My first Enigma machine: Mattel once sold a Barbie typewriter with built-in crypto capabilities

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/01/09/my-first-enigma-machine-matte.html

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First Deciphered Barbie Crypto Message: YANA LOVES JOZEF. MEET BY OXCART.

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I’m sure this could have somehow been added to “the Immitation Game!”

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Wait, there’s no instructions on adding an Arduino and setting it up for AES-128? No brass parts at all? What is this blog coming to?

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I generally don’t like Barbie stuff (and never really did), but that would have been awesome to have as a kid.

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Cryptography class is tough!

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From the article:

“As it was probably thought that secret writing would not appeal to girls, the coding/decoding facilities were omitted from the manual.”

Holy shit! Have these people ever met a girl? Or any child?

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A slovenian manufacturer?
Decode the secret message to help Little Orphan Anica:

BE SURE TO DRINK YOUR COCKTA

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Indeed, there seems to be a huge variety of frilly diaries with mechanical locks on them.

It also seems a little too easy to activate the coding facilities by accident, which would probably cause much confusion for the unsuspecting user.

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Great, now only the Russians will know Billy is Hot!

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Yeah, I think I remember them using this in Cryptonomicon.

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Das Code!

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Nobody likes to say it so bluntly; but isn’t “develop enough opsec to count as an entity distinct from your parents/guardians” kind of a fundamental aspect of the maturation process for human larvae?

(Or, in less privacy-oriented markets, “just outlive your parents and get them out of your business that way”; either through patience or by means of ‘inheritance powder’.)

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Rewatch for the third time? Don’t mind if I do!

[quote=“fuzzyfungus, post:16, topic:92625”]
‘inheritance powder’[/quote]

Just in case you haven’t seen it, this is quite readable:

Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah

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Let’s go shopping?

Also, obligatory @codinghorror:
Programming Is Hard, Let’s Go Shopping!

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