Remembering When Alan Turing Developed a Portable Voice Encryption Device (popularmechanics.com) 25
Long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat writes: Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020, reveal Turning had produced a working model of a portable voice encryption device. He even demonstrated it by using a Winston Churchill speech recording.
"Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack," Jack Copeland wrote in an article for IEEE Spectrum, "Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack."
More from Popular Mechanics: Turingâ(TM)s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes âoewas a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.â The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well...
[T]he reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isnâ(TM)t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasnâ(TM)t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turingâ(TM)s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turingâ(TM)s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.
"Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack," Jack Copeland wrote in an article for IEEE Spectrum, "Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack."
More from Popular Mechanics: Turingâ(TM)s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes âoewas a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.â The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well...
[T]he reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isnâ(TM)t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasnâ(TM)t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turingâ(TM)s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turingâ(TM)s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.
"Alan Turing, one of the more famous people" (Score:1)
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Probably one of the most brilliant people of the century who we lost due to bigotry.
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Sadly, one of so many. Recently found out my best friend in highschool had suicided likely because he had been outed as gay. All I can think of is he should have told me, I'd have supported him, he's hadly the only gay friend I ever had. And in retrospect it should have been bleedingly obvious, the man would practically run from any woman who showed him affection, and he was pretty dandy. Singing in a hair metal band and bei
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So way more than "one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine".
Hence my comment.
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Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park
I really have no idea what your objection is to that statement.
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From their careful selection of text, they WANTED it to mean something else so badly that they couldn't handle putting in the full text. It's a common blight on today's Internet, where people want other people's writings to mean something other than what was meant by the writer, so carefully select the words they read.
More AI garbage or just bad writing? (Score:3)
"Today, there is intense interest in the use of multivibrators in cryptography. Turing’s key generator, the most original part of Delilah, contained eight multivibrator circuits, along with the five-wheel assembly mentioned previously. In effect the multivibrators were eight more very complicated “wheels,” and there was additional circuitry for enhancing the random appearance of the numbers the multivibrators produced."
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Re: More AI garbage or just bad writing? (Score:1)
There's a Futurama joke from 25 years ago encoded somewhere in that comment. Oy I'm old.
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How is ChatGPT supposed to know the difference? Both involve hands and mouths, so clearly it's the same context. :P
DELILAH - now rebuilt (Score:5, Informative)
https://hmgcc.gov.uk/our-story [hmgcc.gov.uk] - has details of Alan Turing's work on this and pictures of the rebuild.
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Thanks. Any ideas where I can listen to what the encoded voice sounds like?
Confusing (Score:2)
This is slashdot, we all know who Alan Turing was.
But who is this Turinga T. M. person?
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The British government, in a desperate bid to increase profitability, has trademarked Alan Turing himself.
Cryptonomicon had a scene with this (Score:2)
Not the first to the party (Score:1)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Digitized voice signals and used an OTP distributed as matching phonograph records. Operational in 1942.
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"The SIGSALY terminal was massive, consisting of 40 racks of equipment. It weighed over 50 tons, and used about 30 kW of power, necessitating an air-conditioned room to hold it."
Turing's device was slightly easier to move ...
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Turing was also involved in Sigsaly, so it's not surprising he ended up working on a second-generation machine that removed some of the drawbacks of Sigsaly.
Unicode secret decoder ring (Score:2)
Is still needed in 2026 to read this post.
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Backpacking? Sure, 20%. Military? More like 33%, and up to 40% being a "normal" load on a soldier. So 39 Kg is not too bad, as long as they are not carrying much (and ideally nothing) more.