I am very, very pleased by the news that the entire Bletchley Park archive–millions of documents–are going to be digitized over the next few years. While I suspect the vast, vast majority of the documents won’t be of interest to me at an individual level, it will be a wonderful resource for researchers, and hobbyists. (And make no mistake, the fact that people all over the world will have access to the archive electronically dramatically alters the potential for both researchers and hobbyists to actually do that.) And those people will comb through the digital information to extract things–both individual documents, and aggregate results–that I would be very interested in. Generally speaking, I’m in favour of digitizing almost every document store, but as a long time cryptogeek, I’ve got a special place in my heart for Bletchley’s history.
Tag: cryptography
Links On A Saturday Night
Between this whole house-selling/house-buying thing, and the relatively insane week I’ve had at work, I have been neglecting the blog. Let’s catch up on a few things that have popped up in the meantime. I may have mentioned here before that I enjoyed Farmer’s Riverworld books (for getting me into Burton, among other things), and I certainly have mentioned my… Read more →
Stick Figure Crypto
I generally love when people use the comic form to explain complicated concepts. I generally love cryptography. I have a special place in my heart for stick figures. So you can imagine how I feel about Jeff Moser’s multi-stage explanation of how AES came about, and how it works. Everyone should check it out, since there’s not really anyone (at… Read more →
Saturday Night Shotgun Post
While I’m uploading some MP3s for a music post a little later tonight, let’s do the tab closing dance: Did you see the story about the scientists who unfroze the blob of 120,000 year old life in the Arctic? I can’t do my usual thing of making the news sound like a creepy SF or Lovecraftian story, since the actual… Read more →
A Monday Night Gallimaufry
Let’s see if we can close some of the myriad tabs I’ve opened in the process of trying to catch up with everything that happened in the non-work world while I was off spending time at the Melbourne office: I’m quite impressed at the 16-year old (from the city where I did my university days) who managed to isolate plastic… Read more →
Nerding It Up Tinfoil Hat Style
So, a few months back I was thinking about an upcoming trip to Boston. A trip not unlike the one I’m on right now, albeit shorter and without the 9 day, all-day meeting marathon. Anyway, I was thinking about this trip with particular reference to the USA’s apparent new policy of having border guards copy data on laptops people bring… Read more →
Explanation
I spent some time last week at a professional conference. For the most part it was a relatively valuable use of my time, but there were significant portions of time where I was stuck sitting in a room with lots of people while a particularly boring speaker was presenting. I was without a computer–the conference expressly frowned on bringing one… Read more →
A Small Challenge
Answer, and explanatory story, to follow. On the off chance that someone comments with the plaintext before I get around to telling the story, I will send them a $20 Amazon gift certificate or something like that. Read more →
Thursday Night Bookish Links
Some bookish links: Have you read Vernor Vinge‘s True Names? If you haven’t then “for shame”. According to the Wikipedia entry “It was one of the earliest stories to present a fully fleshed-out concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to stories in the cyberpunk genre. Because of this, it is often referenced as a seminal work of the… Read more →
