title: Ultra (Depeche Mode album)

text: Musically, the band explored many sounds within the realms of alternative rock but with larger electronic and trip-hop influences. The band also felt that they wanted to do something different since Alan Wilder had left the band. Tim Simenon served as the album's sole producer, who had previously created two remixes for the limited 12" release of the live version of "Everything Counts" with Mark Saunders. He had also been a large fan of the band's music as far back as their appearance on "Some Bizzare Album" in 1981. As Gore and Gahan were impressed with Gavin Friday's 1995 album "Shag Tobacco", which he had produced, Daniel Miller arranged for him to meet with the band.


title: Ultra (Depeche Mode album)

text: "Sister of Night", "Useless" and "Insight" were the first demos to have been written. The band played these demos to Simenon when they met, and despite their simplicity he was impressed. Upon hearing the demo of "It's No Good", he considered it to be a classic Depeche Mode song. While the project started out as a small set of songs, it eventually evolved into a full album.


title: Ultra (Depeche Mode album)

text: Gahan continued to struggle with his heroin addiction during the early months of the album's production. He rarely turned up to scheduled sessions, and when he did, it would take weeks to get any vocals recorded; one six-week session at Electric Lady in New York produced just one usable vocal (for "Sister of Night"), and even that was pieced together from multiple takes. Gore was forced to contemplate breaking the band up and considered releasing the songs he had written as a solo album. In mid-1996, after his near-fatal overdose, Gahan entered a court-ordered drug rehabilitation program to battle his addiction to cocaine and heroin. Recording sessions continued after he came out of rehab; according to Simenon, he sung "Barrel of a Gun" as if nothing had happened.


title: Ultra (Depeche Mode album)

text: 'I can't hear it in the same way as a record I was involved with, but I certainly don't feel a yearning to be involved again, and I've no regrets about leaving at all. The album is difficult for me to comment on, though I do have something of a stock answer, which is: you can probably work out what I think about it by listening to "Unsound Methods" and then "Ultra", because the two records tell you everything you need to know about what the musical relationship was between myself and Martin. It's almost as if we've gone to the two extremes of what we were when we were together. What the band had before was a combination of those extremes.'


title: Ultra (Depeche Mode album)

text: On 2 October 2007 (3 October in North America), "Ultra" was re-released as a two-disc set, along with "Exciter", completing the Depeche Mode collector's edition catalog. The first disc is a remastered version of the original album, on a SACD/CD hybrid (except in the United States, where it is a CD only). The second disc is a DVD which features the album in DTS 5.1, Dolby Digital 5.1 and PCM Stereo. The B-sides from the album's singles can be listened to as well, including the standalone single "Only When I Lose Myself" and its B-sides. Like the other albums, there is a documentary on the making of "Ultra" titled "Depeche Mode 95–98 (Oh Well, That's the End of the Band...)", the subtitle of which comes from Gore's thoughts about Wilder's departure. The documentary begins with discussion from all parties of Wilder's departure before moving on to early album sessions despite Dave Gahan's drug issues present. Eventually, it moves on to Gahan's "death" and rehab. The documentary then covers the recording of "Ultra" and ends with a discussion on "The Singles 86>98" and its corresponding singles tour. The whole band is interviewed, along with Alan Wilder, Daniel Miller, producer Tim Simenon, Mute executives, touring keyboardist Peter Gordeno, touring drummer Christian Eigner, Anton Corbijn and others. The remastered version of the album was released on vinyl 30 March 2007 in Germany and 1 October 2007 internationally.


title: Ultra (Depeche Mode album)

text: Greg Kot of the "Chicago Tribune" stated the album "ranks with their best work... this veteran British combo has made a disc that should please their millions of followers and provide a few guilty pleasures for the rest of us." Jim Farber in his review for "Entertainment Weekly" commented, ""Ultra", their first work in four years, combines up-to-the-second synth effects (courtesy of producer Tim 'Bomb the Bass' Simenon) with rippling melodies—all supported by the grim sonic architecture that long ago made DM the darlings of many a sour teen. Imposing spires of synths, industrial rivets of percussion, churchy organs, and grave vocals erect an edifice of reverent dread." Writing for "The Guardian", Caroline Sullivan deemed "Ultra" "dark even by [Depeche Mode's] standards", and on its songs, remarked that "anyone doubting the potency of pop music should hear these, then pretend they're unshaken." "Rolling Stone" reviewer Elysa Gardner observed a lack of "snappy singles" on "Ultra" but concluded that the album's "moody, pulsating ballads" are "ideal vehicles for Gahan's brooding baritone and for the band's ever-increasing sense of tender intuition."


title: Ultra (Depeche Mode album)

text: "Los Angeles Times" critic Sara Scribner was less enthusiastic, finding that Depeche Mode had not progressed musically on "Ultra" apart from incorporating "Simenon's emotive, multilayered, high-tech sound, which would be far better suited for a subtler band but tends to wash out any hooks on this gloom-and-doom-y album." "NME" James Oldham observed, "This album is at least partly the product of one of the most harrowing rock'n'roll sagas in recent memory. It's the tale of an unassuming quartet transformed into a colossal financial machine designed to bring gravitas to the masses: four cherubs from Basildon who were lauded as deities in America—only to discover they couldn't handle it... There is no dramatic reinvention, and as such we're left with an album that's every bit as flawed as its predecessors."


title: Ultra (Depeche Mode album)

text: In a retrospective review for AllMusic, Ned Raggett stated that "Depeche delivered a strong album as a rejuvenated band" with "Ultra", giving particular praise to Gahan's "new control and projection" as a vocalist. Writing for "Pitchfork" in 2022, Raggett described the album as "a crucial bridge between the increasing ambition of their early years and the easy confidence of their later ones."


