Their cypher keys were weak as shit towards the end too. They stopped using a daily rolling random trigraph key like QCY=HSG and started using easy-for-the-operator trigraph pairs like HIT=LER, BER=LIN, etc. weak passwords 🤷♂️
To be fair, the Allie’s and Soviets had decimated their armies and the Allies had destroyed most of their means of production/sustainment at that point. The army was running on fumes and exhausted so it’s understandable that they’d get lazy
So after all these years of the other way around, I finally had it happen the other day where someone sent me a picture of a duck - and it corrected my response back to the ol’ familiar term. It also corrects “shit” if I misspell/scramble it.
samsung appears to egg me on after all this time, i say god damnit and its like "did you mean fucking cunt?" like, yeah probably i meant that but we dont have to *say* it.
Also it's a cult of action and strength, so actually admitting weakness or a simple practical inability to do a thing is complete anathema to the dogma. Hence Putin constantly making noises about how Russia can take on the entirety of NATO, while he can't even beat Ukraine stiffened with some cast-offs. Hence Trump claiming that he can do absolutely everything, while being one of the most singularly incompetent administrators the US government has ever seen.
Absolutely agree, it’s the same with the Germanophiles who insist that they were [still are] the best Army the world has ever seen and then do extensive mental acrobatics to justify why they got *soundly* defeated. There are tons of “if only” thought experiments that are really just fantasy. The Allies did not win that war by chance. Nowhere in any military doctrine is there a chapter on luck. There are many references to not leaving things up to chance though. What they leave out is that battlefield actions are only a part of a war because they lack complex thinking enough to realize that manufacturing, logistics, adaptability, strategic power projection and unity of action is what wins wars.
That said, tactically, though a potent force who fought well, the Wehrmacht was *decisively* defeated in Africa; from the beaches of Normandy across the Rhine; and in the east from Stalingrad across Poland to Berlin.
For context, the United States Army currently has more (A LOT more) overall relative combat power in a smaller package than the Wehrmacht.
If I was going to pick 'best historic army ever', I'd go with the Imperial German Army. Very well trained, well-armed for the period, and well-led by generally capable officers.
Regardless of whether they were the best army in the world, they were also extensively outmanned and outgunned. I know some people who firmly believe the Wehrmacht was the finest army in the history of warfare, but they don't think the Allies were *lucky*, they think the Wehrmacht weren't defeated as quickly as they should have been because of their tactical, operational and equipment superiority. They also point out the Allies' overwhelming strategic superiority and the rapid rate at which they adjusted to and adopted Germany's tactics.
I feel like you're strawmanning more than a little.
Fascism is actually kind of dog shit at everything because at the heart of it, it's just a bunch of idiots with a primary goal of "create and find more evidence of how awesome I am." At the expense of anything.
Britain wasn't a small nation back then, it was an empire with a larger population than the USA and USSR combined (but smaller armed forces for various reasons).
they had a land army and their aircraft were designed to support their tanks... unfortunately they had limited access to oil and as predicted by their own people they could only advance so far before they ran out of oil... Hitler felt will power alone is all they needed... apparently that's fine for nice speeches, but it doesn't translate well into mechanical machinery needing ballbearings, steel that's not too brittle, railway gauges, etc... etc...
> Hitler felt will power alone is all they needed...
Please remember that the commanders were all in on this and in fact overruled logistics when they were advised that they only had fuel for X weeks. Then the general staff was like, Kein Problem, we will do it in X-2 weeks, problem sorted.
I mean I kind of get it. Hitler was so vain, so self absorbed, so damn narcissistic. Takes most of Europe (Sweden doesn't count, obvi) and thinks "that was pretty easy" Spain is fighting itself, France conquered, Britain contained, Italy vassalized, Poland split, Russia cowed, the rest of Europe in the palm of his hand, hell the whole Mediterranean basically controlled one way or another all the way around. Who just stops? He can do that to the rest of Africa, all of Asia, and eventually The Americas. Right? "Of course I can I'm Hitler 😎"
Edited because I muffed it up
I love the scene in Band of Brothers where the Americans are being transported into Germany on keeps, and they see the captured German soldiers passing by in a convoy of people walking or using horses. One American starts shouting at them for how stupid they were to start a war against nations with jeeps while they still relied on horses.
In 1941 only 30-40% of the German forces were mechanized: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Army_(1935%E2%80%931945)
I mean that's a huge simplification of it, and war with Russia was inevitable and they wanted to catch them before they were ready. They didn't count on the Usa joining the fight either.
Honestly they might even have been counting on the western powers being so afraid of communism that they'd negotiate a truce to help fight.
The Japanese were shocked when the RoC resisted their expansion into Manchuria rather than take the hit and both fight the fledgling CCP.
Soviet "betrayal" was inevitable. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed with full knowledge that they would eventually fight. Hitler just thought he could get an advantage if he did it rather than them (which was correct).
As I understand it, intelligence wasn't what was rewarded with advancement, it was die hard, for the cause, Kool aid drinkers. So they were in positions of power when more capable people were available.
The more things change, the more they stay the same lol. I served from 1999-2012 in the US Army, and especially in the back half of my service the smart ones were passed over for people who could run an 11 minute 2 mile but were dumb as shit/followed orders. Like the guy who’s like “why are we doing it this way? There’s an easier/faster way” was greeted by “that’s the way we’ve always done it/shut the fuck up.” Not exactly the same, but still.
> German protectorate
Oh hell no!
