Bletchley Park and The Enigma Machine

http://www.paulluvera.com/.a/6a00d8341c84f353ef0120a59d6448970b-pi

http://www.paulluvera.com/.a/6a00d8341c84f353ef0120a59d63c7970b-pi

World War 2 was one of the first wars where technology took affect on who was going to win the war and who was going to loose.  The Germans perfected the single most important aspect of wining a war and that was secret communication.  They came up with the enigma machine in order to turn all their communication into code so that it was impossible to read.  The allies had to come up with their own way to combat this.  So in response to the war Bletchley park was opened as a code deciphering location.  This is where the famous mathematician Alan Turing and his brilliant co-workers built The Bombe and Colossus. The two machines that could determine what the German messages were saying.  I did a lot of research on this topic in order to write a research paper for my English class over the last month.  I found the topic to be very interesting to read about and I am glad that I chose it.  It is probably one of the hardest topics I could have chosen though.  There is almost no information out there on what happened.  Just to be able to work there all 10000 employees had to sign an act saying that they would never talk about what was going on behind the fences of the park.  It then took 30 years for them to come out and say "okay, you can now tell your family what you did during World War 2."  It is because of the 30 years of silence that there is no information.  A lot of people never actually decided to come out and say anything or they were dead by that point.  I would advise that if you want to do a written report of this topic do not take the task lightly.  You are going to read a lot of papers that will have almost the exact same information in them.  However if you like to read journals for fun and the knowledge they hold I highly recommend doing some searches on Alan Turing, Bletchley Pack, and the Enigma Machine.

Journal #1 Revision: What's Wrong with your pa$$wOrd?

http://www.creditsesame.com/blog/a-hackers-favorite-password/

I decided to do my rhetorical analysis paper on the Ted Talk titled "What's wrong with your pa$$wOrd?" by Lorrie Faith Cranor.  In this speech Lorrie discusses all the things we are doing wrong when creating new passwords. Most people put absolutely no thought into identity theft when they create passwords and that is a huge problem.  A few of the things she mentioned that we do wrong were length, the use of common names, and the reuse of old passwords. Listening to Lorrie speak really hit me pretty hard.  I had never really given much thought to what I should be doing when making a new password.  I always figured simple and using the same basic format for all of them was smart because then I couldn't forget it.  Lorrie gives some really good advice on using noun/verb alternation in order to come up with random passwords that are both long and random.  She goes on to also explain how because the nouns and verbs are making a slight sentence they are easier to remember.  

This speech has really made me start to think twice on using my same usual passwords. I highly recommend everyone to watch this speech and just stop and think about for a little while.   It really does not take a long time to think of a good password and there are many ways to store your passwords so that you don’t have to worry about forgetting them.  If you are anything like me, it will be the best 17 minutes you ever spent.  This is the link in order to get straight to the talk in case I persuaded you to watch it: https://www.ted.com/talks/lorrie_faith_cranor_what_s_wrong_with_your_pa_w0rd

Journal #2 Revision: Equality? The Real Question of the World

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/11/Dear_White_People.jpg

This blog is intended to be a review of the movie “Dear White People” for my English 202 class.  The movie “Dear White People” is the story of four black college students that attend the Ivy League school Winchester University.  Winchester was always a predominantly white school and now with the addition of colored students some staff and students find it very difficult to deal with the change.  One of the main characters Sam White is a bi-racial student that is having a hard time trying to decide where she fits in and what rights she wants to fight for.  She was the sole speaker for the only talk radio on campus called Dear White People where she would inform white people about the rules of living with and around the small black community on campus.  She would tell than what was acceptable and what was un acceptable.  The problem was that it was extremely one sided and did not take into account of how others had to live their lives as well.  When Sam was elected to be head of the Armstrong/Parker house on campus, the all black house on campus, she proceeded to try and block out all non-black folks and those who opposed the black race. At the end of the movie there was a black face party thrown by one of the other houses that was eventually crashed by all the other colored groups on campus.  It wasn’t until this party that a lot of the confusion was sorted out among the students and everyone’s true colors were shown.

My person opinion of this movie is hard for me to explain.  I had a very hard time following the story line of this movie.  It was confusing and hard to follow along and keep up with all the characters at the same time.  I love the general concept of the movie but it really needed to be given in a different way for me.  I could maybe give this movie like 4 stars out of 10.  I was never once able to fully see the drama and the comedy that this movie was supposed to produce.

Journal #3 Revision: The Imitation Game

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Observer/Columnist/Columnists/2014/11/14/1415981916239/2014-THE-IMITATION-GAME-012.jpg?w=620&q=85&auto=format&sharp=10&s=ae349037c00d6333e5b9837227324886

Whoever would have thought that one single machine and a whole lot of calculus could save millions of lives and end one of the bloodiest wars in world history?  The Imitation Game is a movie that is all about how a small handful of men and a woman saved millions of lives and an estimated 2 yeas of battle by breaking one of the hardest codes to ever exist, the enigma code.  Enigma was used by the Germans for all communication both before during and after World War 2.  Now anyone could receive the messages they were sent flying through the air all day.  It was decoding what the messages said that was the hard part.  The codes we simply one letter would mean another letter for example M=W but when you did this for all the letters and characters they claimed that there were 159,000,000,000,000,000,000 for the code.  Now it sounds like you should be able to get a bunch of people together and figure out the code in no time, but you would be wrong.  Precisely at midnight every night the Germans would change the code and they would have to start all over again from scratch.  This is where our main character Alan Turing came into the equation.  He was hired to be one of the people that would sit at a desk and try to figure out what the code was for that day, but Turning had other plans.  He wanted to build the first computer ever in existence or what he named Christopher.  The name coming from his childhood lover Christopher Morcum.  The story of these men and woman who single handedly played god during the war is an inspirational story of hard work and determination.