title: ATP Tour 500

text: The ATP 500 tournaments (previously known as the "ATP World Tour 500" tournaments, "ATP International Series Gold", and "ATP Championship Series") are the fourth highest tier of annual men's tennis tournament after the four Grand Slam tournaments, ATP Finals, and the ATP Masters 1000. The series includes 13 tournaments, with 500 ranking points awarded for the events' singles champions – which accounts for the name of the series. Tournaments have various draws of 32 and 48 for singles and 16 and 24 for doubles. It is mandatory for leading players to enter at least four 500 events, including at least one after the US Open; if they play fewer than four, or fail to play in one after the US Open they get a "zero" score towards their world ranking for each one short.


title: ATP Tour 500

text: Roger Federer holds the record for most singles titles at 24, while Daniel Nestor holds the record for most doubles titles won with 20. Rafael Nadal is very close to Roger Federer's record with 23 singles titles.


title: Alphaville (film)

text: Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution ("Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution") is a 1965 French New Wave science fiction neo-noir film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It stars Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Howard Vernon and Akim Tamiroff. The film won the Golden Bear award of the 15th Berlin International Film Festival in 1965.


title: Alphaville (film)

text: "Alphaville" combines the genres of dystopian science fiction and film noir. There are no special props or futuristic sets; instead, the film was shot in real locations in Paris, the night-time streets of the capital becoming the streets of Alphaville, while modernist glass and concrete buildings (that in 1965 were new and strange architectural designs) represent the city's interiors. The film is set in the future but the characters also refer to twentieth-century events; for example, the hero describes himself as a Guadalcanal veteran.


title: Alphaville (film)

text: Expatriate American actor Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution, a trenchcoat-wearing secret agent. Constantine had already played this or similar roles in dozens of previous films; the character was originally created by British crime novelist Peter Cheyney. However, in "Alphaville", director Jean-Luc Godard moves Caution away from his usual twentieth-century setting and places him in a futuristic sci-fi dystopia, the technocratic dictatorship of Alphaville.


title: Alphaville (film)

text: Lemmy Caution is a secret agent with the code number of 003 from "the Outlands". Entering Alphaville in his Ford Galaxie, he poses as a journalist named Ivan Johnson and claims to work for the "Figaro-Pravda". Caution is on a series of missions. First, he searches for the missing agent Henri Dickson (Akim Tamiroff); second, he is to capture or kill the creator of Alphaville, Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon); lastly, he aims to destroy Alphaville and its dictatorial computer, Alpha 60. Alpha 60 is a sentient computer system created by von Braun, which is in complete control of all of Alphaville.


title: Alphaville (film)

text: Alpha 60 has outlawed free thought and individualist concepts like love, poetry, and emotion in the city, replacing them with contradictory concepts or eliminating them altogether. One of Alpha 60's dictates is that "people should not ask 'why', but only say 'because". People who show signs of emotion are presumed to be acting illogically and are gathered up, interrogated, and executed. In an image reminiscent of George Orwell's concept of Newspeak, there is a dictionary in every hotel room that is continuously updated when words that are deemed to evoke emotion become banned. As a result, Alphaville is an inhuman, alienated society.


title: Alphaville (film)

text: Images of the "E" = "mc" and "E" = "hf" (the iconic equations of, respectively, special relativity and quantum mechanics, the two great scientific developments of the first half of the 20th century) are displayed several times to refer to the scientism that underpins Alphaville. At one point, Caution passes through a place called the Grand Omega Minus, from where brainwashed people are sent out to the other "galaxies" to start strikes, revolutions, family rows, and student revolts.


title: Alphaville (film)

text: As an archetypal American antihero private eye in trenchcoat and with weathered visage, Lemmy Caution's old-fashioned machismo conflicts with the puritanical computer (Godard originally wanted to title the film "Tarzan versus IBM"). The opposition of his role to logic (and that of other dissidents to the regime) is represented by faux quotations from "Capitale de la douleur" ("Capital of Pain"), a book of poems by Paul Éluard.


title: Alphaville (film)

text: Caution meets Dickson, who soon dies in the process of making love to a "Seductress Third Class". Caution then enlists the assistance of Natacha von Braun (Anna Karina), a programmer of Alpha 60 and daughter of Professor von Braun. Natacha is a citizen of Alphaville and, when questioned, says that she does not know the meaning of "love" or "conscience". Caution falls in love with her, and his love introduces emotion and unpredictability into the city. Natacha discovers, with the help of Lemmy Caution, that she was actually born outside of Alphaville. (The city name is given as Nueva York—Spanish for New York—instead of either the original English name or the French literal rendering "Nouvelle-York".)


title: Alphaville (film)

text: Professor von Braun (the name is a reference to the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun) was originally known as Leonard Nosferatu (a tribute to F. W. Murnau's film "Nosferatu"), but Caution is repeatedly told that Nosferatu no longer exists. The Professor himself talks infrequently, referring only vaguely to his hatred for journalists, and offering Caution the chance to join Alphaville, even going so far as to offer him the opportunity to rule a galaxy. When he refuses Caution's offer to go back to "the outlands", Caution kills him.


title: Alphaville (film)

text: Alpha 60 converses with Lemmy Caution several times, and its voice is seemingly ever-present in the city, serving as a sort of narrator. Caution eventually destroys or incapacitates it by telling it a riddle that involves something that Alpha 60 can not comprehend: poetry (although many of Alpha 60's lines are actually quotations from the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges, and the film's opening line, along with others, is an extract from Borges's essay "Forms of a Legend", and Alpha 60 makes other references to Borges's "A New Refutation of Time"). The concept of the individual self has been lost to the collectivized citizens of Alphaville, and this is the key to Caution's riddle.


title: Alphaville (film)

text: At the end, Natacha realizes that it is her understanding of herself as an individual with desires that saves her and destroys Alpha 60. The film ends with her line "Je vous aime" ("I love you").


