Soviet 'Enigma' cipher machine sells for $22k at collapsed museum's auction | Hacker News Reader

Soviet 'Enigma' cipher machine sells for $22k at collapsed museum's auction

theregister.com

77 pointsrbanffy25 comments

In related news, a set of Pokemon trading cards from the 90’s recently sold for almost $200k [1]. Our species sure has strange priorities.

[1]: https://gamerant.com/pokemon-card-set-record-price/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

Pokémon cards (and any kind of collectible card) are practically the opposite of a Veblen good.

They're an item that follows supply and demand to a tee, the ones that are in high circulation are cheap, and the ones that are no longer in circulation and are had to come across are expensive.

That’s like questioning why sports stars make a lot of money. It’s because there someone like Lebron James brings in millions of fans and a regular person doesn’t.

I don’t find it surprising there are millions more Pokémon fans than WW2/crypto fans in 2020. We’re also in the cusp of a nostalgia trading card boom according to a podcast I list to (even sports cards), which they call the 3rd wave of super fandom.

What surprises me is the absurd number of counterfeit Pokemon cards I see. When my kids were still interested in them, we were in a bodega that was selling little boxes for like $1 for 5 cards - I didn't know anything about them. When I looked at them later, they seemed just slightly off... and then I researched how to tell the counterfeit cards. I'm astonished that there's profit to be made, even at 20¢.

I was surprised to learn that Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income was a big Pokemon card nerd and recently came out with a channel about Pokemon Cards. He says he was inspired by marketer Gary Vee, who has apparently been hustling Pokemon Cards for a while now. I think Pokemon Cards are just the "in" thing right now.

From January 14th:

"1952 Mickey Mantle baseball card sells for record $5.2 million"

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2021/01/14/1952-mi...

And in August a Mike Trout 2009 rookie card went for $3.9 million.

Children of friends of ours had several which are valued 50-100k now; they burnt them when they moved house early 2000s. There is something to say for yard sales or even hoarding.

OTOH, if so many hadn't been lost/destroyed over the years they wouldn't be as valuable.

a true patriot would do anything for the Motherland - "A KGB rectal concealment capsule" https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2021/feb/10/relics...

The starting price looks to be $400 or $450. A total opposite to glorious missile cars and laser watches of Bond. A kind of illustration of a typical contrast between reality of a given profession and it's portrayal in movies, etc.

Unless they are Enemas of The People.

Escape from жопаb!

The CIA has the infamous escape toolkit: https://www.spymuseum.org/exhibition-experiences/about-the-c...

Which is similar, but is designed for tools

needs a banana for scale…

And it's knurled. Those freaky Soviets.

It's in "papillon". Used in prisons worldwide

What a movie, I chose it randomly on an airplane, without ever hearing about it, and I think at the beginning I was thinking about switching to something else but I didn't and then I couldn't... took me by surprise how much I liked it. I don't know why, it's the first time I'm seeing it mentioned on the internet and I had to make a comment.

The original french work was translated into English by .. the author of "master and commander" Patrick O'Brian

The film has a stellar cast. Its a good adaptation of the underlying story. Its grounded in ugly truths. Its a classic redemption story. The book was a worldwide best seller phenomenon and that gave the movie makers swing to get budget.

To clarify the title: Enigma was German, this is (predictably) not an Enigma, being soviet. The quotes are to indicate faux, not to specify exactly.

It is very strange that nobody is talking about the dramatic effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union. I believe that the collapse is comparable to the post-colonisation effects.

Nobody is talking about the millions of people who got their lives destroyed. Science ended in nothing. Careers disappeared. The GDP took 20 years to recover as it plummeted to the 1960s levels after the collapse. This all was celebrated as "great victory" of freedom and the free markets, ignoring the grandparents of the 1990s who hanged themselves because there was no money to pay anything.

This "Fialka" mentioned in the article is just another artifact of the big mistake we are continuing to do and are still not realizing that we were wrong in the way we treated the countries and people after the collapse. Funny enough that exactly this arrogant behavior has lead to leaders like Xi, who is so consumed by the effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union that directly impacts relationships we believe that matter, e.g. Hong Kong, Taiwan and Xinjiang with their Uighurs.

That a great nuclear power collapsed without destroying the earth is a miracle

It collapsed, yes, but out of its ashes rose Russia. And they still have all those nuclear missiles.

That's no enigma. enigma had 3 or 4 rotors. This is more like a "tunny", almost. Germany's teleprinter encryption, what you hear about that was decrypted at Bletchly Park, was a machine that had 12 rotors. This picture looks like a machine with 10 rotors.

TL;DR: this thing probably has significantly stronger encryption than enigma.

The Crypto Museum in the Netherlands has one.[1] They also have most of the accessories, including the test unit. It's a rotor machine, considerably more advanced than the Enigma. Among other things, it has a "magic" circuit, using very early Soviet transistors. which fixes the problem with reflector-type rotor machines that prevents encoding a character into itself. That creates an exploitable vulnerability.

[1] https://cryptomuseum.com/crypto/fialka/psu/tempest.htm

looks like apl :)

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