[HN Gopher] The working-class hero of Bletchley Park you didn't ...
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The working-class hero of Bletchley Park you didn't see in the
movies
Author : hansmayer
Score : 66 points
Date : 2025-10-12 12:04 UTC (7 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| jleyank wrote:
| Like the early hackers, he _made things_. In Flower 's case, he
| made things than enabled hackers (eventually). While theory is
| important and interesting, actually making sh*t that works moves
| things forward.
|
| Yeah, he also helped shorten the war which saved a whole lot of
| lives.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The U-Boot commanders all knew that the Enigma had been
| cracked, but Admiral Doenitz refused to believe it.
|
| Rommel's Afrika Korps was also defeated by Enigma, because
| Rommel also refused to believe it was cracked. Enigma pointed
| out when and where Rommel's supply ships were.
|
| No matter how secure your encryption method is, one should
| always assume it is cracked. Me, I would have backed it up with
| one-time pads.
| defrost wrote:
| > all knew that the Enigma had been cracked, but Admiral
| Doenitz refused to believe it.
|
| Whereas: The dropping results made Admiral
| Donitz suspicious. Although reassured by the Abwehr, the
| German Foreign Intelligence, that Enigma was unbreakable, he
| insisted on improving the security of Enigma. On 1 February
| 1942 the famous Enigma M4 model with four rotors and new key
| sheets were introduced.
|
| ~ https://www.ciphermachinesandcryptology.com/en/enigmauboats
| ....
|
| ~ https://uboat.net/technical/enigma_ciphers.htm
|
| There were multiple Enigma variations, based on rotor choice
| pool sizes, number of fittable rotors, time cycles to
| changing procedures, etc. Some naval enigma variations were
| broken, others weren't.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > Me, I would have backed it up with one-time pads.
|
| Even one-time pads are subject to the efforts used to counter
| Enigma, such as so-called _gardening_. I fully agree that
| layers are better than a single method like Enigma was many
| times in practice, which is usually all-or-none with no
| failsafe, at least until later in the war, when Enigma
| variants started being used in combination with coded
| messages and code words on top of the Enigma cipher machines
| themselves, but those efforts were foiled by the dedication
| and planning of the gardeners' known-plaintext attacks.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardening_(cryptanalysis)
|
| > In cryptanalysis, gardening is the act of encouraging a
| target to use known plaintext in an encrypted message,
| typically by performing some action the target is sure to
| report. It was a term used during World War II at the British
| Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, England,
| for schemes to entice the Germans to include particular
| words, which the British called "cribs", in their encrypted
| messages. This term presumably came from RAF minelaying
| missions, or "gardening" sorties. "Gardening" was standard
| RAF slang for sowing mines in rivers, ports and oceans from
| low heights, possibly because each sea area around the
| European coasts was given a code-name of flowers or
| vegetables.
|
| > The technique is claimed to have been most effective
| against messages produced by the German Navy's Enigma
| machines. If the Germans had recently swept a particular area
| for mines, and analysts at Bletchley Park were in need of
| some cribs, they might (and apparently did on several
| occasions) request that the area be mined again. This would
| hopefully evoke encrypted messages from the local command
| mentioning _Minen_ (German for mines), the location, and
| perhaps messages also from the headquarters with minesweeping
| ships to assign to that location, mentioning the same. It
| worked often enough to try several times.
| ramchip wrote:
| One-time pads are not vulnerable to gardening.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I can see gardening working against Enigma alone, or one
| time pads alone, but not with the two used serially.
| drcongo wrote:
| Pretty sure anyone who knows even a tiny bit of Bletchley Park
| history is well aware of Tommy Flowers.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Did you ever see them or a character in their role in a movie?
| ViktorRay wrote:
| I don't understand why it matters whether someone was in a
| movie or not.
|
| It's a sad commentary on western culture that being in a
| movie seemingly has the importance that it seems to.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Art imitates life, except when it doesn't accurately depict
| the lived reality and efforts of those who did the work and
| won the war, in which case it's arguably closer to myth
| making. The original author of the James Bond series of
| books, for example, engaged in this kind of propaganda,
| arguably with good intentions and positive impact.
|
| It's relevant whether or not they were depicted in a movie
| because that is the context of this thread, because that is
| the topic of the fine article itself.
| Maxatar wrote:
| Doesn't make much sense to say it doesn't matter and also
| that it's sad.
|
| If it's sad then it matters, if it doesn't matter then it
| isn't sad.
| hecanjog wrote:
| I was under pretty much all the false impressions mentioned in
| the article, it was a nice introduction for me. The name comes
| up, but I never connected the dots.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| He's certainly in the histories I've read, but I guess most
| people don't read those.
|
| Also, his grandson often sits in front of my Mum and Dad at
| football matches! Although I only found that out a lot later.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I suppose knowing that they cracked Enigma (and what it is)
| there and knowing who Alan Turing is qualifies as less than a
| "tiny" amount because I had no idea who he is, and I would
| wager that's more than a large majority of the public know.
| Animats wrote:
| People who have visited Bletchley Park or are into early
| computing history know of Tommy Flowers. Few others do.
|
| He should have been involved in 1950s computing. But he went
| back to the Post Office Research Station to work on phone
| switches again. He did good work on phone switches.[1] But
| vacuum tubes in phone switches were never a good idea, and the
| technology of phone switches was its own little world. Fully
| electronic phone switches were several decades away.
|
| [1]
| https://www.communicationsmuseum.org.uk/emuseum/electronicsw...
| mwnorman2 wrote:
| Bill Tutte founded the Department of Combinatorics & Optimization
| in 1962 at the University of Waterloo (the year I was born!). No
| one knew about his Bletchley Park work until 1985; later in 2001
| he was awarded the Order of Canada (he passed away the following
| year aged 84). I was amongst the usual group of often confused
| undergraduates in his C&O classes ... his mind just operated on a
| level that few of us mere mortals could ever understand!
| charcircuit wrote:
| >He should be up there with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and all the
| rest of them, one of the great figures of the history of
| computing. He should have made as much money as they did
|
| I disagree. The amount of value companies like Microsoft and
| Apple have given the world is many many orders of magnitude than
| what this guy did. Just being early to field of computing
| shouldn't automatically make someone a "great."
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