4 ms·

ETA: Note that I appear to have been mistaken about the connection to ENIAC. Note that it is equally dangerous to send paraphrased messages using the same key

ETA: Note that I appear to have been mistaken about the connection to ENIAC. Note that it is equally dangerous to send paraphrased messages using the same key (which is called sending messages "in depth"). This was used to crack the Lorenz ("Tunny") cipher. Interestingly Bletchley Park hadn't gotten their hands on a Lorenz machine, they cracked it based on speculation. And it lead to the development of the first tube computer, Collosus (which influenced the ENIAC). Nowadays we use nonces to avoid sending messages in depth, but nonce reuse can be similarly disastrous for systems like AES-GCM. For example there have been Bitcoin hardware wallets that reused nonces, allowing the private key to be extracted & the Bitcoin stolen. (To be clear, cryptocurrencies and AES-GCM are completely different systems that have this one property in common.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Lorenz_cipher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Lorenz_ci... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou_9ntYRzzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou_9ntYRzzw [Computerphile, 16m] As an aside does anyone know why it's called "in depth?" I'm guessing that it's related to Bletchley Park's penchant for naming things after fish? But possibly also their techniques that involved arranging messages together and sliding a stencil over them to visually spot patterns (so they're sort of overlayed)? I tried some casual searching but it's a very generic phrase and so difficult to search. It's defined in the The 1944 Bletchley Park Cryptographic Dictionary but it doesn't give an etymology. https://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/documents/cryptdict/cryptxtt.pdf https://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/documents/cryptdict/crypt... [Page 28]

