Amateur Cracks Secret Nazi Code

[KG]

Nazi code that eluded the best cryptographers the Allied forces had to offer during World War II has been solved by an amateur codebreaker with the assistance of a network of computers.
The three uncracked ciphers -- a cipher is a method of transforming text in order to conceal its meaning -- were encrypted in 1942 with a new version of the infamous German Enigma machine, which was used to direct attacks against Allied shipping in the Atlantic.

The M4 Project, the brainchild of Stefan Krah, a violinist and amateur cryptographer of German birth, is credited with cracking one of the three remaining ciphers. The project was named in honor of the M4 Enigma machine that originally encoded the messages.

To solve the puzzling mystery, details of which had been published in a cryptography journal in 1995, Krah wrote a codebreaking program and then went online in January to post information about his project and ask for assistance.

In an interview with the BBC, Krah, a resident of Utrecht, The Netherlands, said it was "basic human curiosity" that prompted him to attempt to break the code. "Clearly, the project is from the 'because-we-can' department," Krah wrote on a bulletin board online.


more>>> http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=003000002OZ6

[Bubba Zanetti]

1. Cool

Now I am going to search e-bay for a German Enigma machine. You see them at Goodwill all the time.

[CrazyOrangeCat]

2. Ha !!!

Welcome to DU!

[mainegreen]

3. You see enigma machines at goodwill?

You must be going to different goodwills than me!

Welcome to DU!

[90-percent]

4. Question

My dad always wanted a Norden (sp?) bombsite. Are they in the same category on EBAY as the enigma machines?

-85% Jimmy

[Bubba Zanetti]

7. Only in that it's a WWII war item

Other than that, you may want to search google and put 'nordon bomb site sale' in the search field.

[Bubba Zanetti]

5. I should have put a ;) after that goodwill comment.

I found guy on the web that sells them. They start at 21K and go up from there.

I used to collect typewriters. It started when a friend of ours who is Amish wanted a pre-1936 German typewriter. Those used the old German type script. When Hitler came into power he 'modernized' Germany in many ways, including making the typewriter makers use Roman type face.

The Amish still publish their religous texts in old German script.

[MrPrax]

6. You can all help break the code

The M4 project is looking for volunteers--so toss away the SETI@home program and get the M4 program:

The M4 Project is an effort to break 3 original Enigma messages with the help of distributed computing. The signals were intercepted in the North Atlantic in 1942 and are believed to be unbroken. Ralph Erskine has presented the intercepts in a letter to the journal Cryptologia. The signals were presumably enciphered with the four rotor Enigma M4 - hence the name of the project.

This project has officially started as of January 9th, 2006. You can help out by donating idle time of your computer to the project. If you want to participate, please follow the client install instructions for your operating system:

http://www.bytereef.org/m4_project.html

Good time for Math Geeks actually:

Magic math mystery solved at last

Long before the Sudoku number puzzle became the crack cocaine of brain teasers, a bored Benjamin Franklin jotted down a couple of much more complex number puzzles of his own.

But, exactly how the U.S. inventor, printer and statesman devised his so-called magic squares 270 years ago, without the help of a computer, and how many permutations are possible under his distinct mathematical design have stumped mathematicians ever since.

Now, a trio of Canadian number crunchers have used modern-day technology to come up with one of the answers.

<snip>
The answer came as a surprise to Prof. Loly and two graduate students who started working on the problem in 2004. After all, a previous estimate pegged the answer at something more than a handful and less than 228 trillion.

It would also likely come as a surprise to Franklin, who later wondered if puzzle- making was the best use of his time.

more here