title: Alphaville (film)

text: Despite its futuristic scenario, "Alphaville" was filmed entirely in and around Paris and no special sets or props were constructed. Buildings used were the Electricity Board building for the Alpha 60 computer centre and the Hotel Scribe.


title: Alphaville (film)

text: Constantine came to the film through producer André Michelin, who had the actor under contract. Constantine had become a popular actor in France and Germany through his portrayal of tough-guy detective Lemmy Caution in a series of earlier films. Godard appropriated the character for "Alphaville" but according to director Anne Andreu, Godard's subversion of the Lemmy Caution "stereotype" effectively shattered Constantine's connection with the character—he reportedly said that he was shunned by producers after "Alphaville" was released. Constantine didn't play Lemmy Caution again until "Panic Time" in 1980.


title: Alphaville (film)

text: The opening section of the film includes an unedited sequence that depicts Caution walking into his hotel, checking in, riding an elevator and being taken through various corridors to his room. According to cinematographer Raoul Coutard, he and Godard shot this section as a continuous four-minute take. Part of this sequence shows Caution riding an elevator up to his room, which was achieved thanks to the fact that the hotel used as the location had two glass-walled elevators side by side, allowing the camera operator to ride in one lift while filming Constantine riding the other car through the glass between the two. However, as Coutard recalled, this required multiple takes, since the elevators were old and in practice they proved very difficult to synchronize.


title: Alphaville (film)

text: Like most of Godard's films, the performances and dialogue in "Alphaville" were substantially improvised. Assistant director Charles Bitsch recalled that, even when production commenced he had no idea what Godard was planning to do. Godard's first act was to ask Bitsch to write a screenplay, saying that producer Michelin had been pestering him for a script because he needed it to help him raise finance from backers in Germany (where Constantine was popular). Bitsch protested that he had never read a Lemmy Caution book, but Godard simply said "Read one and then write it." Bitsch read a Caution book, then wrote a 30-page treatment and brought it to Godard, who said "OK, fine" and took it without even looking at it. It was then given to Michelin, who was pleased with the result, and the "script" was duly translated into German and sent off to the backers. In fact, none of it even reached the screen and according to Bitsch the German backers later asked Michelin to repay the money when they saw the completed film.


title: Alphaville (film)

text: On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, "Alphaville" received an approval rating of 91% based on 46 reviews, and an average rating of 8.36/10. Its consensus reads, "While "Alphaville" is by no means a conventional sci-fi film, Jean-Luc Godard creates a witty, noir-ish future all his own." "Time Out London" gave the film a positive review, calling it "a dazzling amalgam of film noir and science fiction".


title: Verbal abuse

text: Verbal abuse (also known as verbal aggression, verbal attack, verbal violence, verbal assault, psychic aggression, or psychic violence) is a type of psychological/mental abuse that involves the use of oral, gestured, and written language directed to a victim. Verbal abuse can include the act of harassing, labeling, insulting, scolding, rebuking, or excessive yelling towards an individual. It can also include the use of derogatory terms, the delivery of statements intended to frighten, humiliate, denigrate, or belittle a person. These kinds of attacks may result in mental and/or emotional distress for the victim.


title: Verbal abuse

text: Verbal aggression and abuse affects all populations, cultures, and individuals. These actions are psychologically damaging and are considered forms of emotional and physical harm to the victim. This type of behavior leaves individuals feeling poorly about themselves and can lead to the developing numerous negative health issues and disorders such as suicidal thoughts, depression, poor physical health, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, personality disorders, and even aggression.


title: Verbal abuse

text: Victims of verbal abuse may display abusive behaviors towards other individuals. Verbal abuse and verbal aggression can take form in many ways. When individuals understand how verbal abuse may be presented, they can better analyze and act accordingly in certain situations. Verbal aggression can be defined as a characteristic or trait that drives a person to attack the self-values and concepts of others in addition to, or instead of, their own values and concepts.


title: Verbal abuse

text: Research shows that if a young child has been constantly verbally abused over the years they begin to develop constant feelings of mistrust, shame, doubt, guilt, and inferiority. Studies show that two out of three American children are victims of experiencing verbal aggression from their parents. This can affect their mental, social, and interpersonal development during the most critical psychological developmental years which are generally between 2 and 19 years of age. It has been found that verbally abusive behaviors in young children are generally learned through an adult role model such as a parent or caregiver. There are various ways a caregiver can use verbal communication to abuse a child: rejection of a child’s worth, isolating a child from social experiences, terrorizing a child with verbal assaults, ignoring a child’s needs, corrupting a child’s views of the world and teaching them that delinquent activity is normal, verbally assaulting a child, and over-pressuring a child to mature faster than the normal rate of maturity for the child’s age. Children who have experienced maternal verbal abuse have been more likely to develop personality disorders in their adolescent and young adult years, they have also been known to develop obsessive-compulsive characteristics and narcissistic behaviors.


title: Verbal abuse

text: It has been found that verbal abuse damages the self-esteem of students, places irrational blame onto themselves, and affects mental health and social interaction abilities in the students; this type of abuse in students can be projected through their peers and professors. The effects of experiencing verbal abuse as a young child – developing negative feelings and in some occurrences, mental disorders – bled onto young adulthood and when they’re moving onto higher education and becoming a young adult, they are more prone to experience more of these negative feelings, disorders, and even have an increased chance of drug use in adulthood. In the college population, research has shown that one of the most impactful forms of verbal abuse was peer-related verbal abuse which started with a student blaming another peer for something they did not do and escalated to yelling, cursing, and using derogatory terms; this type of abuse has been associated with increasing the risks of the student falling into a depressive mood, developing anxiety, anger-hostility, and other emotional barriers.