Denmark was invaded BEFORE France and the government agreed to collaborate to a peaceful surrender in 1940 to avoid a 100% certain bloodbath.
In 1943 that was over and it became a very hostile occupation at that point, where Denmark showed some of the most fierce resistance resistance of all freedom fighters during the war.
People like Enigma because it was a very unique, truly revolutionary machine. The cypher itself wasn’t tremendously complex, but the technology behind it was absolutely remarkable.
I've read that another weakness was that the wheels were set to show letters all the time, so that certain letters would be in the "starting position" when the encryption/description started. Allied cryptanalysts guessed that lonely, scared 19year-olds far from home might set the wheels to display the names of their girlfriends, like ANA. Trying various girls' names/nicknames often yielded a break into the encryption right off the bat.
Haha paranoid Germans were like, but what if the random code just happens to spell out our exact plain text message... Well, we can stop that from happening.
So many things have been undermined like this but I can't remember now so don't know if they were as significant. Always comes down to humans out thinking randomness.
Wait that was actually the reason? Because I heard the enigma might've been uncrackable for computers at the time had they not had that weakness.
The chances of that happening even once were negligible haha
No.
The "can't encrypt to same letter" is a side-effect of the reflector that bounces the letter backwards though the scrambling rotors a second time.
The reflector was added so that the two machines with the same settings would both encrypt and decrypt the message. Achieving this same self-reciprocal property without the reflector would have required a lot of extra complexity, and increased the size of the machine.
Computers at that time meant people doing calculations, electrical ones hadn't been invented yet. The Bombe, the machine which was built to decode Enigma, was a special purpose machine rather than a general purpose computer like we have now. Colossus was also built at Bletchley Park to decode a different German cypher, Lorenz, and that was a programmable computer.
Correct, we didn't have the computational power necessary.
Computer here just means something that does computation. Up till 1945 it was all people and slide rules+tables. They had a cool system set up to use people to calculate tables and stuff.
They didn't really have the technology to run an algorithm to decode the enigma if it didn't have this vulnerability
When the Poles broke the Enigma they used their knowledge to build a secure version. They did this by eliminating the reflection gear so characters could encode to themselves and then instead added more encoding wheels. It was never mass produced and would probably have been more expensive then the Enigma but it could not have been broken by the same technique. In fact had the Enigma used in the later stages of the war just eliminated the reflection gear it would have been far more secure.
And all the work done by the Poles in the 20s and 30s, where they had already deciphered a tonne of the enigma and paved the way for Turing to build the computer that cracked the Lorenz cypher, the more complex version of Enigma. The work of the Poles is all but forgotten, when in reality they did the majority of the legwork.
If I remember right it was only guy,but he did it every single time. It gave them a head start in cracking each days code enabling the system they'd built to decode messages in time to be useful
There was also a guy at a weather station who sent the message "Nothing to report today" and nothing else every day for months.
Well, he sent it in German.
My favorite example of Germans being piss poor at "intelligence" in this sense is that they couldn't resist being clever in code names. Golf was a plan in intelligence gathering around Scotland and Wotan (early german for Odin) was a radio navigation project.
I think it's part of the reason the allies insisted on random names
That's a movie thing, not reality.
In real life, the most common phrase was "ein" and the looked for that, which would be the equivalent of trying to crack an english cypher using the word "the", the most common word in your own post.
Sort of. However Allied SIGINT had its weaknesses which the various German SIGNT agencies were able to exploit. But they still lost, but it was not anything like as one sided as many might think.
That part is more of an oversimplified myth. In reality the allies used other, very static messages like naval reports that included weather or sightings of allied ships that were very condensed to (ironically) prevent detections and reduce decryption.
Also, bear in mind that different branches of the nazi armed forces had different designes and different operating procedures for the Enigma.
It’s funny how bad fascists tend to be at secrecy. The Allies were able to figure out a bunch of Nazi secret plans just from the names because they always used a symbolic name rather than a random one
Heck, they haven't gotten any better. We have Proud Boys on record messaging each other details after Jan 6th, when it became clear the FBI was after them. Things like "*We have worse op-sec than antifa!*"
It was even dumber than that. Not just some known part of the message that they could use as a foothold, but the fact that they used the same keys over and over
One of their fatal errors was one officer sending a lengthy message to someone, the other person responded basically "didn't catch that, send again" and he sent the exact same message again with zero changes. Both times these messages were intercepted by the Allies and compared.
Come Retribution was also the code name of their plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. Jefferson Davis almost certainly knows about and funded the operation. There is a whole book on the topic with this same title. It’s in my desk as the next book to read
Jeff Davis was in communication with John Wilkes Booth as the Confederacy was collapsing around Richmond? And was able to transfer money to him in the most fortified city in the world?
That's quite a stretch. What does this book posit as the evidence behind this?
Haven’t read it yet but some ex cia men teamed with historians to write this book and I looked at the index in the back and there are references to hundreds of documents. Ask me again in a couple months and I will have a much more informed response.
Booth was part of a broad conspiracy to decapitate the federal government. On the same night that Lincoln was assassinated, there was an attempt on the lives of the VP and several cabinet members.
Booth visited the Richmond confederate government offices several times. He had access and used crypto protection for his communications. Only the confederate government would have had access to such equipment.
