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Thursday, March 30, 2006

Enigma: For Sale

From Engadget
(http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/30/original-wwii-enigma-machine-for-sale-on-ebay/):

One of the most famous elements of the Nazi war effort was the Enigma electrical cryptography machine, which was adopted by the Germans in 1925 after they discovered how easily the British cracked their codes in World War I, and a rare example of which is now for sale on eBay for almost $16,000 as of this writing. The Enigma improved on older monoalphabetic ciphers (where letters are exchanged in a one-to-one fashion throughout a piece of text) by altering the cipher each time a new letter was encoded, giving the machine over 10,000,000,000,000,000 possible keys.

Wow. I never thought one of those would be up for auction. Here's the link:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ru=http://search.ebay.com:80/search/search.dll?from=R40&satitle=6265092168&fvi=1&item=6265092168&rd=1.

And if you're curious about the Enigma machine, the Wikipedia entry is absolutely outstanding. Here's the link for that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine.