Remembering When Alan Turing Developed a Portable Voice Encryption Device (popularmechanics.com)
- Reference: 0184004744
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/06/20/059229/remembering-when-alan-turing-developed-a-portable-voice-encryption-device
- Source link: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a71535854/turing-speech-encryption-device/
> Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020, reveal Turning had produced [2]a working model of a portable voice encryption device . He even demonstrated it by using a Winston Churchill speech recording.
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> "Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack," Jack Copeland [3]wrote in an article for IEEE Spectrum , "Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack."
[4]More from Popular Mechanics :
> Turingâ(TM)s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes âoewas a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.â The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well...
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> [T]he reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isnâ(TM)t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasnâ(TM)t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turingâ(TM)s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turingâ(TM)s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~smooth+wombat
[2] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a71535854/turing-speech-encryption-device/
[3] https://spectrum.ieee.org/alan-turings-delilah
[4] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a71535854/turing-speech-encryption-device/
More AI garbage or just bad writing? (Score:3)
"Today, there is intense interest in the use of multivibrators in cryptography. Turing’s key generator, the most original part of Delilah, contained eight multivibrator circuits, along with the five-wheel assembly mentioned previously. In effect the multivibrators were eight more very complicated “wheels,” and there was additional circuitry for enhancing the random appearance of the numbers the multivibrators produced."
DELILAH - now rebuilt (Score:4, Informative)
[1]https://hmgcc.gov.uk/our-story [hmgcc.gov.uk] - has details of Alan Turing's work on this and pictures of the rebuild.
[1] https://hmgcc.gov.uk/our-story
Confusing (Score:2)
This is slashdot, we all know who Alan Turing was.
But who is this Turinga T. M. person?
Cryptonomicon had a scene with this (Score:2)
The book Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson, had a scene with this. I don't know how historically accurate the device in the book was, because the way the book described it, it came across as an analog device.
"Alan Turing, one of the more famous people" (Score:2)
Stop right there and fuck off.