July 2007 - TommyLog

AMAZING!!!

Enigma machine on eBay

David Pescovitz:

Every so often, an authentic Enigma machine, turns up on eBay. The Enigma machine, introduced in 1923 by the Chiffriermaschinen Aktien-Gesellschaft (Cipher Machines Stock Corporation), was used by the Germans to encrypt messages during World War II. With eight days left in the auction, the current bid on this specimen is $10,100 and the reserve has not been met. According the auction listing, this Enigma is in “museum condition” and includes extra lamps. Here’s a description of the Enigma that I wrote for a 1999 article in Wired:

German soldiers issued an Enigma were to make no mistake about their orders if captured: Shoot it or throw it overboard.

Based on electronic typewriters invented in the 1920s, the infamous Enigma encryption machines of World War II were controlled by wheels set with the code du jour. Each letter typed would illuminate the appropriate character to send in the coded message.

In 1940, building on work by Polish code breakers, Alan Turing and his colleagues at the famed UK cryptography center Bletchley Park devised the Bombe, a mechanical computer that deciphered Enigma-encoded messages. Even as the Nazis beefed up the Enigma architecture by adding more wheels, the codes could be cracked at the Naval Security Station in Washington, DC – giving the Allies the upper hand in the Battle of the Atlantic. The fact that the Allies had cracked the Enigma code was not officially confirmed until the 1970s.

Link

Previously on BB:
â€¢ Enigma machine spotted on eBay Link (via Neatorama)

Originally posted by David Pescovitz from Boing Boing

Last Harry Potter leaks online

Cory Doctorow:
The new Harry Potter novel — Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — has hit the Internet days before its publication. The publisher spent a reported $20 million on keeping the book secret. Was the money well-spent? As Bruce Schneier points out, the kind of person who downloads a series of photos of the pages of a giant novel is also the kind of person who’ll line up and buy a copy the night it comes out.

Me, I’m just glad to finally know what happens who dies at the end of the final Harry Potter novel — SPOILER ALERT! Select the text below to read it.

The publishing industry.

Seriously, though. With the last book, the publisher was so freaked out about ebook “piracy” that they refused to release an official electronic edition. The result? Fans made their own electronic text in 24 hours. And other fans translated the book into German in 45 hours.

That’a a lot of fan-energy, sitting out there, looking for ways to love these books. Surely there’s a smarter way to deal with that kind of love than attempting to suppress it?

Four days before it hits bookstores, I’ve got a copy of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” I downloaded it from a link posted at the Bittorrent file-sharing site the Pirate Bay.

But hold on. It’s not as sweet as it sounds. What I’ve got is not really the book but a series of photographs of the book — someone has meticulously snapped shots of each page. Some who’ve discussed leaked copies say that they’ve seen only Pages 1 through 495. But the copy I have includes all the pages; I could, if I wanted to, tell you the very last line of the very last Harry Potter book right now.

Link,
Link to Deathly Hallows torrents on The Pirate Bay

Originally posted by Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing

Crook reprograms ATM in PA to think $20s are $1s

Xeni Jardin:
Over at the Wired News Threat Level blog, Kevin Poulsen has an item up about a recent ATM robbery in Pennsylvania in which an unidentified, beflipflopped guy in shorts….

…strolled into Mastrorocco’s Market and reprogrammed the cash machine to think it was dispensing dollar bills instead of twenties. Along with a female accomplice, the crook netted over $1,540 in two visits on June 19 and 20, according to store owner Vince Mastrorocco. “They came in, they hit me the first day — a man and a woman — and they cleaned me out,” Mastrorocco told THREAT LEVEL. “Then they came back the next day and cleaned me out again.”

A sergeant with the Derry Borough Police Department they’re still investigating the crime, and no arrests have been made.

Of course, THREAT LEVEL readers know exactly what happened. The machine was a Triton 9100, and like competitor Tranax, Triton printed its default administrative passcodes in its ATM service manuals, which have been widely available online. We reported on this last September after a Virginia Beach gas station ATM (a Tranax) got hit with the same hack.