>From: "John K. Taber" <jktaber at tacni.net>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Subject: Re: Enigma vs Tractatus (was Re:Left wing blogs
>Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2002 17:27:17 -0500
>
>Carrol Cox asked:
> >
> > >Was Enigma a complex polyalphabetic cipher or a scrambler?
>
>and Justin replied:
>
> > It was a scrambler.
>
>I'm sorry I was slow in replying, maybe some confusion could
>have been avoided. I also don't know how much detail is tolerable
>on a list like this.
>
>But no, Justin, the Enigma is a complex polyalphabetic substitution
>cipher. This is easy to demonstrate if anybody insists.
>
>I'm not sure, but I suspect that Carrol means "transposition cipher"
>when he says "scrambler." The Enigma does not transpose letters.
>
>AFAIK, the Enigma did not use the German alphabet. It used the
>standard 26 letter alphabet, which was the standard in international
>telegraphy, and international telegraphy did not support umlauts
>or the Cyrillic alphabets, or anything but 26 latin letters.
>German was spelled out: The most frequent message was
>LAGEUNVERAENDERT, umlauts spelled out ("situation unchanged").
>
>Some corrections on its breaking. It was the Poles who first
>broke the Enigma before the War began. Marion Rajewski is the
>only name I recall today, but there were three of them. They
>escaped to the British bringing their work with them. In the
>meantime the Germans complicated the Enigma beyond the resources
>that Poland could muster. I'm not sure, but I seem to remember
>that with the strengthened Enigma, the captured machine was
>important in providing the order of letters on the rotors. There
>was no reason to assume that the order was the standard
>alphabet, but so it was, which greatly aided solution.
>
>Justin must mean Andrew Hodges biography of Turing, _Alan
>Turing: The Enigma_. This is a marvelous book which I highly
>recommend. Turing was a very lonely homosexual, in math and
>the hard sciences, as well as in super secret work, not the
>arts or literature where he might have found more support.
>Hodges handles that with sensitivity, or at least so I think.
>The biography isn't anything about economics or lefty bashing,
>but despite that list readers might give it a try.
>
>Andrew Hodges maintains a web site devoted to Turing at
>http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/
>I recommend browsing it.
>
>There are pictures of Enigmas at the NSA web site
>http://www.nsa.gov/ at their web Cryptologic Museum,
>and I believe that Bletchley Park also has some pictures
>at http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/. It also has
>an explanation of how the contraption worked.
>
>But enough. On to Marx and politics.
>
>--
>John K. Taber
>
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