by Lidia Paulinska | Mar 9, 2016
March 2016, RSA, San Francisco – After hours spending on the show floor at RSA conference and the talks about security, vulnerability, encryption and authentication I stopped at the Gemalto booth in the North Hall of Moscone Convention Center to listen the presentation. Scott Meltzer from Gemalto was talking about the history of famous encrypting machine Enigma. The company also presented the real 1946 original Enigma machine (NEMA) at the booth. That was a Swiss, 4-rotor model with a movable reflector, built for the Swiss Army in 1946. 1 of 300 machines that are known to still exist today.
Here is the story that was presented.
The most common information that we hear about the Enigma code is that it was super-secret throughout WWII, and it took one man to invent but over 10,000 men to defeat.
Well, none of it is true.
The Enigma was invented in 1918 by Arthur Scherbius in Germany. The inventor was highly interested to share his “rotating rotors” encryption machine with the military but the WWI was just about to end and army wasn’t interested. So, instead he put his invention for commercial use and started the company. The first prototype called Enigma A came to life in 1923. Enigma D, the first commercial version, was produced in 1927 and sold in multiple countries to encrypt financial information, diplomatic communiques, and military messages. By 1928, both German Army and Navy were using customized and upgraded versions of those machines. In fact, the British government had actually purchased several first generation Enigma machines back in 1926.
So, what is the Enigma machine and how it works.
It’s a huge polyalphabetic substitution cypher. Each message is encrypted with its own unique key. Keys are around 17,000 characters long. There are non-repeating substitutions and no easily discernable pattern. The sender would press a key on the keyboard. This would advance the first rotor one step and send an electric signal from the keyboard, through the plug-board. This would be the first substitution in the cypher. Each rotor then introduced an additional substitution as that signal went through it. Another substitution at the reflector and then back through the rotors in reverse and out through the plug-board, with additional substitutions at each step. And finally the signal was sent to the lamp array to show the encoding of that letter. The genius of this electro-mechanical system was that the encoding was reciprocal. If you typed a “W” on one Enigma, and it came out a “B,” typing that “B” on another Enigma would reproduce the “W,” but only if their initial settings were the same. And because a rotor would move every time a key was pressed, the circuit created by the next key pressed would be completely different than the previous circuit and would generate a completely different substitution.
The Enigma was the most powerful and unbreakable code machine. Until 1932.
Just before Nazis came to power, three Polish mathematicians: Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski, successfully broke the Enigma. Poles were able to decrypt 75% of the German army’s Enigma-encrypted radio transmissions between 1933 and 1938. But once the war began in 1939, the Nazis upgraded their machines. They distributed 2 additional rotors, and they changed their procedures to plug several security holes that the Poles were exploiting. This didn’t stop the Poles from breaking some of the Nazis’ daily codes, but each success took much longer, and breaking the entire system would have required way more manpower than they had. They also knew from some of their decrypted messages that Hitler had set his sights on Poland and was planning his move within the next 6 weeks. So, five weeks before Nazis invaded, the Poles gave French and British codebreakers all their information, including working models of the Nazi’s military Enigmas they had reverse-engineered, along with the Cyclometers, Bombas and Zygalski decrytping sheets they used to decode them.
And this is when the more familiar story of breaking the Enigma code begins.
The story of The Bletchley Park Team – Dilly Knox, John Jeffreys, Peter Twinn and Alan Turing, along with over 11,000 others started to deliver their Ultra decrypts. “It was thanks to Ultra that we won the war” – said Winston Churchill to King George VI. BBC claimed that this team shortened the war by at least 2 years. The story was recently portrayed in the movie “The Imitation Game” starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley.
by Lidia Paulinska | Mar 2, 2016
Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody was written 40 years ago by Freddie Mercury. It is a song that put the band on the top of music arena. It has spent 14 weeks at number one, giving it the fourth longest stay at the top of the chart. Bohemian Rhapsody is in a list of the all-time best sellers, with 2.36 million copies sold. It is a six-minute suite of the style called progressive rock that abandons the danceable beat that defines earlier styles and is more likely to experiment with compositional structure, instrumentation, harmony, rhythm, and lyrical content.
