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This is fascinating and would make for an excellent long-form article. Most people don't think of WWII as being a theater with particularly advanced electronic

This is fascinating and would make for an excellent long-form article. Most people don't think of WWII as being a theater with particularly advanced electronic warfare going on. It's a shame this is presented as a twitter thread.

dragontamer 5y ago
> Most people don't think of WWII as being a theater with particularly advanced electronic warfare going on. Ehh? At a minimum, WWII was when cryptography and code-breaking became popular. The Battle of Midway was an overwhelming American victory because the USA effectively hacked the Japanese codes and reversed the trap. Thousands of code-breakers were employed to try to crack the Enigma machine, and only one exotic project by Mr. Alan Turing (THE Alan Turing, the father of modern computers) was able to break it. ------ While radios existed in WWI, they were still somewhat exotic. By WWII, every single tank, ship, and airplane was equipped with radios, and those communications were 100% the target of many exotic attacks. England experimented on new forms of Radio, such as RADAR. Germany began to use radio-guided missiles (the V1 "Flying Bombs" were radio-guided by Morse Code... primitive by today's standards but obviously open to electronic attack if you could just figure out the codes). WW2 was the start of electronic warfare on every front. Radio-guided weapons, jamming, radar, even cryptography and information security. Sure: these electronics in WW2 were pretty bad by modern standards. But they were still electronics and computers and integral to both the Pacific and European theaters. I'd argue that cryptography and code-breaking is one of the highest forms of electronic warfare, its practically the invention of the information-security fields (HTTPS, SSL, TLS, etc. etc.) that we use to... well... chat on Hacker News, among other things.
- p_l 5y ago
  Fortunately Turing was given complete method to crack Enigma before the war started, eh? (Turing is responsible for bringing the computational complexity down and figuring Turing Machine from the multi-team work on Bombe, Colossus and other automated code breaking machines).
- onecommentman 5y ago
  “Alan Turing, the father of modern computers”? A (very important) father of modern computers. Canonization is unnecessary.
deeviant 5y ago
dang 5y ago
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- onecommentman 5y ago
  True, but in this case the comments really aren’t about this single Twitter thread, but the use of Twitter threads in lieu of a Webpage. This discussion is of current and general relevance about that particular format, using this great content as an example. It’s not that common in this case. Not a topic hijacking, but indirectly meeting a need that hasn’t been met by anyone posting an article addressing the Twitter thread issue as it has evolved over the last several months. This discussion has the benefit of a concrete example. Perhaps someone could post an article that focuses just on Twitter threads and the discussion can continue there?
  - dang 5y ago
    > the use of Twitter threads in lieu of a Webpage Yes, this is an extremely common complaint which has taken so many HN threads so far off topic that it just needs to stop. Nothing so repetitive is interesting. Some people choose to post great content in a series of tweets—for whatever reason. It's the way the world is and complaining about it on HN doesn't help. We specifically changed that guideline to say "article or website formats" in order to clearly cover this case.
- margalabargala 5y ago
  You're right, sorry about that.
KineticLensman 5y ago
Luckily there are some good links to 'proper' PDF sources, e.g. [0] [0] https://www.aerosociety.com/media/15088/2020-06-36-bs-rcm-ops-18-nov-20.pdf https://www.aerosociety.com/media/15088/2020-06-36-bs-rcm-op...

dragontamer 5y ago

> Most people don't think of WWII as being a theater with particularly advanced electronic warfare going on. Ehh? At a minimum, WWII was when cryptography and code-breaking became popular. The Battle of Midway was an overwhelming American victory because the USA effectively hacked the Japanese codes and reversed the trap. Thousands of code-breakers were employed to try to crack the Enigma machine, and only one exotic project by Mr. Alan Turing (THE Alan Turing, the father of modern computers) was able to break it. ------ While radios existed in WWI, they were still somewhat exotic. By WWII, every single tank, ship, and airplane was equipped with radios, and those communications were 100% the target of many exotic attacks. England experimented on new forms of Radio, such as RADAR. Germany began to use radio-guided missiles (the V1 "Flying Bombs" were radio-guided by Morse Code... primitive by today's standards but obviously open to electronic attack if you could just figure out the codes). WW2 was the start of electronic warfare on every front. Radio-guided weapons, jamming, radar, even cryptography and information security. Sure: these electronics in WW2 were pretty bad by modern standards. But they were still electronics and computers and integral to both the Pacific and European theaters. I'd argue that cryptography and code-breaking is one of the highest forms of electronic warfare, its practically the invention of the information-security fields (HTTPS, SSL, TLS, etc. etc.) that we use to... well... chat on Hacker News, among other things.

p_l 5y ago
Fortunately Turing was given complete method to crack Enigma before the war started, eh? (Turing is responsible for bringing the computational complexity down and figuring Turing Machine from the multi-team work on Bombe, Colossus and other automated code breaking machines).
onecommentman 5y ago
“Alan Turing, the father of modern computers”? A (very important) father of modern computers. Canonization is unnecessary.

deeviant 5y ago

dang 5y ago

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

onecommentman 5y ago
True, but in this case the comments really aren’t about this single Twitter thread, but the use of Twitter threads in lieu of a Webpage. This discussion is of current and general relevance about that particular format, using this great content as an example. It’s not that common in this case. Not a topic hijacking, but indirectly meeting a need that hasn’t been met by anyone posting an article addressing the Twitter thread issue as it has evolved over the last several months. This discussion has the benefit of a concrete example. Perhaps someone could post an article that focuses just on Twitter threads and the discussion can continue there?
- dang 5y ago
  > the use of Twitter threads in lieu of a Webpage Yes, this is an extremely common complaint which has taken so many HN threads so far off topic that it just needs to stop. Nothing so repetitive is interesting. Some people choose to post great content in a series of tweets—for whatever reason. It's the way the world is and complaining about it on HN doesn't help. We specifically changed that guideline to say "article or website formats" in order to clearly cover this case.
margalabargala 5y ago
You're right, sorry about that.

KineticLensman 5y ago

Luckily there are some good links to 'proper' PDF sources, e.g. [0] [0] https://www.aerosociety.com/media/15088/2020-06-36-bs-rcm-ops-18-nov-20.pdf https://www.aerosociety.com/media/15088/2020-06-36-bs-rcm-op...