onionisafruit 1y ago
My assumption about “in depth” is that it comes from the idea of giving the adversary a greater depth of material to work with. I don’t have anything to back this up.
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis#Depth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis#Depth
Stevvo 1y ago
An interesting quirk in Ethereum is that a contract address is determined by deployer address + nonce. So, you can send ETH to a contract that does not exist, then later deploy a contract there and recover it.
- tripplyons 1y ago
  It is also the same address on many forks of Ethereum, which has led to some strange circumstances when Optimism sent tens of millions of dollars to a smart contract address on the wrong blockchain, and a hacker was able to create a smart contract they controlled using the same address on the blockchain it was accidentally sent to and steal the funds.
  - trhway 1y ago
    Bug or feature. Could it have been a transfer of funds organized to look like a hack?
  - hiatus 1y ago
    Do you have a link to read more about this?
    - maxbond 1y ago
      https://gov.optimism.io/t/message-to-optimism-community-from-wintermute/2595 https://gov.optimism.io/t/message-to-optimism-community-from... I've never seen a corporate announcement whipsaw from technical incident report to tentative job offer to a threat paraphrasing the IRA before but I guess that's because I don't spend time in the cryptoasset community.
trenchpilgrim 1y ago
If you model the distribution of messages as a tree from sender to recipients, the key's reuse across messages could be measured as "depth" in a structural sense.
philwelch 1y ago
This is the first I’ve heard of Colossus influencing the ENIAC. I was under the impression that Colossus was so secret that ENIAC was designed independently and (falsely) touted as the first tube computer prior to Colossus’ existence being declassified. I’m not sure if I’m misremembering that though.
- maxbond 1y ago
  I think you're right, my mistake. I didn't find anything definitive but given they were developed around the same time by (on cursory inspection) different people and that Colossus was as secret as you say (it wasn't declassified until the 70s), it does seem unlikely. I thought that had been mentioned in a Computerphile/Numberphile video on the topic but I must be mistaken.
- Animats 1y ago
  The ENIAC seems to be the first general purpose electronic digital computer. It wasn't stored program, though - no good memory devices. Plugboards and lots of rotary switches. Took hours to load a new program. Unrelated to Colossus. The first machine to have it all was the Manchester Baby.[1] Now this really was sort of a descendant of Colossus, with some of the same people involved. It was mostly a test rig for the Williams Tube memory device. Once there was something that could do the job of RAM, things took off quickly. Within two years there were quite a number of stored program electronic digital computer projects. Electronic arithmetic worked fine, but everybody had been stuck on the memory problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Baby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Baby
  - maxbond 1y ago
    Any good books to recommend on computer history?
  - adrian_b 1y ago
    Several earlier electro-mechanical computers were closer to a modern computer than ENIAC from the point of view of program storage, as they had a clearly defined instruction set and the programs were stored on punched tape (taken from teletype machines). With ENIAC, reconfiguring the computer for solving a new problem was done essentially in the same way as for an analog computer (or nowadays for an FPGA), by rewiring the connections between the arithmetic units, the storage registers and the control sequencers, so that ENIAC will solve the new problem when powered on. The resemblance of ENIAC to an analog computer is not an accident, but its architecture has been conceived as an electronic substitute of the electro-mechanical analog computers known as "differential analyzers", which had been in widespread use both before WWII and during WWII, for computing solutions of systems of differential equations, which were found in various engineering problems, including in many of military importance. On the other hand, Harvard Mark I had been inspired by Babbage's proposal for a digital computer with stored program, hence its architecture much closer to modern digital computers. While ENIAC had an architecture inspired by the mechanical differential analyzers, for the schematics of its electronic arithmetic and register circuits it used some information from the designers of the earlier Atanasoff-Berry Computer, which was a special-purpose electronic computer for solving systems of linear algebraic equations, and which included even the first DRAM memory (the second DRAM memory will be the British Williams CRT).
andoma 1y ago
I visited Bletchley Park museum this summer when in London. Can recommend and it's also really easy to get there; just a 50 minute train ride from London Euston station, and 5 minute walk to the museum. Entire family enjoyed the museum (have two teenage kids). There is also the "National Museum of Computing" located next to it which contains the Bombe, Collosus and related equipment. As I understand it most (or all?) of the original hardware was destroyed after the war to avoid leaking any information about the British code breaking skills. Thus, the machines on display are replicas, but should be fully working. The computer museum also exhibits post-war computers all the way to modern machines. I'd say that museum is more for the geeks while the Bletchley Park museum is definitely worth a visit even if you're not into computers.
- robotresearcher 1y ago
  A personal Bletchley Park anecdote: my grandfather, an electrical engineer, staffed a radio listening station during the war, and every evening a motorcycle dispatch rider would take the day’s intercepts away to a secret location. It was more than 20 years before my grandfather figured out they went to Bletchley. In the 1980s the Bletchley museum project put out a call for wartime electrical components so they could build their Colossus replica. My grandfather in the 1950s had made a chain of Christmas tree lights from govt issue tiny light lightbulbs he pinched from work. He painstakingly removed the nail polish he had painted them with 30 years earlier, and sent them to Bletchley. They used his family Christmas lightbulbs in the replica that is still there today. I had the privilege of touring the museum with him in the 1990s. Also on that day I heard my grandmother’s stories of her time in the British Army during the war. That day was incredibly interesting and moving, and is an important memory for me.
  - toasterlovin 1y ago
    What an incredible story, thank you for sharing.
  - trhway 1y ago
    At the end of 90-s some parts sent to the Russian Mir space station were found and bought at flea market - these parts had been pinched from work and their production ceased during those years of collapse in USSR/Russia.
Animats 1y ago
As I point out now and then, Colossus was not a computer. It was a key-tester, like a Bitcoin miner. Here's the block diagram of Colossus.[1] Before there were general-purpose stored program digital computers, there were many special-purpose computing devices. They checked some, but not all, of those boxes. - IBM had electronic arithmetic in test before WWII, but that went on hold during the war. Mechanical arithmetic worked fine, although slowly, and by 1939, Columbia University and IBM had something that looked vaguely like a programmable computer, built from IBM tabulator parts. - The G.P.O. (the UK's post office and telephony provider) had been fooling around with electronic switching since 1934. That's where Tommy Flowers, who designed the electronics of Colossus, came from.[2] He had a tough life. After the war, he wanted to get into computers, but couldn't get funding because he couldn't talk about what he'd done for security reasons. - Memory was the big problem. Colossus just had some registers, built from tubes. And plugboards, the ROM technology of the 1930s and 1940s. Useful memory devices were all post-war. Needed storage to get to stored program computers. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Logical-architecture-of-Colossus-broken-down-into-its-three-main-function-units-and_fig3_345544841 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Logical-architecture-of-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers
- gerdesj 1y ago
  "Colossus was not a computer. It was a key-tester," The original definition of computer was basically a person wot computes (analyzes data and performs arithmetic and so on). That would have mostly involved pencil and paper, fag packets and napkins. IT co-opted the term for their devices, many years later. What is your issue with Colossus performing automated computations/analysis given some inputs of some sort and hence being described as a computer? One of the earliest modern day IT related truisms is "garbage in/garbage out" - that dates back to at least getting the clipper out on the cards. Can that notion be applied to Colossus or rather is Colossus the sort of device that gi/go might refer to? What exactly is a computer?
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    I think the gp was confused with other devices. Colossus was indeed a computer by most definitions. I think the poster winced it up with the Bombe or other systems - not surprising because colossus wasn’t really known for many years. (It was secret into the 1970s iirc) Other devices would calculate but not store instructions. The common ones you see are the fire directors on naval ships, which were analog “computers”, but single purpose.

