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Doesn’t matter. You’re interpreting it as some stupid message, when it’s literally a bored 19 year old pressing which ever key is most convenient again and agai
by jonathankoren 3y ago
Doesn’t matter. You’re interpreting it as some stupid message, when it’s literally a bored 19 year old pressing which ever key is most convenient again and again and again and again… simply to create bogus radio traffic.
There were tons of bogus messages where the wheels were set to whatever German teenager’s favorite four letter swear word was.
- bragr 3y agoIIRC there was one German operator who used his sweetheart's initials over and over as the combination allowing for decryption.
- jonathankoren 3y agoI believe these single letter "messages" were useful in quickly determining the day's setup, and maybe wiring diagrams, but I'm not sure about the last part.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y agoI wonder if they had the passwords as post-its next to the machine…
- littlestymaar 3y agoPost-it only got invented in 1968 unfortunately.
- boffinAudio 3y agoBack then, post-its were called slates.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoWasn't it all messages ending with "heil hitler"? I mean that could be the operator's sweetheart in a way.
- bragr 3y agoSort of, but that's a massive oversimplification. The bomba machines needed shorts "cribs" of expected plain text to search against, like "heil hitler" as you mentioned, and I think usually they went after the standard start of the day weather report. But the bomba only can reduce the search space, it doesn't produce the answer, and analysts still need to manually break it. So yes but it was hard so they also took advantage of operator error where ever possible. This stack exchange explain it well: https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/30332/why-does-the-term-cilly-begin-at-the-start-of-every-message-in-the-imitation https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/30332/why-does-th...
- Rebelgecko 3y agoMust be human nature. When I used an enigma machine at a museum, the first thing I did was try to make it light up with a 4 letter word. It does help that 4 letters of ciphertext is easier to remember :)
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoI can imagine some “adversarial gloves” (with regard to https://adversarialfashion.com/ https://adversarialfashion.com/) for VisionOS which allows someone who’s not wearing the goggles to have their hand gestures interpreted in various ways, including the ability to make an obscene gesture -- localized to the goggle-wearer’s location, of course -- at said goggle-wearer to be interpreted as the system-configured shutdown gesture. I’m inclined to agree with you that it must be (read: I hope it is) human nature, given my enjoyment of machine exploits. Makes me wonder about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36470438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36470438 (“A brief history of insults”). (I know I’ll be likely to use my goggles-computer exclusively in private places.)
- pests 3y agoDid you post this on the wrong thread?
- codetrotter 3y agoMaybe there will be an Enigma machine app for VisionOS
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoI did not. I’d considered whether it was off-topic or not and concluded that it was not given the direction of discussion up to the point of my comment. We’re several comments deep after one tangent from “enigma machine exploits” to “obscenities with enigma machine exploits” and my tangent to “obscenities with hypothetical-but-not-yet-implemented machine exploits”. I can understand that it seems out of place, though I also disagree that it is out of place. (Really, the biggest reason I had against posting it was the knee-jerk reaction some people will have towards presumed Apple fanboys preempting any consideration that an idea could be relevant. It might be worth giving that a thought.)