Talk:Fish (cryptography)

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FISH vs Fish

My memory is that the BP term for the two machines was not all caps. If we've knit the all caps into the structure here, is there need for a dab or redirect? I suspect so. Comment? ww 19:04, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The original BP documents I have seen use "Fish" (e.g. here (http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/archive/t/t01/TR01-004.html)) and "Tunny" (e.g. here (http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/archive/b/B06/BO6-085.html), as well as throughout the Tunny document), butttttttt they also used "FISH" (e.g. here (http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/archive/t/t01/TR01-006.html)). I haven't yet found a reference to Sturgeon, but it's dollars to donuts they would have used "Sturgeon" too.

Various books which were either definitely or probably produced with the help of GCHQ personnel (e.g. Johnson, Secret War; Lewin Ultra Goes to War) also use "Fish". However, West, SIGINT Secrets uses FISH, but that may also be his personal device to keep all the code names clear. (BTW, for those who don't have this, it has a wonderful 5-page appendix of all the various code-names for various nets, from ALBATROSS to YELLOW, along with the service that used it, the German code name, what it was used for, and the date of the first break. Neat.)

I personally don't care whether we use "FOO" or "Foo", as long as we are consistent across a) articles, and b) across crypto-systems. Noel (talk) 14:28, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

(I've seen books (I think F. L. Bauer's Decrypted Secrets) use caps even for things like "ENIGMA"!) Thanks for doing some digging on the usage. I prefer "Fish" personally, but if there's not a dominant style, then perhaps we might choose the shortest name that we can as the article name; that is, if it's a choice between [[FISH]] and Fish (cryptography), then maybe we should go for the former? Outside of this article, if the usage is mixed in the literature, I would probably advocate consistency only within individual articles, and not across articles. — Matt Crypto 16:42, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

(No problem on the digging - I'm doing some other stuff in this area at the moment anyway, so a good chunk of my crypto library is spread out around me, making it fairly easy!) To the extent there's a preference (I wouldn't go anywhere near so far as to say "dominant"), it seems to be "Fish", so I would say you get your wish! Ironically, that BP document that used "FISH" uses "Fish" on the very next page (http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/archive/t/t01/TR01-007.html). Go figure! So there's clearly no rigidly-adhered-to system.

So if you would prefer "Fish (cryptography) that's fine with me - unless you think minimizing length should outweigh all else, and would rather go for "FISH". Length doesn't bother me, I'm just as happy with "FISH" as with "Fish (cryptography)".

Second, why wouldn't we want to standardize usage? (Not that I'm advocating editing articles just for the heck of it to swap the capping, but if you're working on something anyway...) Also, when I said "across crypo-systems" above, I just meant among groups like Fish, Tunny, Herring (a later Tunny keysystem on the Rome-Tunix link), etc, I didn't mean globally across all cryposystems. It just looks really, well, ugly to look at FISH (cryptography) and see "Tunny" and "STURGEON" next to each other.

PS: I'm in the process of adding a [[Fish (disambiguation)]] page, and will point it here, so people will be able to find this page easily. Noel (talk) 18:35, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Fish (cryptography) sounds good to me too, and I certainly agree that mixing things like Tunny and STURGEON is very ugly! By the way, if you've got your crypto books out, and if you've got the time/inclination, would you be interested in collaboratvely working one of these articles up to Featured Article quality? I've been doing a bit of reading on Tunny / Colossus over the past week or two. — Matt Crypto 15:59, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Actually, as I look at what's happening here, I suggest we split this page up because as we add material on both, it'll get ugly with Fish (which I'll use in this note for the WWII one) and FISH (the Fibonacci one on the same page).

I was going to say that then we'd need a disambig, but I just realized we can do that on [[Fish (disambiguation)]]; as long as there are only two cryptographic fish, we can link the two crypto fish pages back and forth at their headers; thereafter the link would have to be back to [[Fish (disambiguation)]].

The only thing remaining is to decide what to call the pages. I reckon we can use Fish (cryptography) and FISH (cipher), which I think works nicely, although FISH (cryptography) for the second one is fine too. I think Fish (cipher) is not appropriate for a title if we use it to describe all the teleprinter ciphers (although I'm not positive this corresponds to actual BP usage (see the BP dictionary entry for Fish here (http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/archive/b/B06/BO6-041.html) - I need to check this some more).

As to the featured article, yes, but I'd like to do a dump of all the stuff I've been accumulating in my brain over the last couple of days to add first! :-) Noel (talk) 17:38, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Sounds a good scheme for the naming. — Matt Crypto 18:48, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

OK, done. Cross-linked the two pages, looked all pages that linked to this to weed out the ones to the modern FISH.

Should I set FISH (cryptography) to point to [[Fish (disambiguation)]] (after I have changed all pages that refer to it, of course), as it really is a bit ambiguous? I suppose not, as it is referred to as FISH in a number of documents/books. What about Fish (cipher) - send that one to the new one?

More stuff coming soon on this Fish. Noel (talk) 23:28, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Russian Fish

I actually have seen reference to something called "Russian Fish" (although that was almost certainly not its proper name), in Thomas Parrish The Ultra Americans, which has part of a chapter on it (pp. 282-284). It describes (and has photos of) some gear the Germans built to intercept and decode "the Soviet equivalent of the German Fish" - implying that it was teleprinter traffic, but not saying so explicitly. It does say it used 9 separate radio channels (which would seem to confirm it is teleprinter - although it might have been voice, a la X-system).

I've never seen anything else about this (not too surprising - they would have kept such breakins to Soviet traffic very quiet). Perhaps there's some family relationship to the gear that was built to decode signals intercepted in the Berlin tunnel (but that's a total guess). Noel (talk) 05:00, 11 May 2005 (UTC)