Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • January 30, 2024 7:04 PM

@ tfb, ALL,

“I do wonder whether the remaining colossi were really still useful in the 1960s.”

Yes…

Remember that the crypto machines they were designed to work against were still being used “second hand” by many nations as “high level” systems.

So you keep them going…

The equivalent was people still using “valve radios” into the 1980’s.

Clive Robinson • January 31, 2024 1:18 PM

@ tfb,

Re : Secrecy is cheaper that way.

“I wonder how the cost of keeping a real colossus working would have compared with the cost of building a transistorised copy which, by the late 50s or early 60s anyway, would be cheaper and more reliable.”

The design of much better encryption devices using transistors had gone ahead. Look up the “BID 600 family” that EOL’d at the end of the 1980’s,

https://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/uk/bid610/index.htm

Flipping the design around to have made a replacment for Colossus would have been possible but effectively pointless such stratigic crypto methods were already gone, even from Crypto AG (that the NSA/CIA controled the design of everything and ensured back doors were built in as standard).

But even today there are still jobs where thermionic valves/tubes are lower cost to maintain and surprisingly to many, smaller and more efficient (It’s why home Microwave Ovens still use Magnetrons rather than the LDMOS FETs designed to replace them).

But also consider the Secrecy Aspect. If I ask an engineer to design a new crypto system “for the good of his country” that is “Patriotic work” thus they are unlikely to talk.

However to design a crypto breaking machine, that’s not Patriotic Work, that’s Spying…

As MI6 and the CIA discovered intelligent people tend to get introspective about such things and start getting drunk etc, and become real security threats.

As we all now know some go very rapidly from Patriot to Whistlevlower to having been exiled abroad with faux allegations and even congress critters issuing death threats, to salve their narcissistic ego’s at hqving been shown to be the craven cowards they are rather than “strong-men to be heroically lead” (but in reality self entitled elitists turn others into needless “cannon fodder”).

So from the “secrecy” aspect, better to get a small team who are not that bright but unimaginative and “stolidly reliable” even lacking ambition to maintain what everyone else would think of at best as “old junk” year in year out.

The very fact that you and others say “we can do better with…” is a very serious strike against you in terms of “The sort of secrecy desired” for this “seen down the centuries as ungentlemanly spying”, no matter how suitable you may be in other respects or for many other jobs requiring secrecy.

At the end of the day Tommy Flowers was treated dispicably by those in the Civil Service and they are a real stain on this countries character and reputation. Tommy on the other hand, was the sort of quiet hero we could do with one heck of a lot more of.

Clive Robinson • January 31, 2024 11:22 PM

@ tfb,

Re : Replacment is the way of Evolution.

“well, for mo good reason at all, up to and including having to source parts from ebay”

In nature we used to get ill and die.

And all that we were or could be was lost. And the work we did with others might be passed to somebody new, with different style or just lost to mankind for good.

We were uniquely individual and all that we did was individual.

It was century after centuray of artisanal labourers and craftsmen. With knowledge passed down via “Guild Secrets” and apprentice taught “Patterns”.

A way of working that appears to now only exist or flourish in the first world nations in the software industry.

There was a reason things changed and “Natural Philosophy” became “Science” and “artisanal craftsmanship” became engineering, and the word “Manufacture” lost it’s true original meaning of to be “made by hand” by a single individual to be made by machine by a long multitude series of professs.

The First historical examples of which made by many individuals were detailed by Adam Smith about French “pin makers” from the start of the 1700’s had “divided their labour”[1]. To later still, the processes by which the “Whitworth Screw thread” of the first “designed standard” became a “National Standard” called the “British Standard Whitworth”(BSW) thread[2]. Only made possible by a very repeatable and standard process of “factory not artisanal” manufacture which in turn made other manufacture not just possible but importantly “interchangable” thus “easily replacable”.

The word “Manufacture” had reversed it’s meaning and a new industrial revolution that brought the “machine age” to war in a way not seen before. Not just in “pattern cut parts” like rifle stocks of earlier times, but the design of “infernal machines” by “designed standard” “catalog parts” to meet the “war needs” of nations.

From Victorian Boiler Explosions came the first factory and workshop laws for “The Safety and comfort of the public”. With it the days of the “artisanal craftsman lone working at his forge” were over and the new science begat by it’s appliance of knowledge by mathmatical modeling gave birth to the new age of “engineering and design” and the world rushed forward. We saw in just over a century more societal development than in all of mankinds previous history and deaths by the tens of thousands by carpet bombing of entire cities then by nuclear bomb.

Since then in just a lifetime mankind has jumped through first solid state electronics and the micro chip where parts are so standard and small we see them like ants. And processes become not just abstract by the mechanics of reproducable machines but by the product of the mathmatics of knowledge information crafted by other information of logic and reasoned thought.

To the point some think we are on the threshold of replacing the function of not just the human hand and labour, but the human mind with an artifice created by man from pure information “Artificial General Inteligence”(AGI).

My personal view is “maybe but very unlikely” because our handeling of information is still almost stone age in concept, and our production of the mechanics of information processing very very artisanal and by patterns oft kept secret.

We have a nascent industry the only part of which where secrecy is not endemic is “Free Open Source Software”(FOSS) but it sufferes from lack of reasoned and thought through design. Worse to stay in the game a “kitchen sink” mentality of over complexity has arisen.

In short we’ve hit a wall not of the laws of physics or other science, but of mankinds greed that is expresed and dressed up as the false markets of faux economics bought and paid for by the wants of the self entitled at the expense of society and actually mankind in general (that yes includes the “self entitled” to short sighted to see their own ruin approaching rapidly).

It is in this framework you have to view the desire to hang onto that which is “sufficiently known” to “be considerd dependable” and not to be replaced by that which is clearly known to be “undependable and dangerous”.

As you might have noticed, I don’t do the likes of the past quater crntury of “Microsoft” and “AI” in my personal life. Because I have sufficient experience to see the icebergs ahead and have an idea of the disaster comming as we are ordered to pile on more coal in a Titanic effort to go ever faster in a “Red Quern’s Race” that benifits us not.

The last decade or two have been one disaster after another, bubble after bubble, made by VC’s and Hedge Fund managers dabbling in nonsense “High Tech” to grab what they can and give nothing in return. Each of these bubbles have brought more and more vulnerability and chaos at some point we had better hope the Merry Go Around can be stopped so we can get off in an orderly way before we are violently flung off many to their hurt or worse…

I can not blaim those who try to keep dependable in their reach, it is after all what I do. Maybe because I learnt the lesson Y2K had to teach a couple of decades before it became the hurculean effort it did become for many.

Many will tell you Y2K was a fraud designed to take from their pockets etc. Such people are never going to learn from lifes lessons, and will thus scream “More coal, more coal” those icebergs to them are unseen so more steam ahead… Others however have learned one or two of histories lessons and their advice is to progress yes, but recklessly no. The victorians learnt the hard way of the need for science and engineering not reckless pursuit of stupidity at all costs… Well it’s our generations turn, will we learn before or after considerable harm?

[1] https://conversableeconomist.com/2022/08/23/adam-smith-and-pin-making-some-inconvenient-truths/

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Standard_Whitworth