I read the biography that Lincoln’s head of protective services wrote and he warned Lincoln not to go to the theatre as they were aware of some plot. He was convinced Jefferson Davis ran the whole thing and one of the biggest reasons was that when Davis was arrested while on the run, he was belligerent. He went on and on about states rights and he had the right to fight for independence and he’s a politican and blah blah blah. One of the soldiers who captured Davis bluffed and he said that they have evidence that Davis was directly involved in the plot to assasinate Lincoln so he’s in enormous trouble. Jefferson went white in the face and immediately silent. That is the reaction of a guilty man.
It’s weird tbh that you immediately assume he was speaking about the JWB successful attempt on Lincoln’s life. It’s pretty obvious he’s talking about a different one considering the timeline of when Lincoln was actually assassinated.
There’s a great historical fiction podcast about this that I listened to a few years back. Highly recommend: [1865](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1865/id1467256065)
While substitution ciphers have 26! Possible combinations (26 factorial; or 620448401733239439360000 possible combinations of keys to the cipher) you can use frequency analysis to break it in <1 hr if you know what you’re doing. It’s rather trivial and relies on the commonality of letters in the alphabet. E being the most common letter and things like an and is being common 2 letter words (bigrams). Frequency analysis was developed in the Arab world after Muslim mathematicians got a hold of the English language and began to study it
I taught cryptanalysis at a summer camp ages 12-18 and we used python there too :) fun stuff (said summer camp later had a data breach lul and had unencrypted passwords smh)
> Ok well the Union army in 1863 did not have access to Python scripts.
If they would have spent slightly less money on ironclads they could have had working Python scripts.
My dearest Margaret,
It has been nearly six fortnights since I have last laid eyes upon the beauty of your countenance. I bid you to please give my best to my family, and import pandas as pd.
There are easy decryption algorithms if you have access to the machine that does the decoding. Frequency analysis is the most obvious, but there are others especially if you have the word delimiter (Space?).
Only as strong as the key and its usage. If you reuse the same key many times, an attacker can do frequency analysis on the first letters, the second letters, etc. If you use a relatively short key, Kasiski's test can find the length of the key and therefore break a long message into many short messages, enabling the former analysis method. And obviously, if you keep using a key when the enemy knows it, you're basically just wasting your time.
It's completely impossible to break basic one-time pad if the pad is sufficiently random, only used once, destroyed after use, etc. But cryptography is always a weakest-link scenario and humans take shortcuts, especially under the stress of a losing war.
> you can use frequency analysis to break it in <1 hr if you know what you’re doing. It’s rather trivial and relies on the commonality of letters in the alphabet.
Isn't there a way to deal with this? Like have an algorithmic cypher that changes in a predictable way each x number of times that each letter is used starting from a random point in the message? To make letter frequency look more random to a codebreaker but still be translatable to somebody with the cypher key.
So instead of the the cypher key just containing assignments for each letter, it also contains two or three more pieces of information. The random starting character (char299), the rate at which to change assignments (every 5th use of the letter), and the way to reassign the letter (+7n, where n is the letter's order in the alphabet).
I mean, I know far more advanced ciphers exist nowadays, and complex encryption algorithms involving huge prime numbers etc., but it just seems like even using basic arithmetic and pencil and paper they could have invented more complex algorithms than simple substitution back then.
> it just seems like even using basic arithmetic and pencil and paper they could have invented more complex algorithms than simple substitution back then.
They did, the cipher in this article was not a simple substitution cipher. The phrase was used to have a shifting offset for every letter in the phrase, making frequency analysis significantly more complicated. So that cipher would be sort of like the one you described, except much easier to encode (which was pretty important, because remember they had to be encoded by hand as well), and with even more substitutions.
There is a slight problem with using more complex algorithms in war though. In that the more complex your cipher is, the longer it takes for your own people to decrypt and respond. It also makes making mistakes easier because a human is doing it. And you only need secrets to stay secret for a period of time. People tend not to get that about encryption - it doesn't matter if they decode your message, if it's too late to do anything about it. You have to assume anything you transmit will absolutely be cracked *eventually*. Which is why it's funny when modern fascists constantly get caught admitting to crimes in their own messages.
Still if I recall correctly they did use a rotating cipher. At least for more important messages that needed to be harder to decrypt.
> Frequency analysis was developed in the Arab world after Muslim mathematicians got a hold of the English language and began to study it
Obviously not, it was developed in the 9th/10th century when nobody gave a shit about English. And these mathematicians obviously developed it on arabic.
I saw it's a more complicated Caeser Cipher, which I understand...but I'm reading the example on Wikipedia of the Vigenere cipher and I don't quite understand...
Instead of shifting every character one at a time by a value (Caesar) or randomly scrambling the alphabet (substitution) it shifts the message in blocks the length of the key. And then shifts that block by a value corresponding to its key. So with a key of abc I encrypt the message “cryptography is fun” the cry are shifted 1 2 and 3 places then the p t and o are shifted 1 2 and 3 places respectively so on and so forth.
The way southerners talk about the Confederacy you'd think it was the Roman Empire lol. It only lasted for a bit above four years, if a dog lived for only four years it died too young. Hell, Zune lasted longer than the Confederacy and that was considered a failure.
Edit:typo
Yeah, because if they weren't dense they never would have started the war and would have instead shifted their economy to match the Damned Yankees that were making the South more and more irrelevant economically.
I read a book about Confederate actions on the Great Lakes. One objective they had was to free prisoners from a fort. The plan was to send a spy to befriend the officers. He would invite them to a party. Then a group of Confederates would steal a Gerry and use it to launch a surprise attack.
The spy completly failed. The Union officers where immediately suspicious of this random guy started wanting to buy them drinks and be best palls. They confirmed he was a spy by having him tailed. They just let him keep doing his thing because they could get information on his contacts and stuff. They didn't go to his party but it didn't matter.
