I watched the video, and was mildly shocked that it was an official Trump ad. The story is absurd on its face. If it were legitimate, the FBI would be confirming it. Instead it's being promoted exclusively by partisan hacks with zero credibility. Hell, in Giuliani's case it's already a known fact that he's compromised by the Russians. It's also known that the Russians have been planning to promote disinformation. Text is by far the easiest evidence to fake.

But I'm quoting you because after watching the video and going into the comments on an ad this stupid, you managed to follow it up with some absolutely batshit projected attacks, and reading your comment honestly made me guffaw. I fucking guffawed Bob, good-naturedly at the actual hilarity of it. No joke, the upside-down topsy-turviness of it actually legitimately tickled my funny bone because what you wrote was so insanely bonkers. There aren't just *hints* at Trump having actually fucking raped children, it's damned near certain when you look at the various evidence. He's a fucking child fucker. Trump. He almost certainly did it, and it's goddamned obvious. So this whole line of attack of "Biden = pedophile" is hilarious. Ghastly too, but hilarious.

You're such a weird enigma, Bob. I don't like to buy into conspiracy-esque shit like "Bob's a Russian account with multiple people behind it," but... sometimes it feels on point.

Dude, anyone who can create an antigrav helicopter could totally crack enigma.

Are you watching these videos via the enigma encryption machine? Because he does not say that.

He says "Plant based diets may now be considered the nutritional equivalent of quitting smoking."

A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

I don't have kids yet, but I can attest to being someone who thought the anti-vaxination stance had some validity.
Please don't confuse me for a moron though; I understand the benefits of vaccinations and my perspective was solely formed on distrust from the system, and the initial ties to autism.
A short period of research and introspection and it was clear that, aside from the systemic trust issues, the claims were unwarranted.
Makes me feel like an enigma in the human race. It seems like no one else wants to take the time and re-educate themselves on difficult subjects. Also makes me feel pretty all-right, being an actual human who's capable of that, and isn't just some lame astroturf projection.

So Tywin Lannister hires Sherlock Holmes to defeat nazis??? Sold!

this actually looks good. If anyone is interested, there's a good video on the enigma machine on the sift.
*related=http://videosift.com/video/Numberphile-The-Fatal-Flaw-of-the-Enigma-Code-Machine

Numberphile - The Fatal Flaw of the Enigma Code Machine has been added as a related post - related requested by ChaosEngine.

It's probably a really good idea to open up the endlessly raging Bombadil controversy. Well so what, Tolkienian cosmology is fascinating. To some extent he's a deliberate enigma. Personally I favour the idea, if he's explicable at all, that he's the spirit of Arda itself or at least the foremost of a number of more provincial spirits. There are competing theories, but it's not really possible that he's a Maia.

Certainly there were any number of Maiar still knocking around at the time of the Fellowship: Gandalf, Saruman, et al; Sauron; Durin's Bane; Gwaihir; arguably Shelob (half-Maia at best); and depending on how widely you want to define 'in Middle Earth', Arien & Tilion (the bearers of the sun & moon), presumably Osse & Uinen, etc.

Bombadil calls himself, and the elves agree, 'eldest', and he claims to have been around before Melkor, who was definitively the first of the Ainur to descend into the circles of the world. He's unaffected by, and not really interested in, the Ring, unlike the Maiar who come into contact with it in the course of the story.

Ilúvatar set the Secret Fire, which gives sentient creatures their fëar or souls, burning at the heart of the world. I can't see an origin for Tom that doesn't derive directly from that, given that at the point he appears in the chronology there's very little else in existence.

I don't know what all this makes Goldberry.

The Superman 1978 film was an enigma, for being a superhero film that didn't absolutely suck.
Then there were the Burton Batman films, which had something special to them that made us feel comic films weren't horribly cheesy.
Then there was a break for a decade of suck, before the first X-men film found that missing link between fantasy and humanity that audiences could relate with on a realistic level. It was bolstered by the first Spiderman, and then the Iron Man film really cemented the legitimacy of comic-based films from there.
That's not even mentioning the Dark Knight films.
But has anyone noticed that gradual slide into mediocrity/laughability in the last few years/sequels? Everything since then has lost that human element that could make us relate to the protagonists and suspend our disbelief, and for me it's felt that everything in this genre has slid backwards to that immature and unrealistic setting.
Meh.

Shame Dota is so impenetrable to spectators that haven't played the game. I imagine a lot of the excitement from this clip needs context beyond even the simple mechanics of the game. I've mostly stopped playing Dota now but its such an enjoyable game to watch atm. Great casters/production, lots of prize money and teams with a lot of character. Winning formula.

I was screaming like a girl when I watched it live. Unashamed Navi fanboy here. I think this was more misplay by iG though, and some smart drafting by Navi. They consistently gave away Siren knowing that as long as they could get Enigma or Tide the Song was as much a set-up for them as it was for their opponents. Dendi's Rubick play in that tournament was the standout for me. Stealing Ravage after Ravage was amazing to watch. Nice to see Enigma getting some more play again recently now that Magnus fell out of the pool a little. Isn't anything quite as hype as 3/4/5 man Black Hole.

The nature of the game of experts and critiques schooled or otherwise in the realm of art, is that even if these are 'replicas' or forgeries that some smugly fart-sniffer will STILL spend bank on the gamble-I hope that's Banksy is disguise, say what you will about the artist, the guys' a genius guerrilla marketing enigma-

Hi guys!!

We try to explain a replace for this enigma, try to see it here:
[url redacted]

Hardly skillful....Deano?? Got my back on this one, right?

