Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • October 25, 2018 4:16 AM

@ echo, Wael,

If the Soviets had made a pen which could detect documents aged by tea similar to the pens used to detect fake banknotes I suspect Western humint operations would have been busted wide open from the beginning.

There are indeed devices that detect “tannin” from “tea” for help in detecting art work fakes.

It’s not known when “art forgers” first started using tea to age/distress things like fake water colours but it was certainly long prior to WWII where the technique was sufficiently well known that Allied POW escape committiee document forgers not only knew about it but used it.

There are stories that it was also used during WWI but I’ve not found any reliable primary or secondary sources.

Speaking of interesting books, you might be aware that James Bond 007 author Ian Fleming was involved during WWII with the “active / offensive intelligence” side of things and his gadget inventing character Q was bassed on a real person.

Well actually a couple… The one who actually was the gadget inventor who did interesting things like make plastic explosive charges that looked like horse or dog “poo” is still “officially” unknown.

However as originally envisaged by Flemming Q was an Armour, and the choice of weapon upset a real armourer who worked at ICI Geoffrey Bootbroyd who wrote to Fleming.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Boothroyd

You asked the other day about the wellrod well Mr Boothroyd was involved with it and it’s amunition.

As for the other Q person apparently it is currently a woman, though some have said the department she runs is a compleate out of date waste of money,

https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/films/898422/James-Bond-Q-Branch-MI6-British-Secret-Service

However the SOE gadgets dept during WWII was the real home of inventiveness and some of the gadgets have been talked about but not all. The making of the gadgets were also things like survival equipment and maps hidden in pilot and other air crew clothing we know that Courtolds sourced the silk for the maps and also where they were printed. We also know about the false heals and compasses hidden in uniform buttons (one of which I have in my collection of bits).

However we also know there was other stuff that is apparently still used today for escape and evasion for not just pilots but others who end up behind opposing force lines (which yes I did some training for when wareing the green).

So atleast in spirit the original “Q” still marches on.

Clive Robinson • October 25, 2018 4:35 AM

@ echo, Wael,

As for the real SOE Q-gadget inventor whilst his identity is “officially” still secret (due to archive rules) publically we know who he was,

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13918865-300-review-careful-carruthers-that-paper-clip-is-loaded/

Obvioulsy provided the skeleton for,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fraser-Smith

I hope that helps you track down any of the books the “real Qs” wrote of which there are several.

Clive Robinson • October 25, 2018 8:31 AM

@ Rach El,

Isn’t this a ‘mad genius inventor’ who was responsible for inventing all kinds of devices, limpet mines, so absolutely brilliant the Allies success in dirty tactics methods entirely depending upon him?

That was one of the others…

There were several of the “gadget-inventors” doing different things at different times.

Whilst we know who some of them are we won’t know all of them for another 27 years under the “100 year rule” that the UK national Archives at Kew operate under.

However there were some real weird ones…

Have a look at one I’ve mentioned in the past, Geoffrey Pyke and Pykrete,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete

In some ways it was the fore runner of fiber glass reinforced plastic (GRP) that god alone knows how many ship, boat, dinghy, and canoe hulls have been made from.

Whilst Pykrete never saw service it has been tried a couple of times by Myth Busting TV shows. Further studies have shown that there are ways to turn it into a viable building material at the poles, and research from that has given rise to the design of habitats on both the moon and mars using local materials.

Then there were floating / swiming tanks and the other “funnies” of Major General Sir Percy Cleghorn Stanley Hobart KBE, CB, DSO, MC. Known as “Hobart’s Funnies” without which D-Day almost certainly would not have gone as well as it did, nor later actions in the Allied Invasion of Europe. Arguably if he had not come up with his ideas, much more of Europe would have become Russian occupied territory, certainly all of Northwestern Europe.

The “Hobart Funnies” bridged anti-tank ditches with bundles of copice cuttings (fasciens) rivers with bridge segments, mine fields with flails and even flame throwers and other strange projectile weapons (peyards / flying dustbins). Most were not Hobart’s designs, but he championed them against much opposition having been froced into retirment by Wavil, and brought back by Churchill. Many people are alive today who would not have been but for his will not just to succeed with tanks but to make them the friend of the infantryman in just about all conditions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobart's_Funnies

We know there are others who designed all sorts of interesting devices, and I hope that eventually all their names will become known.

But there were others who from WWII served the greater good. The rudiments of plastic surgery came of age during WWII and due to eye surgeons treating pilots with shards of perspex from aircraft canopies in their eyes we got contact lenses. Other medical discoveries from WWII are still with us. Also various bone repair techniques used in reconstructive surgery, thus saving people from amputations or deformaties.

Even the gadgets have gone on for the greater good with self inflating life vests many sailboat sailors wear. Likewise the bags of dye and shark repelent. Also modern survival equipment comes from some of the gadgets.

Trying to track it all down could easily become a full time job or even a lifetimes work.

Clive Robinson • October 25, 2018 10:50 PM

@ Jon (fD), echo,

After being informed of the difference, I learned how to flip my fork around in one hand from one grip to the other. It’s cute… “Oh, you mean like this? *flip*”.

There are nine basic ways to hold a fork… Much the same as there are for pencils/pens/paint brushes.

You have the three closed fist holds “shovel, stab-in, stab-out” the later two has the fork come out of the bottom of the fist.