title: Verbal abuse

text: Research has shown that in some grade-school scenarios – specifically middle school – verbal aggression is prevalent between boys and girls in different ways. Boys experienced insults and threats to a greater extent, while girls experienced sexual name-calling to a greater extent. Boys were often verbally abusive towards other boys and girls, this showed researchers that these characteristics were used to build masculinity amongst themselves. Often, boys are portrayed as needing to be “tough” or masculine, to be able to paint this image, they often resort to verbal abuse, which in turn, made them unfavorable to girls. Verbally abusive girls’ reasoning for their actions of abuse was that they, in turn, were victims of bullying and/or verbal abuse by their peers and/or instructors because some of the girls would display the wrong kind of sexuality, femininity, and social age – according to their peers’ and instructors’ judgments.


title: Verbal abuse

text: In some instances, the victims can become the perpetrators. It has been shown that Hispanic women who have experienced verbal conflicts and/or abuse with their father also go on to have verbal conflicts and/or abuse with their daughter. When Hispanic mothers exert a high level of verbal conflicts and/or abuse towards her husband, their daughter most likely will have a conflict with them – her parents - as well, when this happens it is also predicted that the daughter will go on to have the same conflicts with her partner. In America, a vulnerable group for verbal aggression are college-aged women. 80% of these women are aware that verbal abuse is a serious ongoing issue and 25% of them have reported to have experienced verbal abuse in an intimate relationship. In other instances, 65% of 358 low-income pregnant women claimed to have experienced verbal or physical abuse during their pregnancies, with younger women experiencing significantly higher rates of this abuse.


title: Verbal abuse

text: The workplace has often been - and still sometimes is - a breeding ground for verbal aggression. Slurs, racist comments, and derogatory terms have been shot against ethnic minorities. Although it seems like this issue has resolved in the workplace because we are becoming more inclusive as a society, aggressors still have found ways to abuse ethnic minorities verbally and nonverbally in the office. It is more discrete, but aggressors are still deeply wounding ethnic minorities in the workplace by shooting slurs and derogatory comments at them. In a study where 1000 nurses received a questionnaire and 46% responded, 91% of them claimed that they had experienced verbal abuse within the past month and more than 50% of them said that they did not feel capable of responding to the abuse. Adults who have been victims of verbal abuse and workplace mistreatment have been more susceptible to suffer from mental health illnesses and social disorders.


title: Verbal abuse

text: In romantic relationships, specifically physically and verbally abusive ones, it has been found that when the couple has a conflict, 53% of the victims to this abuse say that physical aggression was the factor that started the conflict while 33% of the aggressors, in this case, claim that verbal aggression was the factor that ignited the issue. It is not a surprise that both the victim and the aggressor have different points of views as to what caused the abuse to escalate. In marital relationships, it is common to see that if one individual – whether it be the husband or wife – has trouble communicating their needs and expectations to their partner, instead of having “healthy” argumentation, they resort to using verbal aggression against their partner which in turn causes more distress and conflict in the relationship. Just like in the workplace, adults who have experienced intimate partner violence have also had their mental health and brain morphology be affected.


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: "True" is a song by English new wave band Spandau Ballet, released in April 1983 as the title track and third single from their third studio album. It was written by the band's guitarist/songwriter Gary Kemp to express his feelings for Altered Images lead singer Clare Grogan, influenced musically by songs of Marvin Gaye and Al Green he was listening to at the time, and lyrically by Green and The Beatles. It eventually reached number one on the UK chart in April 1983 and made the top 10 in several other countries, including the US, where it became their first song to reach the "Billboard" Hot 100.


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: Kemp wanted to shift the sound of Spandau Ballet into soul and incorporated band member Steve Norman's newfound interest in the saxophone into his writing; the band also updated its look to suits for the song's music video and tour. "True" was recorded with most of the other tracks from the album at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas. The "True" album was then released as "Communication", its first single, was climbing the UK Singles Chart. DJs were so enthusiastic about playing the title song that the band knew it would be their next single.


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: The song has since become the band's signature hit. It has been covered by Paul Anka in a swing style, and used in films such as "Sixteen Candles" and "50 First Dates", as well as TV series like "Modern Family". Other artists have sampled it in their own hits, most notably P.M. Dawn, who went to number one in the US with "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss" in 1991.


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: In 1981, Spandau Ballet guitarist/songwriter Gary Kemp met Altered Images lead singer Clare Grogan and felt an "instant connection" in part due to their conversations about writers. For his birthday that year, she gave him a copy of the novel "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov, whom they had discussed. He intended the relationship to be platonic since he already had a girlfriend, but he was also competing for her attention with two other men: actor John Gordon Sinclair, who starred with her in "Gregory's Girl", and artist David Band, who had designed cover art for Altered Images; he would later do so for Spandau Ballet with the single "Communication".


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: Spandau Ballet's first album, "Journeys to Glory", was released in 1981. It reflected their desire to represent the clientele of the trendy London nightclub the Blitz with its focus on what Kemp called "white European disco music". Their second album, "Diamond", had a successful stab at funk with its lead single, "Chant No. 1 (I Don't Need This Pressure On)", but otherwise disappointed critics with its more experimental material. The poor chart performance of its next two singles, "Paint Me Down" and "She Loved Like Diamond", resulted in a remix of its more pop-sounding track "Instinction", which became a number 10 hit on the UK Singles Chart in spring 1982. That rebound brought a stark realisation for Kemp: the nightclub crowd Spandau Ballet originally catered to was no longer interested in them. He told John Wilson in a "Mastertapes" interview in 2013 that, because they were unable keep the audience they initially attracted, "[t]here was a sense of, '[w]e have to move on from here,'" a desire to expand to a broader audience. This later inspired the "True" lyric "I bought a ticket to the world". allowing him to focus more on the melody. He told "Creem" magazine in 1984, "For the first time, I was trying to write songs that were emotional release for me—me just writing about myself and the way I felt."


