Thursday, October 22, 2009

The wood Laden with toys and flowers and food; The precious forest pouring out To compass the whole town about; The town itself with streets of lawn Loved of the moon blessed by the dawn Where the brown children all the day Keep up.

Alone courting death rather than to survive the day's disgrace. Captain Donald Roy followed at his heels imploring his chieftain not to sacrifice himself but Keppoch bade him save himself. For him he would never. generic valtrex Plugboard with twenty-six jacks. The circuits changed constantly; their potential number was astronomical but calculable. There were five different rotors to choose from (two were kept spare) which meant they could be arranged in any one of sixty possible orders. Each rotor was slotted on to a spindle and had twenty-six possible starting positions. Twenty-six to the power of three was 17 576. Multiply that by the sixty potential rotor-orders and you got 1 054 560. Multiply that by the possible number of plugboard connections - about 150 million million - and you were looking at a machine that had around 150 million million million different starting positions. It didn't matter how many Eni! gma machines you captured or how long you played with them. They were useless unless you knew the rotor order the rotor starting positions and the plugboard connections. And the Germans changed these daily sometimes twice a day.   The machine had only one tiny - but as it turned out crucial - flaw. It could never encipher a letter as itself: an A would never emerge from it as an A or a B as a B or a C as a C. . . Nothing is ever itself: that was the great guiding principle in the breaking of Enigma the infinitesimal weakness that the bombes exploited.   Suppose one had a cryptogram that began:       IGWH BSTU XNTX EYLK PEAZ ZNSK UFJR CADV _       And suppose one knew that this message originated from the Kriegsmarine's weather station in the Bay of Biscay a particular friend of the Hut 8 cribsters which always began its reports in the same way:       WEUBYYNULLSEQSNULLNULL       ('Weather survey 0600' WEUB being an abbreviation for WETTERUB! ERSICHT and SEQS for SECHS; YY and NULL being inserted to baffle eavesdroppers).   The cryptanalyst would lay out the ciphertext and slide the crib beneath it and on the principle that nothing is ever itself he would keep sliding it until he found a position in which there were no matching letters between the top and bottom lines. The result in this case would be:       BSTUXNTXEYLKPEAZZNSKUF   WEUBYYNULLSEQSNULLNULL       And at this point it became theoretically possible to calculate the original Enigma settings that alone could have produced this precise sequence of letter pairings. It was still an immense. dw6daw53w35zxw3456dry444

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