The two “palm to under extended index finger” holds giving the “cut” tines down and “scoop” tines up.

The two “cut” and “scoop” with the fork handle going between the thumb and index finger.

And the two “cut” and “scoop” with the fork handle going between the index finger and middle finger.

In “acceptable English decorum” you are supposed to use the closed fist stab-in for holding and using to carving fork. For eating starters you can use either of the two palm to extended index finger depending on what the starter is. For eating a main course you are expected to always use the palm to extended index finger “cut” never ever any kind of scoop, oh and you are not supposed to squash your peas onto the back of the fork, you are supposed to first put a more solid piece of food onto the ends of the tines, then lift a small quantity of peas/beans etc onto the back of the fork using the more solid piece of food as an end stop to stop them rolling off. Long items of food should be first pierced with the fork then cut to be at most twice the width of the back of the fork. Desert is where it gets interesting you get a spoon and a fork, as a general rule the spoon does not go near or in your mouth, unless the desert is from a liquid thus icecream / sorbet / yogurt / pouring custard. For all others the palm to extended index finger cut or scoop, this includes whipped cream and non pouring custard “Creme Anglaise” / “Creme Patisserie”[1] and any sauces etc based on them.

For elegant eating you are supposed to bring the fork to the center of your mouth square on, and to close your mouth around the food but not the fork. Also you are expected to be facing and looking at your “table partner” when doing so, and chew elegantly with lips closed and not talk. When you have swallowed you then have the conversation passed to you such that you may talk and get more food on your fork, which you keep down at plate level untill you have finished talking, the lifting of your fork signifies to your table partner it’s their turn to talk… If you try doing this, and get it right your eating hand becomes as elegant as a swan, it also quickly becomes clear why there is a “no elbows on the table” rule. Oh and elbows are to be kept at your side and lifted forward not outward.

You used to be expected to know all this before you went to primary school. Whilst my son was taught this by me and his mum and ate correctly at nursery, it needed less than two months at primary school for him to revert to closed fist scooping 🙁

[1] Yes there are three basic types of “propper” custard and you are expected to know which is which at a glance…

Clive Robinson • October 27, 2018 4:34 AM

@ echo,

question of how wealthy would you have to be a century ago to make breakfast while accompanied by music?

That would have been the last month or so of the “Great War” we later called the First World War.

Making breakfast for single people or people without children in most cases would probably not have happened due to being conscripted labour. As for musicians they would have been few and far between as well due to both lack of employment and heavy conscription even of men in their fifties.

But back then most middle class homes had a piano which the children would have been taught to play and family communual singing was still a hang over from the Victorian era.

So getting your children to play would not have been that expensive, and most likely the only option.

Three sets of flu pandemic waves over 1917-19 wiped out not the young or the old but the “economically active” soldiers and pregnant women and their babies, which exacerbated the change of life styles. The worst or deadliest month of which was exactly 100 years ago in Oct 18. The total death estimates for the three waves vary between 3 and 7% of the worlds population. In Britain alone a quater of a million died killing far more than the Great War it’s self.

The “wealthy landed” nolonger realy existed because several sets of “death duties” bankrupted the “landed gentry” who had sent their menfolk off to war as junior officers, who were Kitchener’s Cannon Fodder. Thus the great houses remained vacant and fell into disrepair, there would have been no work for fine musicians. But it was not just them, entire villages that had been built over the previous centuries to serve the landed gentry likewise went through very bad economic times, their young leaving for better lives else where.

But there was more to come as a blood sacrafice had been asked of all men, the majority working class, they inturn demanded a blood sacrafice of the ruling elite. The “Liberal Party” effectively disapeared and was replaced by the “Labour Party”. Women as many as a million had worked in “mens proffesions” due to necesity, some at decent factory wages had to a certain extent become franchised by the Representation of the Peoples Act of early 1918. But they did not want to go back to being servants and wives, they demanded more and they started to get it, then lost it. Due to the closure of munitions factories and returning men being given their jobs back women were not just “not needed” but “not wanted” thus within a few years a little over a quater of working women were back in domestic service, that was harder and more grueling than before the war.

But the problem that was building was what to do with the disabled, the limbless, the sightless, those who had damaged lungs. It has been said that WWI was the first of the scientific wars. But the War disabled not just conscripted soldiers, there were also those now mainly forgotton who had been conscripted into the mines, where there was a higher risk of death and injury than the trenches.

There were not the men to be husbands for single women, nor the jobs in big houses as servants, and the men who had come back had demanded and got their jobs back.

Occupation had to be found for both women and the disabled soldiers but those who suffered the most were the civilian disabled, those who had fought were seen as “diserving” but those diabled by work or from birth were if seen at all were seen as “undeserving”.

But worst treated of all were those who had been conscious objectors, having been put in prison with worse conditions than many can imagine they were in effect Britains first homeland concentration camps, following on from the ideas developed in the Boar War. Having been released they were treated as pariahs by nearly all. Friendless, jobless and quickly homeless they were pushed out of society they effectively were “disappeared” and what became of many is unknown, as they did not appear again in official records, even in the death register.

But perhaps the biggest imposition on society of all and relates strongly to this blog was that of the state. What the state had taken by force from the people, it was unwilling to give back. The UK Surveillance State realy started with WWI and the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) that within four days of War gave the State near unlimited powers. Which along with women’s rights are, WWI’s lasting legacy, as it has now passed from living memory.