Confirmed speakers (alphabetical order) include:

 

Speaker: Tony Sale Hon FBCS
Bio: After careers in electronics and computing Tony Sale set up the first Museums in Bletchley Park in 1994, has researched the breaking of German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers in World War II and rebuilt the Colossus Mk2 computer. www.codesandciphers.org.uk

Title: How the Germans gave away their "unbreakable" codes.
Abstract: Tony will describe how human operator errors enabled the code breakers in WW II Bletchley Park to decipher vital German messages both on the battlefield Enigma cipher machine and the German High Command Lorenz cipher machine, literally used by Hitler to his Generals.

Speaker: Simon Singh, author, journalist and TV producer,
specialising in science and mathematics, and author of 'The Code
Book', a history of codes and code breaking from Ancient Egypt to the
Internet. Personal web site at <http://www.simonsingh.net/>

Title: Cracking the Cipher Challenge
Abstract: In "The Code Book", a history of cryptography, the
author Simon Singh included ten encrypted messages with a prize of
£10,000 for the first person or team to decipher all of them.
Thousands of amateur and professional codebreakers took up the Cipher
Challenge, but it took over a year before the messages were cracked.
Simon Singh will be talking about how he constructed the Cipher
Challenge and how the winners eventually cracked it. He will also be
using the Cipher Challenge to give an introduction to the history of
cryptography and to demonstrate why encryption is more important today
than ever before. As part of the talk, Singh will also operate a
genuine Second World War Enigma cipher machine.

 

Speaker: Phil Zimmermann, the original creator of the PGP e-mail
encryption package, which despite three years of government
persecution became the most widely used e-mail encryption software in
the world. Personal web site at
<http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/background/index.html>

 

The Conference will be held in the elegant Victorian Bletchley Park
Mansion, at the centre of Bletchley Park itself, allowing conference
attendees the opportunity to visit the exhibits on show at the
National Museum of Computing and the rest of Bletchley Park. Bletchley
Park is home to a number of unique artifacts, including the Colossus,
the Bombe (including the mock-up that featured in the film 'Enigma'),
original Enigma machines, and a Lorenz coding machine. The Bletchley
Park web site is at <http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/>. The National
Museum of Computing web site is at <http://www.tnmoc.org/>

 

The conference is organised by the ACCU. The ACCU is an organisation
of programmers who care about professionalism in programming and are
dedicated to raising the standard of programming. The proceeds of the
conference will go to the Bletchley Park Trust to help with the upkeep
of Bletchley Park.

You can find out more about the campaign to save Bletchley Park and how Skills Matter is involved here.

Rates
Conference rates are £85 for ACCU members and £95 for non-ACCU
members. The ACCU web site is at <http://accu.org/>.