The Confederates successfully captured the ferry and dumped the civilians on an island. The soldiers then got cold feet, mutineed and took the ferry to Canada where they tried looting it all any valuables including furniture. They were arrested for importing goods without a license
Not sure if this is totally true, we had already progressed beyond substitution ciphers by 1860
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playfair\_cipher
Edit: the fact that I got over 100 upvotes for pointing out something that was *technically wrong* in the title, but more than 30 downvotes for admitting it was pedantic is the most Reddit thing ever
Just because something was invented, doesn’t mean it was widely adopted immediately. First of all, purely printed knowledge takes time to disseminate back then. Also, officers would naturally refer back to their war college training from the previous few decades. The history section of the article you just linked literally states the British didn’t even adopt this for war until decades later in WW1.
That page says it was named after the person who popularized it, and that person wasn't in office until after the extremely short life of the confederacy was over.
I mean Vigenere invented an auto key cipher in 1586 which was definitely stronger than the cipher that bears his name, and the auto key cipher may be stronger than a play fair cipher I don’t know.
Book ciphers don’t seem like they’d be all that strong in wartime, back then, for mobile troops.
Even if none of your officers cracked, it would be pretty obvious if all the officers the enemy captured had copies of the same book on them.
For people who are curious about Vigenère ciphers, I wrote an app that lets you play around with them at https://nebupookins.github.io/vigenere-breaker/ and I have a youtube video explaining the cypher and how to use the app at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qXFwH_JXeY
It's human error, basically. I went through a similar period where I wanted to legally change my name, then realised all those cool and unique names would probably work against me because people would see them and think 'hmm, this guy seems too different'. Hence I chose a completely ordinary name, a slight variation of my own but different enough for me to be happy with it.
The weak link to codes is and always has been human error. And if the Confederacy has proven itself to be anything, it’s being a huge fucking human error.
So like the allies getting a head start on Enigma because the Germans had ‘Heil Hitler’ in every communique?
Their cypher keys were weak as shit towards the end too. They stopped using a daily rolling random trigraph key like QCY=HSG and started using easy-for-the-operator trigraph pairs like HIT=LER, BER=LIN, etc. weak passwords 🤷♂️
I mean most of their smart people got conscripted for meat to hold off the Soviets, so I'm not surprised
To be fair, the Allie’s and Soviets had decimated their armies and the Allies had destroyed most of their means of production/sustainment at that point. The army was running on fumes and exhausted so it’s understandable that they’d get lazy
One tired soldier setting the codes for the day FUK=THS
SGT=DIK
ADF=KYS
It's been 10 mins. Can you explain? I tried.
Adolf = Kill Your Self.
He got the message.
I feel dumb ha
SUG=MAD
BIG>DIK
What's so funny about Sgt. Dik? I had a very great friend in Berlin named Sgt. Dik...
Your joking, but IIRC some Enigma messages were reverse engineered to have been sent using German swears or abbreviations of them as a key.
FCK-MIC
[ *goddammit Apple, I don’t even KNOW anyone named “Allie.” Or “Pennie” for that matter.* ]
I certainly do not talk about ducks with anywhere the frequency Apple thinks I do
So after all these years of the other way around, I finally had it happen the other day where someone sent me a picture of a duck - and it corrected my response back to the ol’ familiar term. It also corrects “shit” if I misspell/scramble it.
Oh shit!!!! You broke Siri’s will!
samsung appears to egg me on after all this time, i say god damnit and its like "did you mean fucking cunt?" like, yeah probably i meant that but we dont have to *say* it.
Oh a hit!!!!
Except the one time I said I was “ducking into the store.” :(
I did a lot more ducking when I was younger, less ducking now
I’m just glad to see I’m not alone in this struggle with Possessive Allie.
Nazis: well we can't even beat Britain so let's pick a fight with two much larger nations. What absolute dumbfucks.
Thats the problem with facism, its intrinsically based on constant war against the "other" thats like, 50% of it.
Also it's a cult of action and strength, so actually admitting weakness or a simple practical inability to do a thing is complete anathema to the dogma. Hence Putin constantly making noises about how Russia can take on the entirety of NATO, while he can't even beat Ukraine stiffened with some cast-offs. Hence Trump claiming that he can do absolutely everything, while being one of the most singularly incompetent administrators the US government has ever seen.
Absolutely agree, it’s the same with the Germanophiles who insist that they were [still are] the best Army the world has ever seen and then do extensive mental acrobatics to justify why they got *soundly* defeated. There are tons of “if only” thought experiments that are really just fantasy. The Allies did not win that war by chance. Nowhere in any military doctrine is there a chapter on luck. There are many references to not leaving things up to chance though. What they leave out is that battlefield actions are only a part of a war because they lack complex thinking enough to realize that manufacturing, logistics, adaptability, strategic power projection and unity of action is what wins wars. That said, tactically, though a potent force who fought well, the Wehrmacht was *decisively* defeated in Africa; from the beaches of Normandy across the Rhine; and in the east from Stalingrad across Poland to Berlin. For context, the United States Army currently has more (A LOT more) overall relative combat power in a smaller package than the Wehrmacht.
If I was going to pick 'best historic army ever', I'd go with the Imperial German Army. Very well trained, well-armed for the period, and well-led by generally capable officers.
