El Reg standard are slipping
The headline should capitally say "...for SCIENCE!!"
I do not consider this a triumph.
The Enigma code, once used by the Nazis to send secret military commands, will be used by visitors to the Cheltenham Science Fair next week to send tweets. In a celebratory code-cracking session to mark 100 years since Alan Turing's birth, GCHQ has lent out one of its Enigma coding machines to the Science Fair from 12 to 17 …
To use a Turing Bombe to crack an Enigma message, you require a "crib" (some known plaintext of the message). Are they going to add a fixed preamble to every message to provide that crib, then? (e.g. "Cheltenham Science Fair: ...") I think it's only fair to disclose that, as otherwise the educational point is missed, i.e. that the Bombes weren't magic and weren't even computers, they just tested all the possible rotor orders and positions.
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Not to diss Mr T but I thought the Poles "invented" the bombe:
>> It was a substantial development from a device that had been designed in 1938 by Polish Cipher Bureau cryptologist Marian Rejewski, and known as the "cryptologic bomb" (Polish: "bomba kryptologiczna"). <<
& thats wikipedia so it must be right!
Or
>>Before World War II, Polish crypto-analysts had already designed an electro-mechanical machine to test Enigma rotor settings called a ‘Bomba’. However, in December 1938 the German military changed their system slightly thus thwarting the Poles’ ability to decrypt Enigma messages.<<
that's from http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/machines.rhtm which may be more reliable.