Today began early with a trip about
one hour east to Bletchley Park. Bletchley Park, now a museum, once was a code
breaking facility for the Government Code and Cipher School during the Second World War.
While the site appears to consist of only a rather ugly mansion and long
lines of small shacks, it was one of the most important tools that the Allies
used to defeat Nazi tyranny. We saw several Enigma machines, which were used by
the Germans to encipher and decipher their own code. Understanding the internal mechanism of the Enigma machines helped the Allies to break the German codes. These machines were extremely complicated,
and the German codes often were nearly impossible to break. To deal with this issue, British officials
recruited top scholars and assistants to figure out how to decipher Nazi
messages. While at Bletchley we saw the environment that eventually grew to a
staff of 10,000 involved in this task to help win the war.
After dinner Mr. Kendall persuaded his cousin, Emily, to speak to us about what she
does here at Oxford. Emily teaches at
St. Peters College, and was able to share with us her knowledge on Copyright,
which is a branch of Intellectual Property (IP).
Emily was able to explain very well why Copyright laws are so important
for musicians and bands. Without
Copyright, it would be impossible for us to distinguish between who created
certain songs, videos etc.
Submitted by Bennett Setzer and Will Harris
Submitted by Bennett Setzer and Will Harris
Our dorm, Staircase #11.
View of St. Mary's Tower from Staircase #11 window.
Bletchley Park original mansion house (not much to look at, and several times nearly demolished by developers.)
An example of one of the code breaking huts.
The "bombe", designed by Alan Turing and his colleagues to decode the daily encrypted Enigma traffic.
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