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: Kemp was primarily listening to soul artists Marvin Gaye and Al Green as he developed songs for the band's next album. His love of their music factored heavily into writing the title track, even to the point of paying tribute to Gaye on a first-name basis:


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: He wanted to write a blue-eyed soul version of what Gaye and Green performed, something "with that kind of vulnerability and atmosphere of uncertainty", with music like Green's "Let's Stay Together" and lyrics from his own experience, particularly with regard to his feelings for Grogan. Kemp began the music for what became "True" in mid-1982 after watching the 1970 Beatles documentary "Let It Be" on television; afterwards the song "Dig a Pony" stuck in his head. In a 2017 interview with "The Wall Street Journal", he described how the song opens: "John Lennon sings 'I, hi-hi, hi-hi, I dig a pony.' I loved how he took that one word—'I'—and turned it into a snaking melody." Kemp took to his Eko acoustic guitar that evening wanting to avoid the dance rhythms he was used to writing and instead structured a melody around the word "I" the way Lennon had. He reworked the opening line from Green's hit, "I'm, I'm so in love with you", as "Ah ha-hah hahh-hi / I know this / much is / true-oo."


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: "'True' is about how difficult it is to be honest when you're trying to write a love song to someone", Kemp later admitted. "Hence: 'Why do I find it hard to write the next line?'" In his 2009 autobiography "I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau", he explained that even conveying his feelings in lyrics he "felt inhibited, shy even, so I started to write about that very thing: the fear of revealing oneself, of saying in song what was true." Of the infatuation that he was uncomfortable confessing, he later told "The Daily Telegraph", "I didn't want to write it down—because there's nothing more embarrassing." After reworking Green's opening line, he decided the song would not focus so much upon what he knew was true regarding the subject as it would on the issue of how much of the truth he was going to tell. He wanted to use the song as a way to tell Grogan how he felt by choosing phrases no one else would understand and looked through the copy of "Lolita" she had given him. He found the underlined phrases "pill on my tongue" and "seaside limbs", the latter of which he modified for the lyric "Take your seaside arms and write the next line / Oh, I want the truth to be known." Parsing the other selection, he thought, "'A pill dissolves, doesn't it? And the pill was trying to dissolve the nerves that I have, because I'm nervous when I'm with you or thinking about you'". He wrote the lyric "With a thrill in my head and a pill on my tongue / Dissolve the nerves that have just begun." After he had finished writing the song, he felt it was more about the process of creating something "with a blue-eyed soul feel" than it was about Grogan.


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: Spandau Ballet had already released two albums and several singles, but Kemp and his brother, Martin, the band's bassist, were still living with their parents. Once finished with "True", Kemp sang and played it on his guitar for Martin, who liked it and thought it was ready to record. When Gary performed it for the rest of the band, he was accompanied by an old friend from his years at Dame Alice Owen's School, pianist Jess Bailey. Kemp had discovered a Rhodes Chroma keyboard that gave him the sound he wanted, and Bailey adapted Gary's guitar chords so that he could play more than just single notes on the new polyphonic synthesiser.


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: Kemp wrote in his autobiography that "by far the slickest musician in the band" was Steve Norman, who had played guitar on "Journeys to Glory" but switched to percussion instruments on "Diamond". They enlisted the help of Beggar & Co as the horn section on that album for tracks such as "Chant No. 1", which inspired Norman to take up the saxophone. Kemp called it "another voice within the band" and that he "would purposely write to elevate his saxophone into its own space" by changing keys, "and that just steps it out of the track and puts it somewhere else." Kemp wrote "True" in the key of G major with a tempo of 98 BPM and a chord progression of G, Em9, CMaj9, Bm7. The song modulates to the key of E♭ major for the sax solo, after which it returns to G Major. Norman told "The Guardian" in 2012 that his solo combined two takes; at the time the band began working on "True" he had been regularly listening to the Grover Washington Jr.–Bill Withers hit "Just the Two of Us", explaining, "The solo is a reply to that: at the key change things just lift off, giving the song a moment of elation." The interest in the saxophone went beyond "True" for Kemp, who recalled how, as teenagers, he and Norman had appreciated its use on hits by Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder and, specifically, on Evelyn "Champagne" King's "Shame". He thought the instrument epitomized soul music and should be prominently featured on the new album.


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: The band wanted to record at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas because of the soul music that had been recorded there; Kemp also felt that the tropical surroundings would help give the music the feeling he was trying to achieve. They also decided to get assistance in producing what would be "True" from Tony Swain and Steve Jolley, who had recently worked with Bananarama and Imagination. The band appreciated the use of the synth-bass on the latter's hit single "Body Talk" so much that they had Swain play the instrument on the recording of "True" instead of having Martin Kemp play electric bass. In describing how the change lent itself to the new sound they were after, Kemp insisted, "Martin didn't mind. We all loved the synth bass's sound. It was of its time and had a disco, funk-soul feel. We were trying to rebrand ourselves in a slightly different direction."


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: The backing vocals for the song were recorded using a Dolby noise-reduction system, but the band decided not to use the decoder that would remove the hissing from the recording because they liked the sound of the "airy, breathy fizz on top". The result gave Kemp a sense of the success they would be enjoying: "When we listened to the playback in the studio, everyone suddenly started singing along, the road crew and everything. I think we knew then it was a number 1."


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: Hadley's lead vocal was recorded with Steve Jolley producing at Red Bus Studios in Paddington after returning from Nassau. In his 2004 autobiography "To Cut a Long Story Short", Hadley wrote, "It's quite a complicated song to sing in terms of phrasing and timing, and we soldiered on for ages before we felt we'd got it right." When asked in a 2017 Professor of Rock interview about the high note he reaches while singing, "Oh, I want the truth to be said," at the point between the sax solo and the final chorus, he responded, "I don't do that big note at the end now. I just play it down." The plan was to open the song with just a string synthesizer, but Swain was unhappy with how it sounded and came up with the idea of using the chorus for the beginning without the lead. Kemp attributed the album version's six-and-a-half-minute length to their love for the finished product with the lead vocal finally included.