onionisafruit 1y ago

My assumption about “in depth” is that it comes from the idea of giving the adversary a greater depth of material to work with. I don’t have anything to back this up.

aspenmayer 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis#Depth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis#Depth

Stevvo 1y ago

An interesting quirk in Ethereum is that a contract address is determined by deployer address + nonce. So, you can send ETH to a contract that does not exist, then later deploy a contract there and recover it.

tripplyons 1y ago
It is also the same address on many forks of Ethereum, which has led to some strange circumstances when Optimism sent tens of millions of dollars to a smart contract address on the wrong blockchain, and a hacker was able to create a smart contract they controlled using the same address on the blockchain it was accidentally sent to and steal the funds.
- trhway 1y ago
  Bug or feature. Could it have been a transfer of funds organized to look like a hack?
- hiatus 1y ago
  Do you have a link to read more about this?
  - maxbond 1y ago
    https://gov.optimism.io/t/message-to-optimism-community-from-wintermute/2595 https://gov.optimism.io/t/message-to-optimism-community-from... I've never seen a corporate announcement whipsaw from technical incident report to tentative job offer to a threat paraphrasing the IRA before but I guess that's because I don't spend time in the cryptoasset community.

trenchpilgrim 1y ago

If you model the distribution of messages as a tree from sender to recipients, the key's reuse across messages could be measured as "depth" in a structural sense.

philwelch 1y ago

This is the first I’ve heard of Colossus influencing the ENIAC. I was under the impression that Colossus was so secret that ENIAC was designed independently and (falsely) touted as the first tube computer prior to Colossus’ existence being declassified. I’m not sure if I’m misremembering that though.

maxbond 1y ago
I think you're right, my mistake. I didn't find anything definitive but given they were developed around the same time by (on cursory inspection) different people and that Colossus was as secret as you say (it wasn't declassified until the 70s), it does seem unlikely. I thought that had been mentioned in a Computerphile/Numberphile video on the topic but I must be mistaken.
Animats 1y ago
The ENIAC seems to be the first general purpose electronic digital computer. It wasn't stored program, though - no good memory devices. Plugboards and lots of rotary switches. Took hours to load a new program. Unrelated to Colossus. The first machine to have it all was the Manchester Baby.[1] Now this really was sort of a descendant of Colossus, with some of the same people involved. It was mostly a test rig for the Williams Tube memory device. Once there was something that could do the job of RAM, things took off quickly. Within two years there were quite a number of stored program electronic digital computer projects. Electronic arithmetic worked fine, but everybody had been stuck on the memory problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Baby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Baby
- maxbond 1y ago
  Any good books to recommend on computer history?
- adrian_b 1y ago
  Several earlier electro-mechanical computers were closer to a modern computer than ENIAC from the point of view of program storage, as they had a clearly defined instruction set and the programs were stored on punched tape (taken from teletype machines). With ENIAC, reconfiguring the computer for solving a new problem was done essentially in the same way as for an analog computer (or nowadays for an FPGA), by rewiring the connections between the arithmetic units, the storage registers and the control sequencers, so that ENIAC will solve the new problem when powered on. The resemblance of ENIAC to an analog computer is not an accident, but its architecture has been conceived as an electronic substitute of the electro-mechanical analog computers known as "differential analyzers", which had been in widespread use both before WWII and during WWII, for computing solutions of systems of differential equations, which were found in various engineering problems, including in many of military importance. On the other hand, Harvard Mark I had been inspired by Babbage's proposal for a digital computer with stored program, hence its architecture much closer to modern digital computers. While ENIAC had an architecture inspired by the mechanical differential analyzers, for the schematics of its electronic arithmetic and register circuits it used some information from the designers of the earlier Atanasoff-Berry Computer, which was a special-purpose electronic computer for solving systems of linear algebraic equations, and which included even the first DRAM memory (the second DRAM memory will be the British Williams CRT).

