Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Book Reviews

Submission + - Book review

Submitted by benrothke
benrothke writes: Title: How I Discovered World War IIs Greatest Spy and Other Stories of Intelligence and Code

Author: David Kahn

Pages: 469

Publisher: Auerbach Publications

Rating: 8/10

Reviewer: Ben Rothke

ISBN: 978-1466561991

Summary: Very good collection of a large number of excellent articles from David Kahn





When it comes to documenting the history of cryptography, David Kahn is singularly one of the finest, if not the finest writers in that domain. For anyone with an interest in the topic, Kahn's works are read in detail and anticipated.



His first book was written almost 50 years ago: The Codebreakers – The Story of Secret Writing; which was a comprehensive overview on the history of cryptography. Other titles of his include Seizing the Enigma: The Race to Break the German U-Boats Codes, 1939-1943. The Codebreakers was so good and so groundbreaking, that some in the US intelligence community wanted the book banned. They did not bear a grudge, as Kahn became an NSA scholar-in-residence in the mid 1990's.



With such a pedigree, many were looking forward, including myself, to his latest book "How I Discovered World War IIs Greatest Spy and Other Stories of Intelligence and Code". While the entire book is fascinating, it is somewhat disingenuous, in that there is no new material in it. Many of the articles are decades old, and some go back to the late 1970's. From the book description and cover, one would get the impression that this is an all new work. But it is not until ones reads the preface, that it is detailed that the book is simple an assemblage of collected articles.



For those that are long-time fans of Kahn, there is nothing new in the book. For those that want a wide-ranging overview of intelligence, espionage and codebreaking, the book does provide that.



The book gets its title from a 2007 article in which Kahn tracked down whom he felt was the greatest spy of World War 2. That was none other than Hans-Thilo Schmidt, who sold information about the Enigma cipher machine to the French. That information made its way to Marian Rejewski of Poland, which lead to the ability of the Polish military to read many Enigma-enciphered communications.



An interesting question Kahn deals with is the old conspiracy theory that President Franklin Roosevelt and many in is administration knew about the impending attack on Pearl Harbor. He writes that the theory is flawed for numerous reasons. Kahn notes that the attack on Pearl Harbor succeeded because of Japan's total secrecy about the attack. Even the Japanese ambassador's in Washington, D.C., whose messages the US was reading were never told of the attack.



Chapter 4 from 1984 is particularly interesting which deals with how the US viewed Germany and Japan in 1941. Kahn writes that part of the reason the US did not anticipate a Japanese attack was due to racist attitudes. The book notes that many Americans viewed the Japanese as a bucktoothed and bespectacled nation.



Chapter 10 Why Germany's intelligence failed in World War II, is one of the most interesting chapters in the book. It is from Kahn's 1978 book "Hitlers Spies: German Military Intelligence In World War II".



In the Allies vs. the Axis, the Allies were far from perfect. Battles at Norway, Arnhem and the Bulge were met with huge losses. But overall, the Allies enjoyed significant success in their intelligence, much of it due to their superiority in verbal intelligence because of their far better code-breaking. Kahn writes that the Germans in contrast, were glaringly inferior.



Kahn writes that there were five basic factors that led to the failure of the Germans, namely: unjustified arrogance, which caused them to lose touch with reality; aggression, which led to a neglect of intelligence; a power struggle within the officer corps, which made many generals hostile to intelligence; the authority structure of the Nazi state, which gravely impaired its intelligence, and anti-Semitism, which deprived German intelligence of many brains.



The Germans negative attitude towards intelligence went all the way back to World War I, when in 1914 the German Army was so certain of success that many units left their intelligence officers behind. Jump to 1941 and Hitler invaded Russia with no real intelligence preparation. This arrogance, which broke Germany's contact with reality, also prevented intelligence from seeking to resume that contact.



Other interesting stories in the book include how the US spied on the Vatican in WW2, the great spy capers between the US and Soviets, and more.



For those that want a broad overview of the recent history of cryptography, spying and military intelligence, How I Discovered World War IIs Greatest Spy and Other Stories of Intelligence and Code, is an enjoyable, albeit somewhat disjointed summary of the topic.



The best part of the book is its broad scope. With topics from Edward Bell and his Zimmermann Telegram memoranda, cryptology and the origins of spread spectrum, to Nothing Sacred: The Allied Solution of Vatican Codes in World War II and a historical theory of intelligence, the book provides a macro view of the subject. The down side is that this comes at the cost of the 30 chapters being from almost as many different books and articles, over the course of almost 40 years.



For those that are avid readers of David Kahn, of which there are many, this title will not be anything new. For those that have read some of Kahn's other works and are looking for more, How I Discovered World War IIs Greatest Spywill be an enjoyable read.





