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Show HN: Jev as the Bletchley Park Analyst: A Software Bombe on Enigma

Hacker News - Tue, 09/29/2026 - 10:49pm

Watched a recent youtube veritasium on the enigma machine and was curious on how JEV would do in regards to the analysts calls made at Bletchley's. I rebuilt the historical sequence into the software ux.

Results were a mixed, which is what made it interesting. Given the right crib, the Bombe breaks 22 of 25 messages; ciphertext-only against 10 plugs, 0 of 25, same wall Bletchley hit. As a judge of "is this decryption German?" Jev is excellent: AUC 0.9999, 159/160 right decisions. As a crib selector it has no skill at all; its ranking is no better than the fixed list.

Against XGBoost an classical judges, it ties on the same kind of data. But trained on synthetic traffic and tested on real intercepts, and XGBoost drops to 53% correc versus zero-shot Jev holds at 97%. Feel free to try it here: https://enigma-jev.vercel.app/ (requires a jev typesafe api key)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49903792

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Ballmer Peak

Hacker News - Tue, 09/29/2026 - 10:35pm
Categories: Hacker News

Cryptocurrency Exchange

Hacker News - Tue, 09/29/2026 - 10:28pm
Categories: Hacker News

SN 1098: How worried should we be? - Unpredictable Agents

Security Now - Tue, 09/29/2026 - 9:55pm

With millions racing to embrace AI assistants and cybercriminals pivoting to new, high-stakes tactics, the episode tackles the dizzying pace of change and asks: just how worried should we be? The discussion pulls back the curtain on AI's unpredictable power, the escalation of digital extortion, and why the next breach may hit closer to home than you think.

  • Muse has a bad 0-day
  • The regularity of "Irregular"
  • More rogue OpenAI breaches
  • The Seven Deadly Sins (TSDS) hacker group
  • Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) cargo ship hacked
  • The FBI offended ShinyHunters's delicate sensibilities
  • Canonical switches to an every–2-weeks release cadence
  • Axios' AI 101: AI Explainer for normal people
  • How worried should we be?

Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1098-Notes.pdf

Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte

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For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6.

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