361 points by impish9208 5 days ago | 206 comments
pvg 5 days ago
jgrahamc 5 days ago
Ha ha ha. Yes, that was literally my very short pitch to Steven about Tim Jenkin's story!
The actual DM: "I think this has the makings of a hell of a story: https://blog.jgc.org/2024/09/cracking-old-zip-file-to-help-o... If you want I can connect you with Tim Jenkin. One time pads! 8-bit computers! Flights attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!"
jefb 5 days ago
jgrahamc 5 days ago
I also ended up sponsoring the bkcrack project because the maintainer added a new option for me: https://github.com/kimci86/bkcrack/pull/126
latchkey 5 days ago
1970-01-01 5 days ago
bkcrack.exe -k 98e0f009 48a0b11a c70f8499 -r 1..18 ?p bkcrack 1.7.0 - 2024-05-26 [11:07:33] Recovering password length 0-6... length 7... length 8... length 9... length 10... length 11... length 12... length 13...
jgrahamc 5 days ago
SG- 5 days ago
jgrahamc 4 days ago
rsynnott 5 days ago
(It was an 8088, essentially an 8086 with an 8 bit data bus, but 16bit registers and 20bit address bus).
philistine 5 days ago
rsynnott 5 days ago
soulofmischief 5 days ago
You're quoted at the end as saying, "The code itself is a historical document". That sort of electrified me as I began thinking about what other historical code is out there in need of preservation. I'm fascinated with stuff like this, toolkits meant to be used in the field with little room for incremental development. Tracking this kind of stuff down seems like a fun hobby.
aanet 5 days ago
The story reads like _The Cuckoo's Egg_ in a way. Spies, intrigue, covert comms, action, revolution!
I loved that the code is still around, and works.
Kudos!!
motohagiography 5 days ago
I think it was the ANC and its activists organizing the coalition of other countries to sanction and isolate the government that ultimately caused it to yield power, which is the necessary condition for any revolution- it requires allies to be in place to support it for when it succeeds. On the ground, you only really need a few dozen people to seize some buildings and bank accounts, it's coordinating the external trade links to keep everyone paid and in their jobs while the top of the regime changes to new hands that's difficult. The opsec for that ground force just has to get most of them to their X day, where they're going to take casulties anyway.
In the case of SA, it seemed like a matter of convincing other countries to do nothing, by persuading the world the govt were just racist villains, and convincing the National Party in government that nobody would intervene to save them if there were a civil revolt. That part was organized in plain view. Opsec is interesting and mysterious, but often less important than the stories we tell about it afterwards.
zellyn 5 days ago
It's hard to stress how normal _anything_ can seem when you grow up with it. I often wonder whether, if we'd stayed (we moved to the US permanently in 1992) and if apartheid had continued, whether I'd have woken up to the reality of what was going on and become more politically active in my college years. I have no confidence my sense of right and wrong would have been strong enough to escape the stifling blanket feeling of "Well, yes, it's not right, but let's not go tooooo crazy" that pervaded political feeling in those days.
Thanks for doing this, JGC. (And now that I think of it, you might enjoy the historical spelunking in the "Georg Nees" entries on my blog at zellyn.com. Code archeology is tremendously satisfying, and getting an email from one of his sons out of the blue was a delight!)
gramie 4 days ago
To be honest, I was prepared to see all white South Africans as evil oppressors, and it took me a while to see that there was a spectrum -- many of whom I met -- from oppressors to opportunists to passive enablers to freedom/justice fighters.
One of my distant relatives in South Africa was decidedly racist, but mourned how his son had gone from playing with the children of black farmworkers to, after a stint in the South African Defence Forces, being a vicious white supremacist.
nxobject 5 days ago
That's actually a really good insight. It explains why quite a few successful revolutions – e.g. Russia and China – happened in countries _without_ an established administrative bureaucracy, and patted themselves on the based on their apparent competence in building one.
cyberax 5 days ago
Erm.... Whut? China was (and is) _the_ example of a country held together by a civil bureaucracy. Ditto for Russia.
orkoden 5 days ago
pewpew2020 4 days ago
motohagiography 5 days ago
it's essentially demesquita's "logic of political survival," also distilled into the well made cartoon, "rules for rulers" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
amai 1 hour ago