Reviewed by Ben Rothke

Submission + - WSJ: Prepare to hang up the phone - forever (wsj.com) 1

Submitted by retroworks
retroworks writes: Telecom giants AT&T and Verizon Communications are lobbying states, one by one, to hang up the plain, old telephone system, what the industry now calls POTS--the copper-wired landline phone system whose reliability and reach made the U.S. a communications powerhouse for more than 100 years. Is landline obsolete, and should be immune from grandparents era social protection?

Comment Re: No proof so far (Score 5, Insightful) 148

by whoever57 (#46612585) Attached to: Apple, Google Go On Trial For Wage Fixing On May 27

No one at being recruited is at will. These aren't tech support jobs they're design and engineering teams. These folks have very detailed contracts. Your not working a new products without one.

Perhaps the state in which you live permits indentured servitude, but California law restricts what employment terms can be enforced and leaving to join a competitor is an act that is protected under California law.

Submission + - 500GB To 1TB On An mSATA Stick - Samsung SSD 840 EVO mSATA Tested (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Shortly after 2.5-inch versions of Samsung's SSD 840 EVO drives hit the market, the company prepared an array of mSATA drives featuring the same controller and NAND flash. The Samsung SSD 840 EVO mSATA series of drives are essentially identical to their 2.5" counterparts, save for the mSATA drives' much smaller form factor. Like their 2.5" counterparts, Samsung's mSATA 840 EVO series of drives feature an updated, triple-core Samsung MEX controller, which operates at 400MHz. The 840 EVO's MEX controller has also been updated to support the SATA 3.1 spec, which incorporates a few new features, like support for queued TRIM commands. Along with the MEX controller, all of the Samsung 840 EVO mSATA series drives feature LPDDR2-1066 DRAM cache memory. The 120GB drive sports 256MB of cache, the 250GB and 500GB drive have 512MB of cache, and the 750GB and 1TB drives have 1GB of cache. Performance-wise, SSD 840 EVO series of mSATA solid state drives performs extremely well, whether using synthetic benchmarks, trace-based tests like PCMark, or highly-compressible or incompressible data.

Comment Bad summary (Score 5, Informative) 206

Much as I hate to defend Microsoft, the summary mischaracterises Microsoft's statement. Microsoft is saying that it already had the right to search the mailbox, so a court would not have issued an order. It's like asking a court for permission to search your own house. The court won't issue an order, but that doesn't mean that it would be illegal to do the search.

I don't know if Microsoft is right in its claim that it would not have been able to get a court order, but let's get the facts straight when criticising Microsoft.

Comment Re:More lip service (Score 1) 141

by whoever57 (#46538621) Attached to: Gmail Goes HTTPS Only For All Connections

Better to compromise certificate authorities than to compromise certificates.

Let's say you work for a large tech company based in Mountain View and, when connecting from home, you actually inspect the certificate that is presented to your browser and it isn't the certificate that you expect. What do you do?

Next, assume you tell your bosses. What do they do?

Comment Summary -- root can do anything! (Score 5, Interesting) 220

by whoever57 (#46521271) Attached to: Malware Attack Infected 25,000 Linux/UNIX Servers
The report only mentions in passing how the servers are compromised, which is that the operators of the botnet use credentials that have already been stolen to "infect" new machines. I personally think it likely that brute force attacks against ssh passwords are also used.

The summary states:

The servers are being hijacked by a backdoor Trojan

but I think this is an inaccurate summary since the Trojan is being installed on machines where the attackers already have root credentials.

Perhaps some unknown vulnerability is also being used to gain root access, but the report does not claim this.

Comment Re:Shooting themselves in the foot (Score 3, Informative) 229

by whoever57 (#46488817) Attached to: Elon Musk Addresses New Jersey's Tesla Store Ban

Sure I saw some stuff, but then *wham* I ran into something that will affect me eventually. It's HEROES EARNINGS ASSISTANCE AND RELIEF TAX ACT OF 2008, section 301 that says that if you emigrate FROM the US you have to pay capital gains tax on your possessions.

Did you see the exclusion of the first $600,000 in section 3?

Comment Re:Why dealerships get a free ride (Score 2, Insightful) 342

by whoever57 (#46459447) Attached to: New Jersey Auto Dealers Don't Want to Face Tesla

If we remove the dealer who is going to stock parts, deliver them, and install them?.....Eventually either you stop getting parts and service for cars after 5 years or your start getting gouged in ways you can only imagine

Yes, quite true. I'll just run down the road to my local (California) MG dealer to get parts for my '71 MG...... Oh wait!

Guess what, parts for my MG usually cost less than than equivalent parts on new cars.

Slashdot Top Deals

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

Close