Found in 4 comments on Hacker News
brudgers · 2017-01-17 · Original thread
I didn't recognize the name directly but I had read about the Poles breaking Enigma in: https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Wits-Complete-Story-Codebreaki...

It's a good read if you like that sort of thing.

munin · 2016-02-17 · Original thread
Anyone who wants more of a history of WW2 crypto that extends the cast of characters beyond Turing (and the cast was significant and varied) should read "Battle of Wits" (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743217349) the historian who wrote it wrote it after a large NSA declassification in 1996.

What's even more extreme about the Polish codebreakers, a story you would read in Battle of Wits, is that they were evacuated from Poland to France after the invasion of Poland, and then stayed in occupied France working in secret for the Allies as part of the occupation government. They posed to the occupation government as the occupation governments signals intelligence system but secretly supplied GC&CS with information they intercepted from the continent (which the Allies had a lot of trouble doing only from the UK).

They did that for years, when they tried to evacuate themselves to Spain, a few of them were captured, interrogated, and did not give up the goods about either the invasion or the secret of Enigma. If you want wartime crypto heroes you would have a hard time doing better than Jerzy Różycki, Henryk Zygalski and Marian Rejewski.

dredmorbius · 2013-12-31 · Original thread
Naked links offer varying level of affordance on different platforms. I've frequently been on systems (or networks) in which following through on individual links is a pain. What's particularly annoying in this case is that Amazon's full links do include item descriptions (for books: the title) in them, though you'd have to click through to the links here, search the fucking title and then click on that link before you get what you're looking for:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743217349 fully expanded is:

http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Wits-Complete-Story-Codebreakin...

e12e's comment was helpful: it supported the original post and included additional information of use to others. And as it happens, Singh's The Code Book was not included in the original list. You can find it here:

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Book-Science-Secrecy-Cryptography...

munin would have performed a superior service (remember: writing is for the benefit of the reader) if he'd at least included descriptive URLs, if not the titles of the works in question.

And your attitude could use considerable improvement.

munin · 2013-12-02 · Original thread
the article states:

> was helped by the Poles who had stolen a machine before the outbreak of war,

which is false! the poles actually built an ENIGMA after analyzing encrypted traffic, see this book: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743217349

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