Comment He Did Work on Aliens and Empire Stikes Back (Score 1) 39
And he inspired me to make science fiction Super-8 films when I was a kid.
Submission + - Alan Turing developed a portable voice encryption device (popularmechanics.com)
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,” Copeland summarizes, “Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack.”
Turing’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 “was a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.”
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.
This is the part of the story where one might say “Well, I’ve never heard of Alan Turing’s voice encoder, so the experiments must have failed.” But remarkably, they didn’t. Turing and Bayley actually did create their Delilah, and even demonstrated it using a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, “successfully encrypting, transmitting, and decrypting it.”
Instead, the reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isn’t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasn’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 Turing’s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turing’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,” Copeland summarizes, “Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack.”
Turing’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 “was a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.”
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.
This is the part of the story where one might say “Well, I’ve never heard of Alan Turing’s voice encoder, so the experiments must have failed.” But remarkably, they didn’t. Turing and Bayley actually did create their Delilah, and even demonstrated it using a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, “successfully encrypting, transmitting, and decrypting it.”
Instead, the reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isn’t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasn’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 Turing’s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turing’s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.
Comment Re:The SpaceX Valuation is Insane (Score 3, Insightful) 67
Delivering "late" is not delivering at all.
For example -- "The Roadster 2 is going into manufacture *this year*" he said, several years ago.
For example -- "We will have humans on Mars by 2024" he said. Even if he eventually does deliver humans to Mars, he still broke that promise.
Saying you're going to do something by a certain date and then not doing so constitutes a broken promise -- even if you do it a decade later.
Comment Re:The SpaceX Valuation is Insane (Score 5, Funny) 67
Of course Musk is a genius... those who say otherwise are idiots.
After all, how else would I be enjoying my FSD Roadster 2 that charges from my solar roof-tiles before the drive through a Boring Company tunnel to the Hyperloop terminal where I'm whisked off to the SpaceX launch-pad in anticipation of a Starship flight to join some of the others who set up that initial Mars base back in 2024.
Those who say that Musk is a snake-oil merchant who doesn't deliver on his promises are just deniers who simply choose not to see the reality of the world as it is today.
Or I could be wrong
Comment Re:With xAI and Cursor (Score 1) 67
I think xAI is falling behind (does anyone using Cursor use xAI as a coding agent?).
Perhaps this is Musk's way of buying market-share for a product that's really failing to perform right now (xAI).
Comment Re:With xAI and Cursor (Score 1) 67
That's $60 billion today (with SpaceX stock near $170) but how much/little will it be in 2 year's time? If I was Cursor, I'd be wanting a fair amount of cold, hard cash in that deal
Submission + - Trump's "Made in the USA" Phone is just a reskinned HTC U24 Pro 1
necro81 writes: The heavily promoted, $499 T1 "Trump Phone" was originally said to be "Made in the USA" and ship in September 2025. Later, that was downgraded to "Assembled in the USA". Given the Trump Organization's lack of engineering or supply chain expertise, many assumed the "T1" would just be a private-label phone made by someone else. After a number of delays, the first phones are finally shipping.
iFixit has performed a teardown and concluded that the T1 is a just gold-painted 2024 HTC U24 Pro — a device from a Taiwanese company, probably using mainland China design and supply chains. In collaboration with NBC News, the iFixit team examined both phones using CT scans, side-by-side teardowns, and even reassembled a working T1 using a U24 Pro main board. As for "assembled in the USA", that may be true, in the same sense that your phone's repairman can "assemble" a phone from a handful of subassemblies sourced from someone else. Or it may have been assembled in Guangdong, China like the other U24 Pros.
iFixit sums it up: "What you have is not an 'American-Proud Design', but a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China. I’m failing to find any stirring of American pride within me. I’ve certainly felt it before, so I can confirm that it is absent at this time."
iFixit has performed a teardown and concluded that the T1 is a just gold-painted 2024 HTC U24 Pro — a device from a Taiwanese company, probably using mainland China design and supply chains. In collaboration with NBC News, the iFixit team examined both phones using CT scans, side-by-side teardowns, and even reassembled a working T1 using a U24 Pro main board. As for "assembled in the USA", that may be true, in the same sense that your phone's repairman can "assemble" a phone from a handful of subassemblies sourced from someone else. Or it may have been assembled in Guangdong, China like the other U24 Pros.
iFixit sums it up: "What you have is not an 'American-Proud Design', but a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China. I’m failing to find any stirring of American pride within me. I’ve certainly felt it before, so I can confirm that it is absent at this time."
Comment Putin/Trump Probably Laughed When Brexit Passed (Score 1) 226
With broken EU Russian Could Take Europe, as without EU, how does military contractors function?
Comment AI Has Brought Only Problems for Humanity (Score 1) 33
That facility won't produce anything to equal the damage AI has caused and will cause. AI is the 2nd worst tech human beings have ever made, 2nd to nuclear weapons. AI is yet another anti-humanity device that benefits only the world's wealthiest people.
Comment When you get to town, CA will redlight-rachet you (Score 1) 103
No one likes a road-rager, but no one likes to hit 6 to 7 red light in in a row. So, what difference is it how fast the highway flows--if you are going to hit every single light? So, if CA is big on light-racheting to slow down traffic in cities--then the big study is just about making narrower highways.
Comment This is why less is more (Score 1) 34
The more that's added, the greater the chance that something might be wrong.
Comment No Youtube Advertisments, then? (Score 1) 120
You should see of the youtube ads. "My husband went at me so hard..." In another one, they show a woman with her legs over her. Youtube doesn't care; they have a monopoly.
Comment Still Makes Nucler Waste (Score 1) 89
Fusion reactors seem really cool, but they still produce nuclear waste. Now that Nevada doesn't want it all. Where are you going to put it?
Comment Exactly Why "Driverless" Cars Need Steering Wheels (Score 1) 155
In the even...of a conflict we need to be able to get all the driverless cars off of the roads.
Comment Re:You don't understand this (Score 0) 115
Sometimes cells do go bad, but inevitably all the cells will become worn out, in the case of lithium cells--from the point of manufacture.
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