Bleretchley Park, United Kingdom-Freedom of Liberty on this English-country asset is a rhythmic stimulus and constriction made of dozens of batteries rotating back and forth in a closet-size closure-a recreation of one of the cars that coders of The codes here are used to read Nazi the coded messages of Germany in World War II.
These bombs, based on previous models invented by Polish cryptographs in the late 1930s, helped the British solve a problem from hell. Enigma encryption machines used by the military, Marina and Hitler’s Air Force allowed nearly 159 quintillion facilities, much to defeat with a brutal forces attack. And the Germans changed the puzzle keys settings every day.
The first bomb here, designed by calculating the legend Alan Turing, essentially engineering the rotors and plugs that enigma equipment used to encode messages, accelerating sufficient decoding to give the intelligence of the same day starting in 1940.
By 1945, 328 bombs were in use here, elsewhere in the United Kingdom and in the US; From 1944 onwards, these electro-mechanical machines had helped in the form of colossus, the first programmable electronic computer in the world.
Machines like this helped to kill the fascists. (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
And all the time, the Germans did not realize that they would have been pwned. The whole operation in Bleretchley remained officially secret in the 1970s.
Treashing from London to Bleretchley Park-a half hour trip from the Euston station that treats you in some beautiful landscapes of the country-will take you a narrow look at the cryptographic device used by both places and their allies World War II, as well as what life was like here when thousands of people worked in the temporary “huts” raised in a hurry.
(In a word, Hres. A label recounts the testimony of one of the many women who worked with bombs: “Of course, we were extremely tired and hot – there were no windows where we worked, and all the bombs released a scary heat and a bad smell of oil.
But the £ 26 admission fee (10% discount if purchased online at least the day before) should also remind you of how some basic information security problems and coded messages have not changed in eight decades since – even as encryption has become both a daily tool and a political football.
German enigma cars cannot resist the computing power of the Bletchley Park bomb. (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
Then and now, slow operational safety can be costly. Exhibitions describe how Bretchley’s cryptographs could benefit from Germans who fall into habits that reduced the coincidence of coded messages. For example, the beginning of any message with “a Die Group”, German for “for the group”, left models in the figure that could be used. And the enigma operators who continued to use the same three or four characters – maybe the name of a girlfriend or a curse word – to begin coding a message further facilitated the code work.
And when the operator of a more advanced Lorenz encryption machine had to deliver a garble message, but forgot to change its main settings, that accidental password reuse led to cryptographs that broke Lorenz after they had enigma equipment. Now we have much stronger computers to encrypted our messages, but many of us still can’t resist recycling passwords.
Other code behavior exercises required more aggressive interference. An exhibition recounts how the British were able to break an updated version of Enigma just by grabbing code books for a boat sinking, at the cost of life of two royal navy sailors who could not escape u- 559 Before dipping in the Mediterranean.
The intelligence collected from these efforts made its way to London decision makers in bags carried by motorcyclists of sending to motorcycles. Exhibitions explain that these knights were not allowed to stop and these trips had to be completed without the benefit of road signs, those who had been removed in an effort to slow down and confuse a frightened German occupation.
Bleretchley Park exhibitions include a recreation of Alan Turing’s desk. (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
A stroll through Bretchley buildings also gives knowledge of the daily routines of this crowded campus, from meals to pneumatic tubes used to deliver messages inside the house.
You will also learn about the life of Turing, including the government’s subsequent persecution and conviction by the government for “gross indecision”, which led to his death from cyanide poisoning in 1954. Remains a problem in calculating and elsewhere that gifted people meet fanaticism because of who they are.
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(The British government thanks to the death of Turing in 2013, four years after the then prime minister Gordon Brown officially apologized for what he called the “terrifying” mistreatment of Turing.)
XIX century residence in the heart of Bleretchley Park, on the other hand, provides a compilation of running in World War II that led the Code of the United Kingdom and Cypher School to choose this place as its access to rail transport and his distance from the obvious bombing targets in and around London.
A first page of the newspaper on September 13, 1938 on the screen there is a reminder of how bad West Gabon Hitlerin: A Summary of Washington judging that a speech by the Nazi dictator seeking Czecoslovakia that speaks German “has tended to relax international tension. “
In an easier note, there are birds to see. The large basin before the residence has a swan of driving and colliding, while a side exhibition on one of the huts shows how the Allies used indoor pigeons to transport messages from the UK to partisans to Europe; When the wide band is terrible enough, pigeons can still offer wide band width.
The last stop on the Bleretchley Park map will return you immediately to the 21st century: the National Radio Center. This compact exhibition, led by the UK Radio Society, offers a good explanation of the basics of radio frequency communication, as well as a short wave station station.
That form of communication still operates on the same fundamental foundation as he did during World War II. And after decades of decline, it has become a little more important during another land conflict in Europe started without a sense by a dictator: Russia’s occupation in Ukraine.
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About Rob Pegoraro
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