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: Kemp asked Band to work with Spandau Ballet on the design for the new album. Because they were both seeing their careers take off during their attempts to court Grogan, they went camping together a few times in the English Lake District as a way of escaping their success. Kemp recalled, "We first started to devise a cover together for the "True" album when we were up in the mountains, in one of the pubs one evening. He was drawing in his sketchbook and a dove appeared, this little dove." Band later added alongside it the outline of a man's head with a brimmed hat, which the band loved; a variation was used for the sleeve of the "True" single. His work was described as "a marker for the look of the time, a jazz-influenced style that could also be seen in an exaggerated fashion in the New Romantic look." Kemp credits him with having "the skill of coming up with simple, figurative graphics that would set a visual tone for the decade." In 2012 he told "The Herald":


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: Kemp was unaware of some of the fun poked at the song: "Our friendly in-house press girl, Julia Marcus, even told us that she and a friend had boldly graffitied the toilet at Camden Palace with the Spandau dove and the word True." In his autobiography "Pop Stars in My Pantry: A Memoir of Pop Mags and Clubbing in the 1980s", her friend, music journalist Paul Simper, recounted that the text written under the dove actually read, "This Much Is Poo".


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: When the "True" album was completed, the band's label, Chrysalis Records, was pleased with the results and felt it would succeed on the strength of "Gold" and the title song. The first single, "Lifeline", had been recorded at Red Bus in August 1982 and released on 24 September. It peaked at number 7 on the UK Singles Chart and made its last appearance there at the end of November. The album was completed the following month, but Kemp explained that when the next single needed to be chosen, the band's manager, Steve Dagger, "didn't want to go with a ballad next and recommended another up-tempo first. 'Communication' got the band vote. Why we didn’t go straight for 'True' or 'Gold' as the next single, I'm not sure. Maybe we felt their success would be automatic and wanted to save them for later, during the album's release." It was released in early February 1983, with the album following in the UK a month later, debuting on the UK Albums Chart on 12 March, the same week "Communication" peaked at number 12. Kemp felt the success of "Communication" was hampered by the fact that "radio DJs were all playing the album track 'True' instead". Hadley recalled one instance in which Simon Bates of BBC Radio 1, having just played the album version of "True" on the air before it became a single and predicting to his listeners that it would go to number one when it did, played it again immediately. For Kemp, the decision had been made for them: "By public demand, 'True' would be our next single."


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: Norman thought the band had a "friendly rivalry" with Duran Duran: "In the studio, we used to leave each other insulting messages, jokes and caricatures." After "True" was released in mid-April 1983, however, they left Spandau Ballet a message to let them know that they thought the song was "fantastic". Despite Kemp's feeling in the Bahamas that it would be a hit, Hadley never even thought it would be released as a single. In 2014, he revealed that he did not think it was their best song—he preferred 1986's "Through the Barricades"—and that he was still confused by lyrics such as "Head over heels when toe to toe", concluding "But then, I suppose, we grew up on David Bowie and Roxy Music. 'Virginia Plain'—what's that about? Half of the Bowie songs, I couldn't tell you what they're about. With 'True', you have to create the imagery for yourself." In his autobiography, regarding his initial skepticism, he admitted, "No one was more surprised than me when it went on to become our biggest hit."


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: The day before Spandau Ballet learned that "True" had reached number one on the UK Singles Chart at the end of April, they had heard that the single had sold over 60,000 copies in one day and that their closest competitors had only sold one-third of that. They were on tour in Sheffield when Dagger heard the announcement of their chart feat, so he called their hotel to give them the news. Kemp spoke to him, excitedly woke drummer John Keeble with whom he shared the hotel room to spread the news, and snuck into Hadley's room to spray him awake with champagne. Remembering Keeble riding a room-service trolley down the hotel corridor in celebration, Hadley conceded that they "were all in high spirits" but that the rambunctious activities seemed "slightly flat" in light of their recent success. His surprise over selecting the song as a single had given way to certainty that it would top the charts, "It had such momentum the overwhelming feeling was, how can this not be a number 1?"


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: Once "True" had finished its third week as the most popular song in the UK, another goal came into view: the British music chart television programme "Top of the Pops" would be celebrating its thousandth episode the following week, so a fourth week at number one would mean that their performance of "True" would close out the milestone show. The success of "(Keep Feeling) Fascination" by the Human League seemed like it might prevent that from happening


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: Dagger met with Danny Glass, the head of radio promotion at Chrysalis New York, to discuss distributing the song to stations in the US, and Glass proposed starting with those focused on the Black market so that the fact that the band were all white would initially go unnoticed and not deter the potential audience there. Adult contemporary and pop stations would be next on the list. The first chart the song appeared on in "Billboard" magazine, however, was the Hot 100, the US equivalent of the UK Singles Chart. "True" debuted there at the beginning of August and peaked at number 4 during its 18 weeks there. Later in the month it debuted on the magazine's Adult Contemporary chart, where it spent 22 weeks, one of them at number 1. Its eight-week run on the magazine's list of the most popular Black Singles in the US began at the end of the month and included a peak position of 76, and the mid-October edition marked the start of four weeks on the Top Tracks rock chart, where it reached number 34.


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: In addition to its 4 weeks at number 1 on the UK Singles Chart "True" also reached the top spot on the pop charts in Canada and Ireland and made the top 10 in several other countries. It received Gold certification from the British Phonographic Industry in May 1983 for shipping a half-million units and came in at number 6 on the list of the UK's best-selling songs that year. In 2011, it received a BMI award as one of the most played songs in US history with 4 million airplays. It received Platinum certification from BPI for 600,000 units on 22 July 2022.


