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M4 Message Breaking Project Posts Second Success! |
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Written by Michael Salsbury
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Tuesday, 07 March 2006 |
Earlier I mentioned that I've been donating CPU time to the M4 Message
Breaking Project, which is a distributed computing effort intended to
crack some previously undecoded German military messages from World War
II. The project decoded one message pretty early on. It failed to
decode the second message after several tries, so it moved on to the
third (planning to come back to the second again later to do a more
thorough run against it). The third message cracked some time in the
last several hours. It's a bit garbled, but the experts are working on
it to complete the translation and determine exactly who sent it.
It appears to say:
On escort course 55 degrees
nothing found, following given grid (square). Position AJ3995. [wind] South East
4, seedrem(?), 10/10 overcast, [barometer] 28mb risen, visibility in fog 1
nautical mile
And it appears to be from a captain Schreeder, Schroeder, or
Schreiber. (There's some debate as to exactly what the name is due to
some of the garbling, potential mis-keying, mis-spelling, etc.)
Regardless, it feels very cool to be a part of a project that's uncovering a tiny piece of history.
The final message is currently being attacked. If you're interested in
taking part in the project or just monitoring its progress, the
official site is http://www.bytereef.org/m4_project.html
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 09 March 2006 )
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