You're right. The Poles had the method. They had bombes, which were kind of primitive mechanical computers to crunch the numbers. They also had perforated sheets to keep track of what letters were being used. Their problem was the fact that they just couldn't produce enough of either to keep up. The Navy codes only needed capture of codebooks and machine settings until the Americans got involved and began to crank out bombes in large numbers.

Actually, not the case. The first machine they studied was a commercial machine, but the Poles had trouble breaking the codes until they had figured out the wiring of the wheels inside, which was different for the military machines than the commercial ones. That's part of the reason why it took them a little while after the handover of the information recovered by Hans Thilo Schmidt to start cracking messages.

Maybe the first Brit to read the code, but not the first person. The Poles began to read Enigma messages back in 1932-33 according to the excellently-researched "Enigma: Battle For the Code" by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore. The article is a little clearer, but still can lead one to assume that Dilly Knox was the first to break Enigma messages. He was not. Not to diminish his part in the Enigma saga, but the Poles were reading it long before any other nation.

They have balls, but I can't help thinking that this is counterintuitive. I applaud the effectiveness of the SOPA/PIPA protest yesterday -- that's great. It's within the law, it's effective, it was a lot of people banding together to protest a piece of legislature that could destroy the Internet as we know it. Fair enough. Now right on the heels of that we give Rupert Murdoch something he can point to and say "See? These are the kinds of people we're dealing with! Give an inch and they'll take a mile." All this is going to do is tick off the federal government, add fuel to the fire on the filesharing debate, and give justification to the abuse of power by the entertainment industry lobby. With this recent protest, the Internet has shown that it can bring significant leverage to bear on injustice if enough influential people/corporations get the word out. What's to stop us from doing that instead of giving executives examples of why they should hate the Internet? All this does is invalidate what we did yesterday. SOPA and PIPA are not the answer to the problems with piracy, but neither is this the answer to the problems with anti-piracy work.