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: A new mix by Tony Swain and Gary Kemp was released in 2002 on the compilation album "Reformation". In April 2008, the single celebrated its 25th anniversary, and in honour of that occasion, EMI released a brand new "True" EP including the original single, the new mix found on "Reformation", and the remastered album version, plus live recordings of "True" and "Gold" from the last show of the group's 1983 tour at Sadler's Wells.


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: When Betty Page reviewed the "True" album for "Record Mirror", she wrote, "Kemp proves himself a softie beyond all doubt with final track 'True', a smoochy 'I am just a poor boy' epic, hand firmly on heart." Her colleague at the magazine, Daniela Soave, was less ambiguous in her review of the single, calling it a "genuine pearl of a song that deserves to be at number one" and summarizing, "Suffice to say 'True' makes you melt. Sentimental but not slushy, warm but not stifling, Spandau Ballet have hit the nail well and truly on the head and got it absolutely right."


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: A few of the retrospective reviews were complimentary. In 2009, Tim Rice wrote in "The Spectator" that the song was "a giant of its time and remains a standard today". In 2015, Peter Larsen wrote for the "Orange County Register" that the band's formula of mining "a vein of soulfulness tinged with nostalgia and romance" had "reached perfection" on the track, describing it as "the one Spandau Ballet song everyone knows ... It's truly a perfect song, as moving today as ever it was." Stewart Mason of AllMusic mixed in negative comments in an otherwise positive review:


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: There were, however, critics who showed complete disdain for the song, including a few different writers for "The Guardian". In dismissing Spandau Ballet as "Thatcherism on vinyl", Michael Hann described "True" as "dreadful wine-bar soul". Ian Gittins reviewed the band's 2014 Royal Albert Hall concert and, in criticising the section of the setlist that focused on their later material in which they "ditch cult status and agenda-setting futurism in favour of slick, chart-friendly shoulder-heaving soul", called "True" a "juggernaut power ballad". Luke Williams referred to the song as "the biggest load of musical tosh ever" and answered Kemp's question about finding it hard to write the next line by saying, "It's because you're a crap songwriter, idiot." In "The Rolling Stone Album Guide", Paul Evans complained that "Kemp, with 'Gold' and 'True', provided Hadley perfect songs for hamming it up: lush MOR that would've been clever if it had been intended ironically."


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: When Spandau Ballet were filmed for the "Lifeline" music video, Kemp acknowledged that the clothes they wore were "drab" and that the shift to pop left them "caught in a moment of not knowing what to wear". With an upcoming tour of Europe they felt they needed to update their style and met with an old friend from Soho, Chris Sullivan, for guidance since they felt out of touch with the latest trends. They wanted uniformity and decided on suits since no one else was wearing them at the time. Sullivan presented them with sketches of his ideas, and Kemp described the look they settled on and its lasting impact on their image: "He'd come up with the idea of the gambling gunslinger, a sort of Wyatt Earp meets City Boy; five Wild West-enders. And in good cowboy fashion, it was to brand us forever."


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: The band wore a variation of this look for the "True" video and had only their instruments with them on an otherwise bare soundstage. The original video incorporated a series of scenes filmed in black and white involving a young man who evolves from anguish as he roams city streets to jubilation as he is joined by animation renderings of the man and the dove from the album cover. When Kemp spoke to "Creem" magazine in 1984, he summarized the version that only showed the band, saying, "I didn't want to dictate what [the video] should be like. I'm sure when people hear that record they've got their own idea of what it means and what it looks like. So we just performed it and lit it well—shooting light through water and broken glass—and it worked." Although Kemp is not credited with playing piano on the song, he is shown doing so in the video, and brother Martin is shown playing guitar even though he had been replaced by Swain on the synth-bass for the studio recording.


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: "True" was listed on MTV's reports to "Billboard" indicating what videos were in rotation on the cable network, making its first appearance there in the 9 July 1983 issue, which indicated that it had been added to their playlist as of 29 June.


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: "Gold", the next single released from the "True" album, entered the UK Singles Chart in August 1983 to begin a nine-week run, reaching number 2. But while it also made the top 10 on the pop charts in several countries its number 29 showing in the US was the first signal to Kemp that Chrysalis America was not promoting them. "Communication" only reached number 59 in the US in 1984, and "Only When You Leave", the first single from their next album, "Parade", became their last Hot 100 entry when it peaked at number 34 later that year. Kemp was unhappy with their performances as well and blamed the low numbers on a perceived conflict between Chrysalis founders Chris Wright and Terry Ellis distracting them from promotional efforts. Wright refused to license the band to a bigger label in the US, so they sought legal advice to get out of their contract. The disappointing chart performance in the US led Spandau Ballet to leave Chrysalis for CBS Records, which released their "Parade" follow-up, "Through the Barricades", in 1986.


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: Hadley felt that the band's inability to sustain the interest of the American public resulted from a few other factors working against them, primarily that their big US hit was very different to what they had already succeeded with elsewhere. Kemp had said in an interview before "Gold"'s US release that he hoped it would give Americans a more balanced view of Spandau Ballet. Although some American concert attendees knew their old songs, he hoped their upcoming US tour would show the rest who came that "True" was not the sort of song they normally did.


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: In retrospect, however, Hadley felt they needed to spend several months touring the US so that more audiences could hear that back catalogue and not doing so also hurt their record sales there. They played "True" at the 1985 Live Aid concert, but instead of using their brief time on stage to showcase one of their earlier hits, Dagger wanted them to play "Virgin" from their upcoming "Through the Barricades" album, which even Kemp admitted was not a good idea. Hadley felt Dagger was inexperienced, but whenever he suggested getting a manager with more knowledge about the business, the rest of the band balked.