As Fathom Event continues to search a unique content this time is bringing the legendary rock band to select cinemas nationwide in Queen: A Night in Bohemia, specially restored and re-mixed for the big screen on Tuesday, March 8. Commemorating the recent 40th anniversary, this special event showcases the first-ever live recording of the record-breaking song and includes a never-before-seen documentary featuring archive footage and interviews with all four members of the band. The screening captured Christmas Eve 1975 at the Hammersmith Odeon in London concert accompanying with documentary that deep into Queen’s archives to tell the story of iconic band.
Tickets for the event on March 8 can be found at Fathom Events at www.fathomevents.com/event/queen-a-night-in-bohemia
by Lidia Paulinska | Mar 1, 2016
Buffet, the storied French manufacturer of woodwind musical instruments, including oboes, clarinets, flutes, saxophones and bassoons, refreshed its name and look this year. At the NAMM show, visitors to their booth had a chance to see a name change as well as a new brand logo for Buffet Crampon USA. This is the first change to their iconic woodwind logo in over 170 years. The company decided to make its new look for the 190th anniversary of Buffet Crampon and 90th anniversary of Julius Keilwerth, the German saxophone manufacturer established in 1925 and now a part of the Buffet Group.
The changes were revealed at first in France at the beginning of this year where the family Buffet began manufacturing quality clarinets in 1825. The French musical instrument maker expanded its operations under the vision of Jean-Louis Buffet and his wife Zoe Crampon. Buffet Crampon started operating exclusively in France, and over the years augmented the production to facilities in Germany and China.
Now Buffet Crampon is quickly approaching its second century of operation with a new name and logo as well as a new line of products including new clarinet models for 2016. The product lines now include Tradition professional clarinet and Prodige student clarinet. Tradition establishes a third professional clarinet bore family (alongside the R13 and RC families) and features the first collaboration of European and North American Clarinet Artists in the design of new model. Prodige, on the other hand, sets a new benchmark for student clarinets with an all-new bore design that retains the tone of the Buffet Crampon heritage. Jerome Perrod, global president of Buffet Crampon and Francois Klok, president of Buffet Crampon USA talked with me about the challenges for the music makers in the development of the instruments.
For beginning musicians, the biggest challenge is how to keep the attention to the instrument and continuing playing if the first sound is not satisfactory? The most important thing is to keep the contact with the instrument. The big development for the new instrument was covering a little so the sound is still pleasing. Now, it sounds good right away. This is a big move as a person learns to play the instrument because he/she feels better about their ability to create good sounds. This feedback encourages beginners to continue to play more and study harder versus dropping classes and quitting. Klok, who is an oboe and double reed player reminisced that he was seven years old when he started playing oboe. My brothers and sisters hated me for doing that he stated with smile.
There is another challenge for beginning musicians. Parents are not willing to make a big investment to buy an instrument with the high risk that their son or daughter is going to drop it very quickly. On other hand, if a school buys the instruments, after a few months and multiple players, the instrument is used to much to be attractive any more. The Buffet Crampon presidents know how important ownership of is. Francois remembered that his first obo was lend to him from conservatory, and then his parents bought him a used instrument. He remembered his happiness and pride of owning his first instrument. He knows (and feels) how it is to say – this is my own oboe. Not my sister’s, not somebody else’s, but mine. It is important to make it affordable to young students.
With the new Prodige student clarinet, Buffet Crampon did a wonderful job in addressing these issues. The instrument sounds acoustically beautiful and would not stop music adepts from dropping playing it yet has an attractive price point for parents and schools.
The bottom line is – to create orchestral music we need to have an orchestra with all the variety of instruments.
