Colossus Rebuilt
Very cool for the WWII crypto buff crowd (H/T Schneier).
A neat nugget:
Tony Sale, who led the 14-year Colossus re-build project, said it was not clear whether the wartime technology or a modern PC would be faster at cracking the codes.
“A virtual Colossus written to run on a Pentium 2 laptop takes about the same time to break a cipher as Colossus does,” he said.
A point that often gets overlooked by the layman. Software is great, but if you really want to optimize on speed, you have to deal with hardware. During the 1990s, for example, a researcher built a dedicated DES-cracker machine to demonstrate the vulnerability of DES.