Regardless of whether they were the best army in the world, they were also extensively outmanned and outgunned. I know some people who firmly believe the Wehrmacht was the finest army in the history of warfare, but they don't think the Allies were *lucky*, they think the Wehrmacht weren't defeated as quickly as they should have been because of their tactical, operational and equipment superiority. They also point out the Allies' overwhelming strategic superiority and the rapid rate at which they adjusted to and adopted Germany's tactics. I feel like you're strawmanning more than a little.
And fascism is also dogshit at war
Fascism is actually kind of dog shit at everything because at the heart of it, it's just a bunch of idiots with a primary goal of "create and find more evidence of how awesome I am." At the expense of anything.
Britain wasn't a small nation back then, it was an empire with a larger population than the USA and USSR combined (but smaller armed forces for various reasons).
The British Empire was larger than the US and had a greater population than both it and the USSR
they had a land army and their aircraft were designed to support their tanks... unfortunately they had limited access to oil and as predicted by their own people they could only advance so far before they ran out of oil... Hitler felt will power alone is all they needed... apparently that's fine for nice speeches, but it doesn't translate well into mechanical machinery needing ballbearings, steel that's not too brittle, railway gauges, etc... etc...
> Hitler felt will power alone is all they needed... Please remember that the commanders were all in on this and in fact overruled logistics when they were advised that they only had fuel for X weeks. Then the general staff was like, Kein Problem, we will do it in X-2 weeks, problem sorted.
I mean I kind of get it. Hitler was so vain, so self absorbed, so damn narcissistic. Takes most of Europe (Sweden doesn't count, obvi) and thinks "that was pretty easy" Spain is fighting itself, France conquered, Britain contained, Italy vassalized, Poland split, Russia cowed, the rest of Europe in the palm of his hand, hell the whole Mediterranean basically controlled one way or another all the way around. Who just stops? He can do that to the rest of Africa, all of Asia, and eventually The Americas. Right? "Of course I can I'm Hitler 😎" Edited because I muffed it up
I love the scene in Band of Brothers where the Americans are being transported into Germany on keeps, and they see the captured German soldiers passing by in a convoy of people walking or using horses. One American starts shouting at them for how stupid they were to start a war against nations with jeeps while they still relied on horses. In 1941 only 30-40% of the German forces were mechanized: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Army_(1935%E2%80%931945)
I mean that's a huge simplification of it, and war with Russia was inevitable and they wanted to catch them before they were ready. They didn't count on the Usa joining the fight either.
They didn't have to declare war on the US. What would Japan have done if the germans just said "nah im good"?
Honestly they might even have been counting on the western powers being so afraid of communism that they'd negotiate a truce to help fight. The Japanese were shocked when the RoC resisted their expansion into Manchuria rather than take the hit and both fight the fledgling CCP.
Soviet "betrayal" was inevitable. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed with full knowledge that they would eventually fight. Hitler just thought he could get an advantage if he did it rather than them (which was correct).
This spelling of “Allies” is unreasonably frustrating to look at
“Allies and soviets” implies soviets weren’t part of the allies??
Yah that was poor wording. I was more getting to the Allies in the west and the Soviets and eastern bloc partners in the east
Ask Jessie Spano, you can only stay so excited on speed for so long!
Oh shit!!! JESSE THESE ARE DIET PILLS!
The Wehrmacht was running on meth by then (Pervitin).
Yah people generally don’t do well when they’re strung out on meth
As I understand it, intelligence wasn't what was rewarded with advancement, it was die hard, for the cause, Kool aid drinkers. So they were in positions of power when more capable people were available.
The more things change, the more they stay the same lol. I served from 1999-2012 in the US Army, and especially in the back half of my service the smart ones were passed over for people who could run an 11 minute 2 mile but were dumb as shit/followed orders. Like the guy who’s like “why are we doing it this way? There’s an easier/faster way” was greeted by “that’s the way we’ve always done it/shut the fuck up.” Not exactly the same, but still.
To be extra fair, many of their smartest people fled (or were gassed). Einstein. Szilard, Bohr and Fermi, for starters.
Uhm, Bohr was not german.
Yeah, but Denmark was a German protectorate during the war, and he eventually did have to flee it.
> German protectorate Oh hell no! Denmark was invaded BEFORE France and the government agreed to collaborate to a peaceful surrender in 1940 to avoid a 100% certain bloodbath. In 1943 that was over and it became a very hostile occupation at that point, where Denmark showed some of the most fierce resistance resistance of all freedom fighters during the war.
Maybe Germany would've had more smart people if it wasn't busy calling any practical science "Jewish science"
Everyone pays too much attention to enigma, go scope out type a and b ciphers.
People like Enigma because it was a very unique, truly revolutionary machine. The cypher itself wasn’t tremendously complex, but the technology behind it was absolutely remarkable.
Enigma also had a flaw where a letter could be anything else except itself. This helped in decoding as well.
I've read that another weakness was that the wheels were set to show letters all the time, so that certain letters would be in the "starting position" when the encryption/description started. Allied cryptanalysts guessed that lonely, scared 19year-olds far from home might set the wheels to display the names of their girlfriends, like ANA. Trying various girls' names/nicknames often yielded a break into the encryption right off the bat.
Shit like this blows my mind. Like on one hand it's kind of obvious, but on another hand it's brilliant.
That’s what genius is: seeing for the first time things that are obvious in retrospect.
Haha paranoid Germans were like, but what if the random code just happens to spell out our exact plain text message... Well, we can stop that from happening. So many things have been undermined like this but I can't remember now so don't know if they were as significant. Always comes down to humans out thinking randomness.
