The Imitation Game

Time to see 'The Imitation Game' today, which is a movie dramatising the life of Alan Turing, who led a team which cracked the German Enigma machine encryption in World War II.

An enjoyable and engrossing movie, although there were some parts that made me think '-er- I'm not sure it would have been like that'. Some adaptations would certainly have been in the interests of dramatisation and in some cases to simplify the storyline.

Some people have taken exception to the way this version gets told and the historical inaccuracies. I'll regard it as an accessible way to show at least a couple major intertwined themes, in an acceptable movie length format.

There was a simple code example included in the trailer:

uvsjoh
etcemgf
wkh
irmkqe
htij

It's fairly easy to crack the above using a certain technique, which is similarly adopted in the movie. There's a movie moment quite early on where something gets said which is like the planted line for the later plot point. I won't reveal it, but it made me think 'a-hah' when it was first mentioned.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays an autistic Turing, and there's a great surrounding cast keeping the two time lines in the story-telling moving along.

Afterwards we headed to a Spanish restaurant where the chatter rolled forward to today's spying implications with cloud data. With the suspected state-developed multi-stage Regin viral payload resurfacing, maybe it's time to break out the InfoSec Taylor Swift Security Starter Pack.