andoma 1y ago

I visited Bletchley Park museum this summer when in London. Can recommend and it's also really easy to get there; just a 50 minute train ride from London Euston station, and 5 minute walk to the museum. Entire family enjoyed the museum (have two teenage kids). There is also the "National Museum of Computing" located next to it which contains the Bombe, Collosus and related equipment. As I understand it most (or all?) of the original hardware was destroyed after the war to avoid leaking any information about the British code breaking skills. Thus, the machines on display are replicas, but should be fully working. The computer museum also exhibits post-war computers all the way to modern machines. I'd say that museum is more for the geeks while the Bletchley Park museum is definitely worth a visit even if you're not into computers.

robotresearcher 1y ago
A personal Bletchley Park anecdote: my grandfather, an electrical engineer, staffed a radio listening station during the war, and every evening a motorcycle dispatch rider would take the day’s intercepts away to a secret location. It was more than 20 years before my grandfather figured out they went to Bletchley. In the 1980s the Bletchley museum project put out a call for wartime electrical components so they could build their Colossus replica. My grandfather in the 1950s had made a chain of Christmas tree lights from govt issue tiny light lightbulbs he pinched from work. He painstakingly removed the nail polish he had painted them with 30 years earlier, and sent them to Bletchley. They used his family Christmas lightbulbs in the replica that is still there today. I had the privilege of touring the museum with him in the 1990s. Also on that day I heard my grandmother’s stories of her time in the British Army during the war. That day was incredibly interesting and moving, and is an important memory for me.
- toasterlovin 1y ago
  What an incredible story, thank you for sharing.
- trhway 1y ago
  At the end of 90-s some parts sent to the Russian Mir space station were found and bought at flea market - these parts had been pinched from work and their production ceased during those years of collapse in USSR/Russia.

Animats 1y ago

As I point out now and then, Colossus was not a computer. It was a key-tester, like a Bitcoin miner. Here's the block diagram of Colossus.[1] Before there were general-purpose stored program digital computers, there were many special-purpose computing devices. They checked some, but not all, of those boxes. - IBM had electronic arithmetic in test before WWII, but that went on hold during the war. Mechanical arithmetic worked fine, although slowly, and by 1939, Columbia University and IBM had something that looked vaguely like a programmable computer, built from IBM tabulator parts. - The G.P.O. (the UK's post office and telephony provider) had been fooling around with electronic switching since 1934. That's where Tommy Flowers, who designed the electronics of Colossus, came from.[2] He had a tough life. After the war, he wanted to get into computers, but couldn't get funding because he couldn't talk about what he'd done for security reasons. - Memory was the big problem. Colossus just had some registers, built from tubes. And plugboards, the ROM technology of the 1930s and 1940s. Useful memory devices were all post-war. Needed storage to get to stored program computers. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Logical-architecture-of-Colossus-broken-down-into-its-three-main-function-units-and_fig3_345544841 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Logical-architecture-of-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers

gerdesj 1y ago
"Colossus was not a computer. It was a key-tester," The original definition of computer was basically a person wot computes (analyzes data and performs arithmetic and so on). That would have mostly involved pencil and paper, fag packets and napkins. IT co-opted the term for their devices, many years later. What is your issue with Colossus performing automated computations/analysis given some inputs of some sort and hence being described as a computer? One of the earliest modern day IT related truisms is "garbage in/garbage out" - that dates back to at least getting the clipper out on the cards. Can that notion be applied to Colossus or rather is Colossus the sort of device that gi/go might refer to? What exactly is a computer?
- Spooky23 1y ago
  I think the gp was confused with other devices. Colossus was indeed a computer by most definitions. I think the poster winced it up with the Bombe or other systems - not surprising because colossus wasn’t really known for many years. (It was secret into the 1970s iirc) Other devices would calculate but not store instructions. The common ones you see are the fire directors on naval ships, which were analog “computers”, but single purpose.