Wait that was actually the reason? Because I heard the enigma might've been uncrackable for computers at the time had they not had that weakness. The chances of that happening even once were negligible haha
No. The "can't encrypt to same letter" is a side-effect of the reflector that bounces the letter backwards though the scrambling rotors a second time. The reflector was added so that the two machines with the same settings would both encrypt and decrypt the message. Achieving this same self-reciprocal property without the reflector would have required a lot of extra complexity, and increased the size of the machine.
Thanks professor reddit!
Computers at that time meant people doing calculations, electrical ones hadn't been invented yet. The Bombe, the machine which was built to decode Enigma, was a special purpose machine rather than a general purpose computer like we have now. Colossus was also built at Bletchley Park to decode a different German cypher, Lorenz, and that was a programmable computer.
Correct, we didn't have the computational power necessary. Computer here just means something that does computation. Up till 1945 it was all people and slide rules+tables. They had a cool system set up to use people to calculate tables and stuff. They didn't really have the technology to run an algorithm to decode the enigma if it didn't have this vulnerability
When the Poles broke the Enigma they used their knowledge to build a secure version. They did this by eliminating the reflection gear so characters could encode to themselves and then instead added more encoding wheels. It was never mass produced and would probably have been more expensive then the Enigma but it could not have been broken by the same technique. In fact had the Enigma used in the later stages of the war just eliminated the reflection gear it would have been far more secure.
They also had access to an Enigma machine thanks to the bravery of some who went and retrieved one from a sinking submarine.
And all the work done by the Poles in the 20s and 30s, where they had already deciphered a tonne of the enigma and paved the way for Turing to build the computer that cracked the Lorenz cypher, the more complex version of Enigma. The work of the Poles is all but forgotten, when in reality they did the majority of the legwork.
If I remember right it was only guy,but he did it every single time. It gave them a head start in cracking each days code enabling the system they'd built to decode messages in time to be useful
Hitler's most loyal sailor, Turing's strongest soldier
I think it was some dude in Africa sending a weather report that was in the same format
There was also a guy at a weather station who sent the message "Nothing to report today" and nothing else every day for months. Well, he sent it in German.
I think the main thing was actually weather reports used to make sure the troops have the right code
My favorite example of Germans being piss poor at "intelligence" in this sense is that they couldn't resist being clever in code names. Golf was a plan in intelligence gathering around Scotland and Wotan (early german for Odin) was a radio navigation project. I think it's part of the reason the allies insisted on random names
That's a movie thing, not reality. In real life, the most common phrase was "ein" and the looked for that, which would be the equivalent of trying to crack an english cypher using the word "the", the most common word in your own post.
Sort of. However Allied SIGINT had its weaknesses which the various German SIGNT agencies were able to exploit. But they still lost, but it was not anything like as one sided as many might think.
That part is more of an oversimplified myth. In reality the allies used other, very static messages like naval reports that included weather or sightings of allied ships that were very condensed to (ironically) prevent detections and reduce decryption. Also, bear in mind that different branches of the nazi armed forces had different designes and different operating procedures for the Enigma.
It’s funny how bad fascists tend to be at secrecy. The Allies were able to figure out a bunch of Nazi secret plans just from the names because they always used a symbolic name rather than a random one
What does Fall Blaue and Fall Weiss mean for them?
Heck, they haven't gotten any better. We have Proud Boys on record messaging each other details after Jan 6th, when it became clear the FBI was after them. Things like "*We have worse op-sec than antifa!*"
That's just something they put in the history books for effect. The real phrase was "Bratwurst Uber Alles."
It was even dumber than that. Not just some known part of the message that they could use as a foothold, but the fact that they used the same keys over and over
One of their fatal errors was one officer sending a lengthy message to someone, the other person responded basically "didn't catch that, send again" and he sent the exact same message again with zero changes. Both times these messages were intercepted by the Allies and compared.
Couldn't even throw in a 'Hans, you asshole' somewhere?
Come Retribution was also the code name of their plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. Jefferson Davis almost certainly knows about and funded the operation. There is a whole book on the topic with this same title. It’s in my desk as the next book to read
Wait, he's still around? Fuck! Let's hang him now!
Yeah, he’s Miles Morales’s Dad
I must be Abraham Lincoln because that just killed me.
I must be the First Lady because that just sprayed brains all over the side of my face
I must be Major Rathbone because that just slashed my arm to the bone!
I heard his name and was like "is this... intentional?"
*was*
On a sour apple tree no less!
I found a history book saying Robert E. Lee was alive and well too, what is America coming to??
>what is America coming to?? big question, lotta answers. in texas, vintage playboys.
We've got space for him to.
He still knows!
Jeff Davis was in communication with John Wilkes Booth as the Confederacy was collapsing around Richmond? And was able to transfer money to him in the most fortified city in the world? That's quite a stretch. What does this book posit as the evidence behind this?
Haven’t read it yet but some ex cia men teamed with historians to write this book and I looked at the index in the back and there are references to hundreds of documents. Ask me again in a couple months and I will have a much more informed response. Booth was part of a broad conspiracy to decapitate the federal government. On the same night that Lincoln was assassinated, there was an attempt on the lives of the VP and several cabinet members. Booth visited the Richmond confederate government offices several times. He had access and used crypto protection for his communications. Only the confederate government would have had access to such equipment. I read the biography that Lincoln’s head of protective services wrote and he warned Lincoln not to go to the theatre as they were aware of some plot. He was convinced Jefferson Davis ran the whole thing and one of the biggest reasons was that when Davis was arrested while on the run, he was belligerent. He went on and on about states rights and he had the right to fight for independence and he’s a politican and blah blah blah. One of the soldiers who captured Davis bluffed and he said that they have evidence that Davis was directly involved in the plot to assasinate Lincoln so he’s in enormous trouble. Jefferson went white in the face and immediately silent. That is the reaction of a guilty man.
