BuzzBites: Hypno-Spam; Rebuilding the Bombe

Hypno-Spam

A new form of spam uses a subliminal message to boost responses: It's an animated graphic that flashes the word "BUY!" every 15 seconds. The graphic appears behind text urging would-be investors to purchase a penny stock. The spam is part of a pump-and-dump scheme, in which hucksters promote a stock to inflate its price and then sell it off at a profit.

It's unlikely the subliminal message will affect anyone directly, but plain stupidity seems sufficient. According to a New Scientist article, researchers from two German universities showed that stocks advertised in pump-and-dump schemes became twice as popular in the days after an e-mail campaign. --Andrew Conry-Murray, [email protected]

Rebuilding the Bombe

Technology doesn't last long these days. Cutting-edge hardware can be outmoded in a year, obsolete in three and laughable in five. So why would amateur engineers bother to rebuild a computing machine that hadn't been run in six decades? Because the machine is a working replica of a Turing Bombe used to decipher encrypted German communications during World War II.

Designed by Alan Turing, a father of modern computing, 210 Turing Bombes were built to crack Germany's seemingly unbreakable Enigma machine and help the Allies defeat the Nazis.

At the end of the war, the British government ordered the original machines be dismantled and blueprints destroyed, but a team of enthusiasts rebuilt a working model. See more at bletchleypark.org.uk. --Andrew Conry-Murray, [email protected]

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