Wiki image, dontcha know?

Surely you’ve heard of the German Enigma machine and the Allied efforts to crack it during World War II. Well researchers, using a rebuilt Colossus machine (yup, that’s it right there), wanted to see how fast they could crack similar codes, only they made it into a contest. They invited amateur coders to see who could crack the code first: a giant, code-cracking machine or some programmer with a bunch of time on his hands.

The programmer won.

A German programmer, Joachim Schüth, successfully intercepted the intended radio signal and cracked it in less than two hours. The rebuilt Colossus took three hours and 15 minutes to accomplish the same task.

Maybe Schüth can tell me why CG’s server goes down for a few minutes seemingly every day?

German amateur code breaker defeats Colossus [The Register]