He's an enigma. Black cop in a traditionally "whites only" good-ol' boys club. A tenured motorcycle patrolman who found his niche like a 30-year-veteran bus driver would. Make the rounds, do my job, get my pension, don't make waves.

If it's a healthy survival skill you're speaking of, he's full of it and seems a genuinely nice guy. He's still a member a broken, infected, and hopefully terminal club.

Edit: Oh boy, wall of text crits for 10k.

His explanation was rather short and somewhat misleading. Maybe they thought a proper explanation would have been too dry or too lengthy to be of any interest for a sufficient number of their viewers.

tl:dr

If all rotor settings are indicated to be correct, a feedback loop within the circuit indicated a subset of correct connections on the plugboard, even if the initially assumed connection turned out to be wrong. It didn't show all connections, but enough to run it through a modified Enigma to determine if it's a false positive or in fact the correct setting. If it was correct, the rest could be done by hand.

----------------------- Long version -----------------------

Apologies in advance. We had to recreate parts of the Bombe as a simulation, but a) it's been a while and b) it was in German. I'll try to explain the concept behind it, hopefully without screwing it up entirely.

The combination of clear message and code snippet (2:25) is called a crib. This can be used to create a graph, wherein letters are the vertices and connections together with their numerical positions are the edges.

For example, at position 1, "A" corresponds to "W". So you'd create an edge between "A" and "W" and mark that edge as "1". At position 4, "B" corresponds to "T", so there's the edge marked as "4". All edges are bidirectional, the transformation at a specific position can go either way.

Once your graph is finished, you check for loops. These are essential. Without loops, you're boned. In this case, one loop can be found at positions 2,3,5 in form of "T->E->Q->T".

Here the Bombe comes into play. It uses scramblers, each combining all three rotors plus reflector of an enigma into one segment. This way, one Enigma setting is functionally equal to a single scrambler.

Now you can use those scramblers to create an electrical circuit that corresponds to your graph -- scrambler = edge. All scramblers are set to the same initial configuration. The first scramber remains at in the inital configuration, while the second and third get configurations in relation to their edge's numerical value. Configuration in this case means the value of their internal three rotors, so there are 26*26*26 possible settings within each scrambler.

It's basically a sequence of three encryptions.

Example: in our little TEQ triangle, the first scrambler (TE, 2) gets a random starting position. The second scrambler (QE, 5) gets turned three notches, the third scrambler (QT, 3) gets turned one notch. The initial configuration might be wrong, but only the relation between the scramblers matters. A wrong result simply tells you to turn all scramblers another notch, until you get it right.

You have a possibly correct setting when the output matches the input. Specifically, a voltage is applied to the wire of letter "T", leading into the first scrambler. And on a test register attached to the last scrambler, the wire of letter "T" should have a voltage on it as well. If the setting is incorrect, a different letter will light up. Similarly, all incorrect inputs for this particular setup will always light up a different letter at the the end, never the same (thanks to the reflector). If output equals input, you're golden. And if several loops are used, all with the same input/output letter, each of their outputs must equal the input.

To reduce the number of false positives, you need as many connected loops within the crib as possible.

So far, that's an Enigma without a plugboard. To account for that, they introduced feedback loops into the circuit. In our small scale case, the output of the third scrambler would be coupled back into the input of the first scrambler. The number of loops determines the number of possible outcomes with each specific setting. All of these are fed back into the first scrambler of each loop.

The plugboard, however, changed the input into the system of rotors. Instead of a "T" in our example, it might be a "Z", if those two letters were connected on the board.

A random hypothesis is made and fed into the machine. If the scramblers are set incorrectly, a different letter comes out at the end of each loop and is in return fed back into the first scramblers. Result: (almost) everything lights up. If you start with a good graph, everything will light up.

-----
A key element for this was the "diagonal board", which represented a) all possible connections on the plugboard and b) the bidirectional nature of those connections (AB = BA). Maybe it can be explained without pictures, but I sure as hell can't, so "a grid of all possible connections between scramblers and letters + forced reciprocity" will have to suffice.
-----

If, however, the setting was correct, a wrong hypothesis for the input connection merely meant that everything except the right connections was lit up.

Let's say the fix point of the loops in our graph is the letter "T". We assume that it's connected to the letter "Z" on the plugboard. A voltage is applied to "Z" on the test register, and thereby inserted into the circuit at the first scrambler. Loop #1 applies voltage to the letter "A" on the test register, #2 lights up "B", #3 lights up "F". These three outputs are now fed back into the first scrambler, so now the scrambler has voltage on ZABF, which in return lights up ZABF+GEK on the test register.
This goes on until everything except "U" is lit up on the test register. That means three things: a) the settings are correct, b) the hypothesis is wrong, c) "T" is connected to "U".

Reasons:
a) if the settings were incorrect, the entire register would be alive
b) if the hypothesis was correct, only the letter "Z" would be alive on the register
c) due to the feedback loop, the only way for the output to be "U" is if the input was also "U", and the reciprocity within the system makes it impossible for any other input to generate the output "U". Since "T" was the fix point for our loops, "T" is connected to "U".

Similarly, if the initial hypothesis is correct, everything on the test register except "U" stays dead.

The diagonal board provides registers for every single letter and allows the user to pick one as a test register. During operation, all the other registers serve as visual representations of the deductions based on the initial hypothesis. So you actually get to see more than just the initial connection, all based on the same concept.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Brady, Haran, James, Grime, WWII, Nazi, code, codebreaker, codebreaking' to 'Brady Haran, James Grime, WWII, Nazi, code, enigma, encryption, alan turing' - edited by xxovercastxx