          When it comes to my opinion of the movie I loved the movie.  I had no idea what Enigma was and always thought that the war was won by pure man power.  I would have never guessed that there were half a dozen men sitting in a room for 4 years doing math and building the most complicated machine to exist at the time.  I really need to do a lot more research into this subject and see what else there is to learn.  I highly recommend this movie to anyone who wants to know things about World War 2.  It is a good movie and it is even based off of a book so I’m sure there can be even more to learn if you read the book.

The Imitation Game

          

         

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Observer/Columnist/Columnists/2014/11/14/1415981916239/2014-THE-IMITATION-GAME-012.jpg?w=620&q=85&auto=format&sharp=10&s=ae349037c00d6333e5b9837227324886

          Whoever would have thought that one single machine and a whole lot of calculus could save millions of lives and end one of the bloodiest wars in world history?  The Imitation Game is a movie that is all about how a small handful of men and a woman saved millions of lives and an estimated 2 yeas of battle by breaking one of the hardest codes to ever exist, the enigma code.  Enigma was used by the Germans for all communication during the war.  Now anyone could receive the messages they were sent flying through the air all day.  It was decoding what the messages said that was the hard part.  The codes we simply one letter would mean another letter for example M=W but when you did this for all the letters and characters they claimed that there were 159,000,000,000,000,000,000 for the code.  Now it sounds like you should be able to get a bunch of people together and figure out the code in no time, but you would be wrong.  Precisely at midnight every night the Germans would change the code and they would have to start all over again from scratch.  This is where our main character Alan Turing came into the equation.  He was hired to be one of the people that would sit at a desk and try to figure out what the code was for that day, but Turning had other plans.  He wanted to build the first computer ever in existence or what he named Christopher.  The story of these men and woman who single handedly played god during the war is an inspirational story of hard work and determination.

          When it comes to my opinion of the movie I loved the movie.  I had no idea what Enigma was and always thought that the war was won by pure man power.  I would have never guessed that there were half a dozen men sitting in a room for 4 years doing math and building the most complicated machine to exist at the time.  I highly recommend this movie to anyone who wants to know things about World War 2.  It is a good movie and it is even based off of a book so I’m sure there can be even more to learn if you read the book

Equality? The Real Question of the World

              

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/11/Dear_White_People.jpg

           This blog is intended to be a review of the movie “Dear White People” for my English 202 class.  The movie Dear White People is the story of four black college students that attend the Ivy League school Winchester University.  Winchester was always a predominantly white school and now with the addition of black students some staff and students find it very difficult to deal with the change.  One of the main characters Sam White is a bi racial student that is having a hard time trying to decide where she fits in and what rights she wants to fight for.  She was the sole speaker for the only talk radio on campus called dear white people where she would inform white people about the rules of living with and around the small black community on campus.  When Sam was elected to be head of the Armstrong/Parker house on campus, the all black house on campus, she proceeded to try and block out all non-black folks and those who opposed the black race. At the end of the movie there was a black face party thrown by one of the other houses that was eventually crashed by all the other colored groups on campus.  It wasn’t until this party that a lot of the confusion was sorted out among the students and everyone’s true colors were shown.

          My person opinion of this movie is hard for me to explain.  I had a very hard time following the story line of this movie.  It was confusing and hard to follow along and keep up with all the characters at the same time.  I love the general concept of the movie but it really needed to be given in a different way for me.  I could maybe give this movie like 4 stars out of 10.  I was never once able to fully see the drama and the comedy that this movie was supposed to produce

What's Wrong with your pa$$wOrd?

http://www.creditsesame.com/blog/a-hackers-favorite-password/

I decided to do my rhetorical analysis paper on the Ted Talk titled "What's wrong with your pa$$wOrd?" by Lorrie Faith Cranor.  In this speech Lorrie discusses all the things we are doing wrong when creating new passwords. A few of the things she mentioned were length, the use of common names, and the reuse of old passwords. Listening to Lorrie speak really hit me pretty hard.  I had never really given much thought to what I should be doing when making a new password.  I always figured simple and using the same basic format for all of them was smart because then I couldn't forget it.  Lorrie gives some really good advice on using noun/verb alternation in order to come up with random passwords that are both long and random.  She goes on to also explain how because the nouns and verbs are making a slight sentence they are easier to remember.  This speech has really made me start to think twice on using my same usual passwords. I highly recommend everyone to watch this speech and just stop and think about for a little while.   If you are anything like me it will be the best 17 minutes you ever spent.

This is the link in order to get straight to the talk in case I persuaded you to watch it: https://www.ted.com/talks/lorrie_faith_cranor_what_s_wrong_with_your_pa_w0rd