decently mathematically deep into the mechanics of how they work. I'm about 75% of the way through. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
I was alternating reading with listening for fun.
Tangent, but Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson[1] is a good novel that touches on WWII cryptography topics really well, going decently mathematically deep into the mechanics of how they work. I'm about 75% of the way through. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
I always wondered if Stephenson chose the name "Enoch Root" on a dare, or maybe he has some other story. It's probably something related to an "Enterprise NOC Root" computer account.
Tangent, but Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson[1] is a good novel that touches on WWII cryptography topics really well, going decently mathematically deep into the mechanics of how they work. I'm about 75% of the way through. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
I read it again last year and picked up on a few things that had slipped past my understanding the first time around. I had originally assumed that the present day Enoch Root was the child of Bobby's Nordic girlfriend, but it was obviously not the case upon my second reading. A few web searches revealed the supernatural nature of Root. I always wondered if Stephenson chose the name "Enoch Root" on a dare, or maybe he…
Is there any possibility the cyphertext is wrong ? Either generated with a bug, someone hit the wheel halfway through, copied down wrong, etc? Is there a checksum that authenticates this as a valid cyphertext?
This particular message is particularly interesting due to its origin... U-534 is a German U-boat that was, unusually, recovered after the war. It's now a museum piece. While it was full of water that did a lot of damage, there were some documents on board that were still legible... including the Schlüsselzettel for this message, which is basically a worksheet used by the radio operator to decode messages. It's linked to from the article, along with Dan Girard's theory of why this particular Schlüsselzettel was filled out in an unusual way and missing plaintext... the radio operator at first made a mistake, and then realized that the message wasn't actually intended for (or decodable) by them, so they set it aside.
U-534's recovered documents lead to no small number of interesting Enigma messages, and the linked website has a big focus on them. They specifically reject the claim made by some that U-534 had a specially modified or possibly even broken Enigma machine, since other messages from the boat decode properly.
Enigma cryptanalysis is a very interesting hobby, since the Enigma machine is complex enough to be formidable but still simple enough to be amenable to human attacks. It's also a bit challenging from the perspective of someone used to modern cryptography, because the operation of the rotor machines is very different from modern cryptography, and because both older and modern writing about them uses a lot of terminology and methods developed at Bletchley Park that is not often used elsewhere---it seems to have been the culture of British intelligence, or at least the code-breaking type, to name things after inside jokes. This leads to odd things like Banburismus and Testery.
The Enigma was not the only rotor machine in use by the Germans during the second world war, and not the most advanced either. A more complex evolution of the rotor machine concept, code named "Tunny" by the British, was used for fixed radio links (it was too large and delicate to be practical for naval applications), and Bletchley Park mounted a huge effort to decode it was well, which lead to the development of an electromechanical computer called Colossus. In the essay collection "Colossus," edited by B. Jack Copeland, authors contend that Colossus is a major milestone in computer history, more significant than the Bombe designed for Enigma messages, which has been largely overlooked by historians because most documentation on Colossus remained classified until 2000.
Most interestingly, one author suggests that Colossus was an important precursor to the design of ENIAC which went uncredited because of its classified nature - but several key designers of ENIAC had also been designers of Colossus shortly before. This positions Colossus as a bit of a "missing link" in the development of the programmable computer, since Colossus was modified with limited programmable features similar to ENIAC's more flexible capability.
The 1970 speculative computer film "Colossus" seems to have been an amusing coincidence as knowledge of Colossus was still almost entirely classified at the time.
Tangent, but Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson[1] is a good novel that touches on WWII cryptography topics really well, going decently mathematically deep into the mechanics of how they work. I'm about 75% of the way through. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
I read it again last year and picked up on a few things that had slipped past my understanding the first time around. I had originally assumed that the present day Enoch Root was the child of Bobby's Nordic girlfriend, but it was obviously not the case upon my second reading. A few web searches revealed the supernatural nature of Root. I always wondered if Stephenson chose the name "Enoch Root" on a dare, or maybe he…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please reply your take when you are 99% of the way through
I had the exact same thought. There is no feeling like the frustration of a disappointing ending after being engrossed in a Neal Stephenson book. When they were paper books at least you could throw them across the room. Now that would break my phone.
Tangent, but Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson[1] is a good novel that touches on WWII cryptography topics really well, going decently mathematically deep into the mechanics of how they work. I'm about 75% of the way through. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
I read it again last year and picked up on a few things that had slipped past my understanding the first time around. I had originally assumed that the present day Enoch Root was the child of Bobby's Nordic girlfriend, but it was obviously not the case upon my second reading. A few web searches revealed the supernatural nature of Root. I always wondered if Stephenson chose the name "Enoch Root" on a dare, or maybe he…
Tangent, but Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson[1] is a good novel that touches on WWII cryptography topics really well, going decently mathematically deep into the mechanics of how they work. I'm about 75% of the way through. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
I read it again last year and picked up on a few things that had slipped past my understanding the first time around. I had originally assumed that the present day Enoch Root was the child of Bobby's Nordic girlfriend, but it was obviously not the case upon my second reading. A few web searches revealed the supernatural nature of Root. I always wondered if Stephenson chose the name "Enoch Root" on a dare, or maybe he…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had the exact same thought. There is no feeling like the frustration of a disappointing ending after being engrossed in a Neal Stephenson book. When they were paper books at least you could throw them across the room. Now that would break my phone.
I haven't been disappointed by the endings of his more recent novels: Cryptonomicon, Anathem, Seveneves. (I did not enjoy time spent on REAMDE, that being the only exception.)