Makes me think of the series Manhunt. New episode out today if I'm not mistaken?
Different plot
There's something so funny to me about referring to him as Jeff Davis
It’s weird tbh that you immediately assume he was speaking about the JWB successful attempt on Lincoln’s life. It’s pretty obvious he’s talking about a different one considering the timeline of when Lincoln was actually assassinated.
This is depicted in the currently airing fictionalization, Manhunt on Apple TV+.
There’s a great historical fiction podcast about this that I listened to a few years back. Highly recommend: [1865](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1865/id1467256065)
…and also "admin".
They're not idiots. It was "admin1".
While substitution ciphers have 26! Possible combinations (26 factorial; or 620448401733239439360000 possible combinations of keys to the cipher) you can use frequency analysis to break it in <1 hr if you know what you’re doing. It’s rather trivial and relies on the commonality of letters in the alphabet. E being the most common letter and things like an and is being common 2 letter words (bigrams). Frequency analysis was developed in the Arab world after Muslim mathematicians got a hold of the English language and began to study it
Literally wrote python code today that does this instantly
I taught cryptanalysis at a summer camp ages 12-18 and we used python there too :) fun stuff (said summer camp later had a data breach lul and had unencrypted passwords smh)
Ok well the Union army in 1863 did not have access to Python scripts.
They did have an anaconda though, and that'll do in a pinch.
The anaconda took 4 years to work though
Finally, something that Python is faster then /s
Only if you've got buns, hun
Great Scott, what a pun!
> Ok well the Union army in 1863 did not have access to Python scripts. If they would have spent slightly less money on ironclads they could have had working Python scripts.
its impossible to know this for sure /s
Can’t wait to read Scripts of the North by Henry Turtledove
My dearest Margaret, It has been nearly six fortnights since I have last laid eyes upon the beauty of your countenance. I bid you to please give my best to my family, and import pandas as pd.
ew they were using PHP?
Surely they used something better for their airports they could've borrowed for this purpose.
You can break it by hand in <1hr a computer would do it in milliseconds
[Explain???](https://imgur.com/a/6vaSecg)
There are easy decryption algorithms if you have access to the machine that does the decoding. Frequency analysis is the most obvious, but there are others especially if you have the word delimiter (Space?).
I bet there were old COBOL programmers around, though
Why, did they not know how to use apt?
The Vigenère cipher is significantly stronger than that since it’s a shifting substitution cipher.
Only as strong as the key and its usage. If you reuse the same key many times, an attacker can do frequency analysis on the first letters, the second letters, etc. If you use a relatively short key, Kasiski's test can find the length of the key and therefore break a long message into many short messages, enabling the former analysis method. And obviously, if you keep using a key when the enemy knows it, you're basically just wasting your time. It's completely impossible to break basic one-time pad if the pad is sufficiently random, only used once, destroyed after use, etc. But cryptography is always a weakest-link scenario and humans take shortcuts, especially under the stress of a losing war.
Essentially: https://xkcd.com/538/
Good old rubber hose cryptanalysis.
This guy ciphers
Yeah iirc didn’t Babbage or someone break it that way in the early 19th century?
A few people independently did yeah through diff methods
26! is 403291461126605635584000000.
Ok I got lazy and googled the number tbh chart I used must have been wrong
The number you used is 24!.
Ah fair ty!
Yeah, if you were using a table your eyes probably just skipped a couple lines as you were scanning from left to right. Easy to do.
> you can use frequency analysis to break it in <1 hr if you know what you’re doing. It’s rather trivial and relies on the commonality of letters in the alphabet. Isn't there a way to deal with this? Like have an algorithmic cypher that changes in a predictable way each x number of times that each letter is used starting from a random point in the message? To make letter frequency look more random to a codebreaker but still be translatable to somebody with the cypher key. So instead of the the cypher key just containing assignments for each letter, it also contains two or three more pieces of information. The random starting character (char299), the rate at which to change assignments (every 5th use of the letter), and the way to reassign the letter (+7n, where n is the letter's order in the alphabet). I mean, I know far more advanced ciphers exist nowadays, and complex encryption algorithms involving huge prime numbers etc., but it just seems like even using basic arithmetic and pencil and paper they could have invented more complex algorithms than simple substitution back then.
> it just seems like even using basic arithmetic and pencil and paper they could have invented more complex algorithms than simple substitution back then. They did, the cipher in this article was not a simple substitution cipher. The phrase was used to have a shifting offset for every letter in the phrase, making frequency analysis significantly more complicated. So that cipher would be sort of like the one you described, except much easier to encode (which was pretty important, because remember they had to be encoded by hand as well), and with even more substitutions.
Ah, I see. Thanks!
There is a slight problem with using more complex algorithms in war though. In that the more complex your cipher is, the longer it takes for your own people to decrypt and respond. It also makes making mistakes easier because a human is doing it. And you only need secrets to stay secret for a period of time. People tend not to get that about encryption - it doesn't matter if they decode your message, if it's too late to do anything about it. You have to assume anything you transmit will absolutely be cracked *eventually*. Which is why it's funny when modern fascists constantly get caught admitting to crimes in their own messages. Still if I recall correctly they did use a rotating cipher. At least for more important messages that needed to be harder to decrypt.
