Thread

1. Twiin · 1790948492 · focus · HN ↗

   Last week I used Opus 5.5 to decipher a number of Waffen-SS Truppenschlüssel messages from 1941 that had never been broken. It was a similar approach, I used it to find, transcribe, and process over 10K images from various archives of WW2 material. Within that material was text I could use to help break day ciphers, to use as cribs, and so on. Opus didn't find a new vulnerability in these 85 year old ciphers, but it allowed me to process data at scale in languages I don't speak, and to write a dozen solvers in the time it would have taken me to write one or two by hand. Took what would have taken a research grant, three assistants and a year of time and turned it into a weekend project.

   1. guiomie · 1790959702 · focus · HN ↗

      As an armchair ww2 historian, I'd love a blog post on the technique et the content deciphered.

      1. Twiin · 1790960995 · focus · HN ↗

         I'll put something together this weekend. I had actually started writing it up very early for several days worth of messages, but someone else broke them and submitted them while I was building a little site with a web decoder and writing my results up. 85 years of sitting there unbroken, and then Opus 5.5 comes out and multiple people are solving it within hours of each other.

         In any case I stopped writing it up at that point and tried to focus on the messages. But I have the mostly-done writeup and I'll post it soon.

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