![]() ![]() "It does look rather old-fashioned, does it not, enclosed as it is in an oak case?" Baldwin said. Looking at the machine, it's hard to believe it confounded some of the world's best technical experts, who spent years at places like the UK's secret code-breaking compound at Bletchley Park working on ways to crack it. Then they would tap out the encrypted message in Morse code over the radio, sure in the knowledge that only someone with their own Enigma machine with the same exact settings could decipher it. Users would type their messages into the machine and write down each replacement letter as it lit up. If you press one key on the stripped-down keyboard, a different letter lights up in the lamp board, an array of light-up letters arranged just above the keyboard. As Enigma expert Mark Baldwin demonstrated on Wednesday to a crowd of employees at CBS Interactive, CNET's parent company, "it just changes one letter into another." The power of this machine prompted the Allied forces to launch an effort that used machines, mathematicians sworn to secrecy and some Naval derring-do to crack the code and read Germany's messages. That gave Germany's lethal U-boats the power to communicate with each other about attacks on merchant ships, which devastated the UK throughout the war, taking thousands of lives and cutting off vital supplies and troops en route from North America. It was then cutting-edge, creating one of the world's strongest encryption keys. That marks it as a Nazi cipher machine, used in World War II to encrypt messages sent over radio waves by the German military. It's the black elliptical logo engraved in the wood that sets it apart. It could be just an oddity in an antique store. A black metal mechanical device resembling a typewriter sits in a wooden box.
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