Sunday Night Notes -- September 22, 2024

Locator: 48365TECH.

Mideast: the question that needs to be asked -- why is Israel moving so fast now? Lebanon, Hezbollah. There will be a story out tomorrow in The WSJ that may shed some answers, but it will require connecting some dots. Just thinking out loud.

Politics, link here: 

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The Book Page

Geniuses At War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age, David A. Price, c. 2021.

The Allies were reading German secret messages at will.

Until just after D-Day. Then, without explanation, the Germans made changes to their system. The Allies were working feverishly but unsuccessfully to break in, to solve the problem. The allies were using a "huge" computer dubbed Colossus (Mark) I and Colossus (Mark) II.

From page 154 with editing: 

The Germans had made a number of changes, the most important of which was that they were changing the patterns of all twelve wheels [on their machine} not monthly, as they had in the past, but daily. Wheel patters that worked on messages of one day wouldn't work on those of another day. Translating this knowledge into effective action was another matter. The wheel patterns were distinct from the wheel settings ... the  computational burden of working out the wheel patterns every day, rather than once at the beginning of the month would be enormous. "The problem of solving current traffic seems completely hopeless," wrote the director.

But it wasn't quite completely hopeless. It turns out the [engineers] had designed enough flexibility into the Colossi that they could be programmed for attacking the wheel patterns. Until then, that flexibility had been a theoretical gambit; now their idea would be put into practice. 

Three more Colossu Mark II machines arrived over the next three months (late summer, 1944). The added power more than overcame the daily wheel changes. One month later, cracking coded messages was surpassing the cryptographers' previous records.

And Colossi kept arriving; as Block F filled, new machines went to a newly constructed Block H next door. Including Colossus I, a total of ten machines were installed by April, 1945, an overwhelming force. Exploiting them was a constant growing staff of cryptographers, engineers and Wrens.

Production of an eleventh Colossus started on May 8, 1945. But the work was soon halted; it was V-E day, and the war was over.

As I read that, I couldn't help but think of Nvidia and the Blackwell GB200 NVL 72 and the race to get them to market. 

And then I thought. Who else would be ordering as many as they could get. Quick. Anyone else involved in cryptography? NSA, perhaps. Deep pockets.

And those large data centers? They aren't static. As time goes on, they will replace the "200's" with the next upgrade. 

Never quit reading.

Geniuses At War was published in 2021. The author seems not to have a background in cryptograpohy. Where do I go next. I don't know but this looks like a good start.

My copy of Geniuses is from the library. I may order my own copy to place side-by-side with Gannon's Colossus. We'll see.

The Geniuses epilogue is bittersweet -- more bitter than sweet. Turing's suicide? 

From the epilogue, p. 167:

The recognition accorded to the participants in Bletchley Park's success varied enormously. During the final year of the war, Edward Travis, head of Bletchley Park from February 1942 onward, was knighted as a KCMG, for Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George, sometimes rendered as "Kindly Call Me God." His predecessor, Alastair Denniston, received no honors and would die in 1961 without an obituary in the London newspapers. Flowers was named an MBE, an almost negligible honor, and received an award of one thousand pounds, said to have been less than he spent on Colossus out of his own pocket. 

Turing received an OBE, a level above an MBE but still minor, especially next to his contributions to the war; Newman said that Turing accepted it "rather as a joke." Turing stored his OBE medal in a tin box together with nails, screws, nuts and other miscellaneous hardware. Newman was offered the same award but turned it down, disgusted by what he considered the government's "ludicrous" ingratitude toward his former student. (Seven decades later, in 2015, the actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who had the role of Turing in a feature film the preceding year, would receive a CBE, a higher honor than the one given to the war hero he had portrayed.)