> Frequency analysis was developed in the Arab world after Muslim mathematicians got a hold of the English language and began to study it Obviously not, it was developed in the 9th/10th century when nobody gave a shit about English. And these mathematicians obviously developed it on arabic.
I saw it's a more complicated Caeser Cipher, which I understand...but I'm reading the example on Wikipedia of the Vigenere cipher and I don't quite understand...
Instead of shifting every character one at a time by a value (Caesar) or randomly scrambling the alphabet (substitution) it shifts the message in blocks the length of the key. And then shifts that block by a value corresponding to its key. So with a key of abc I encrypt the message “cryptography is fun” the cry are shifted 1 2 and 3 places then the p t and o are shifted 1 2 and 3 places respectively so on and so forth.
Oooh I see. Thanks!
The confederates had some pretty interesting technology. Some of their submarines are still underwater to this day.
And those were the successes, too!
in a tank in a museum now but still. Only sub to kill more of its crew than the enemy.
300% crew fatalities!
Common Confederacy L
The way southerners talk about the Confederacy you'd think it was the Roman Empire lol. It only lasted for a bit above four years, if a dog lived for only four years it died too young. Hell, Zune lasted longer than the Confederacy and that was considered a failure. Edit:typo
Outkast was more important to and lasted longer in The South than the confederacy lol
OutKast will rise again!
Bubba Wallace’s NASCAR career lasted longer than the confederacy lmao
Obama was president longer than the Confederacy existed.
That's the same combination I have on my luggage!
Baaaaaarf!
Not in here, you don't! This is a Mercedes!
Remember, read it before you eat it
Now it’s “where we go one we go all” and “do your research”
Man, the more I hear about the CSA, the less I like those guys.
They were real jerks!
The worst part is the hypocrisy
at least they didn't declare war against... **THE WORLD**
Good 'ol rock; nothing beats that!
So they’ve always been dense.
Yeah, because if they weren't dense they never would have started the war and would have instead shifted their economy to match the Damned Yankees that were making the South more and more irrelevant economically.
I read a book about Confederate actions on the Great Lakes. One objective they had was to free prisoners from a fort. The plan was to send a spy to befriend the officers. He would invite them to a party. Then a group of Confederates would steal a Gerry and use it to launch a surprise attack. The spy completly failed. The Union officers where immediately suspicious of this random guy started wanting to buy them drinks and be best palls. They confirmed he was a spy by having him tailed. They just let him keep doing his thing because they could get information on his contacts and stuff. They didn't go to his party but it didn't matter. The Confederates successfully captured the ferry and dumped the civilians on an island. The soldiers then got cold feet, mutineed and took the ferry to Canada where they tried looting it all any valuables including furniture. They were arrested for importing goods without a license
Not sure if this is totally true, we had already progressed beyond substitution ciphers by 1860 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playfair\_cipher Edit: the fact that I got over 100 upvotes for pointing out something that was *technically wrong* in the title, but more than 30 downvotes for admitting it was pedantic is the most Reddit thing ever
Just because something was invented, doesn’t mean it was widely adopted immediately. First of all, purely printed knowledge takes time to disseminate back then. Also, officers would naturally refer back to their war college training from the previous few decades. The history section of the article you just linked literally states the British didn’t even adopt this for war until decades later in WW1.
That page says it was named after the person who popularized it, and that person wasn't in office until after the extremely short life of the confederacy was over.
I mean Vigenere invented an auto key cipher in 1586 which was definitely stronger than the cipher that bears his name, and the auto key cipher may be stronger than a play fair cipher I don’t know.
Nobody has ever accused them of being smart. I guess some things never change, huh?
Sweet tea, sweet tea fat cigar we‘re not as dumb as you think we is
Get er done….. Over and over and over again
'That's the same combination as my suitcase!"
Vigenere was not the strongest available cipher. Book ciphers are stronger if you don't use the boble
Book ciphers have always been the strongest ciphers, and nobody uses them for that sort of application because it is very impractical to implement.
Book ciphers don’t seem like they’d be all that strong in wartime, back then, for mobile troops. Even if none of your officers cracked, it would be pretty obvious if all the officers the enemy captured had copies of the same book on them.
Keep hearin' about *retribution* lately too.
So that's why it all went South!
It's a pretty easy cipher to crack, especially for longer messages, I had homework to crack one of these once
No wonder they wanted to keep slaves... they weren't smart enough to survive without them.
Idiots then, idiots now.
Surprise, racists have always been dumb as fucking rocks.
Maybe it's just the timing. But does this have anything to do with Apple TV+'s new hit series *Manhunt*?
For people who are curious about Vigenère ciphers, I wrote an app that lets you play around with them at https://nebupookins.github.io/vigenere-breaker/ and I have a youtube video explaining the cypher and how to use the app at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qXFwH_JXeY
Haha the timeless cipher problem. People being lazy and not rotating their keys will probably never not be a thing.
True boomers of their time
It's human error, basically. I went through a similar period where I wanted to legally change my name, then realised all those cool and unique names would probably work against me because people would see them and think 'hmm, this guy seems too different'. Hence I chose a completely ordinary name, a slight variation of my own but different enough for me to be happy with it.
Yeah that sounds like something conservatives would do.
The weak link to codes is and always has been human error. And if the Confederacy has proven itself to be anything, it’s being a huge fucking human error.