Enigma
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Facebook donates £1 million to WWII code-breaking site Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park was the site where Alan Turing and his World War II team of code-breakers cracked Germany’s Enigma machine and helped save the world from Nazi tyranny. The site is now a popular museum, but it’s facing a £2 million ($2.6 million) revenue shortfall due to the loss of tourism caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, Facebook has announced that it will donate £1 million to the Bletchley Park Trust charity that runs the site.
MIT's 'Enigma' system uses bitcoin tricks to share encrypted data
The MIT Media Lab and two bitcoin experts have unveiled a prototype encryption system that lets you share it with a third party (or be computed with), without anyone else decrypting it. It means untrusted computers could still be tasked with dealing with sensitive data, but without putting said data at any risk. The trick is called homomorphic encryption, which MIT's Guy Zyskind compares to a black box: "You send whatever data you want, and it runs in the black box and only returns the result. The actual data is never revealed." It does this by hacking up the data into pieces and randomly spreading parts across hundreds of computers in the Enigma (the name of the prototype) network.
Weekend Poll: What apps did you discover via the 50 billionth download contest?
On Wednesday, Apple sold its 50 billionth iOS app. TUAW was there keeping track of the excitement and monitoring the iTunes store. Many of our colleagues and readers used this contest as an opportunity to stock up on numerous free apps, to test and explore. Were you one of them? What apps did you download and which ones do you love? Here at TUAW, most of our choices were word of mouth -- Megan downloaded Moves while I gave the Target app a try. I managed to convince Steve Sande to pick up Enigma. Sadly, none of us won. What about you? Did you discover a really great app while trying to win the prize? Drop a note in the comments and share your discoveries. And take part in our little poll. We're curious as to how many times people "entered" with the intent of winning big. %Poll-82542%
Researchers claim discovery of lost city of Atlantis, conveniently located in southern Spain
We had to do a double take when we read this headline from Reuters, but sure enough, it's not April1st yet and its writers don't seem to be joking: the location of the lost city of Atlantis has finally been discovered. Such is the bold claim from an international team of researchers, dreamers and intrepid adventurers. With the use of ground-penetrating radar and electrical resistivity tomography, they've unearthed evidence to suggest that a spot on the southern coast of Spain, just north of Cadiz, played host to what may have been human society's first metropolis. One of the reasons why it's taken archaeologists so long to pinpoint its whereabouts may be the fact that it lies 60 miles inland, where you wouldn't really expect it to be susceptible to the effects of tidal waves (which is what Plato's account of the ancient city identified as its demise). A National Geographic documentary on the subject will be broadcast this evening where we may learn more about what was discovered, the methods for doing so, and the gorgeous tans those scientists built up in sunny Spain.
WarDevil: Enigma screens drop out of the sky
There sure are a lot of screenshots floating around today. This time we get a few glimpses at the very, erm, gray, WarDevil: Enigma. The screenshots are impressive, yeah, but there's a lot of drab going on. For the uninitiated, WarDevil: Enigma centers around this guy who's pretty hardcore. He wears tight, futurisitic suits and enjoys vaguely futuristic firearms and a nifty blade that pops out of his forearm (we're assuming the suit plays some role in that process). Other than that, it's anybody's guess how closely this follows the 360 WarDevil game. Futuristic, fighting robots, explosions. That's our estimation. In any case, feel free to check out the trinity of screenshots.
Britons build working replica of the Turing Bombe
Just in case Al Qaeda or other "evildoers" du jour decide to start communicating in code via the WWII-era Enigma code -- we'll have the Turing Bombe on our side. This working replica of the machine used by British cryptologists at Bletchley Park, the epicenter of the counter-Enigma effort was unveiled at that site earlier this week. According to an article by The Register: "The Bombes used 108 electromagnetic spinning drums to test combinations of letters and reveal the likely keys to the Enigma code used in a particular message." The article goes on to say that Churchill ordered the 200 Bombes that had been built dismantled by the end of the war, and that it wasn't until the 1970s that the classified nature of these devices was lifted. Unlike the shrouded secrecy that its original was wrapped in, this replica will be open to the public -- from September 23-24, there will be a reunion of Bletchley Park veterans and a special demonstrations with war re-enactors in period dress. No word on who will play Alan Turing, though, but our own England bureau chief, Conrad Quilty-Harper, is a likely candidate.[Via The Register]