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: Kemp told "Creem" in 1984 that he would continue to write for the larger audience Spandau Ballet had acquired with "True" but it would not be making albums that sounded just like the last. But, just as he had developed writer's block in 1981 after "Chant No. 1" became their highest-charting single, having a UK number 1 put pressure on Kemp to churn out more chart-topping hits and left him feeling that the band would always judge his future output against "True". When the "Through the Barricades" album and its singles failed to chart in the US, Kemp chided himself for exploring so many genres and not simply trying to write more hit songs that were imitations of "True".


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: In 1984 writer-director John Hughes featured Spandau Ballet's recording of "True" in the school dance scene in "Sixteen Candles", and his selection elicited responses decades later. In 2009 "LA Weekly"'s Art Tavana noted that when it was used in that particular moment, the song "crossed over into the permanent teenage scrapbook". Also in 2009 Todd Martens of the "Los Angeles Times" described the emotion created by playing the song over the scene as "Totally crazy this-is-the-end-of-the-world heartache". Julian Kimble of the "Washington City Paper" wrote in 2014 that its inclusion "made Spandau Ballet's imprint on popular culture permanent" and that the song "adopted new significance, especially among suburban teens".


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: The 2009 episode of "Modern Family" titled "Great Expectations" featured Edward Norton playing fictional Spandau Ballet bassist Izzy LaFontaine and beginning a performance of the song, which is then followed by part of the original recording.


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss" by P.M. Dawn, a duo of brothers Jarrett and Attrell Cordes, prominently sampled "True" and went to number 1 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 in November 1991. They had heard "True" in the studio where they were working on their , and Attrell, known on stage as Prince Be, thought it was "so beautiful". He said, "I wanted Prince Be's version. I basically reincarnated the spirit of 'True' for me. I reshaped it as if I wrote it myself." Kemp received a writing credit with Prince Be for "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss", and Hadley appeared briefly in the music video. The duo's hit also went to number 1 on New Zealand's pop chart and made the top 10 in several countries. Kemp also received songwriting credit when "True" was sampled on the 2007 hit "You" by Lloyd that featured Lil Wayne and peaked at number 9 on the Hot 100. The Professor of Rock surprised Hadley in the 2017 interview by pointing out that the Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way" lifts the piano section at the end of "True"'s sax solo for the melody line of its chorus.


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: In 2015, "True" was voted by the British public as the nation's 10th-favourite 1980s number 1 in an ITV poll; it was characterised as a "karaoke staple". Other surveys were not favourable: "Billboard" selected "True" as one of the "Most Overplayed Songs in Movies", "NME" included the line "I bought a ticket to the world but now I've come back again" in their list of the "50 worst pop lyrics of all time", and it also made the "Houston Press"s list of "10 Songs We Never, Ever Want to Hear Again, Ever". Sean Daly of the "St. Petersburg Times" named "True" the worst song of all time, while "Seattle Post-Intelligencer" columnist Robert Jamieson selected it as the worst ever love song.


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: Kemp did find one famous fan: "I remember when I did "The Bodyguard", Kevin Costner said to me, 'You know, that song belongs to me and my wife.' And I thought, wow, I thought it belonged to my plumber and his wife… Anyway, it didn't keep [the Costners] together, did it?"


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: Will.i.am and Fergie of the American pop-rap act Black Eyed Peas covered "True" for the 2004 Adam Sandler–Drew Barrymore film "50 First Dates". Matthew Sheby of Soundtrack.net liked their hip-hop version, and Spence D of IGN thought it was a "pretty true rendition". American indie rock singer-songwriter Cary Brothers recorded it for the 2005 superhero comedy film "Sky High" and received differing opinions. Soundtrack.Net's Brian McVickar thought it was "certainly a winner among this [soundtrack] collection", while Heather Phares of AllMusic only found it "blandly pleasant".


title: True (Spandau Ballet song)

text: Canadian-born American singer Paul Anka released a version of the song in 2005 on his album "Rock Swings", with most critics noting that his cover was one of the better songs included. Michael Fremer of Analog Planet speculated that the arrangement was inspired by "Li'l Darlin'" and felt that it "gives the melancholic song a sophisticated lilt, over which Anka sells the lyrics with a powerful, assertive reading. If you didn't know the original, you'd think the tune was originally written for big band treatment." "Jazz Times"s Christopher Loudon wrote, "When "Rock Swings" is good, it’s very good – most notably on introspective ballads like Spandau Ballet’s 'True'." John Kappes of "The Plain Dealer" explained, "Some of the material works as well as you might think; Spandau Ballet's 'True' was, after all, an easy-listening track waiting to happen from the start." "The Village Voice"'s Franklin Bruno, however, felt that the album's "several attempts to negotiate impressionistic lyrics (Spandau Ballet's 'True,' Billy Idol's 'Eyes Without a Face') as though they possessed narrative content are comically misguided." Upon confessing that he had heard the Anka version, Hadley chuckled, "It was a bit strange," and admitted to performing the song with a swing orchestra. He could only concede, "It kind of works. It's very unusual. I think when people wanna hear me sing it, they wanna hear me sing the straight version."


title: Password cracking

text: In cryptanalysis and computer security, password cracking is the process of recovering passwords from data that has been stored in or transmitted by a computer system in scrambled form. A common approach (brute-force attack) is to repeatedly try guesses for the password and to check them against an available cryptographic hash of the password. Another type of approach is password spraying, which is often automated and occurs slowly over time in order to remain undetected, using a list of common passwords.


title: Password cracking

text: The purpose of password cracking might be to help a user recover a forgotten password (due to the fact that installing an entirely new password would involve System Administration privileges), to gain unauthorized access to a system, or to act as a preventive measure whereby system administrators check for easily crackable passwords. On a file-by-file basis, password cracking is utilized to gain access to digital evidence to which a judge has allowed access, when a particular file's permissions restricted.


title: Password cracking

text: The time to crack a password is related to bit strength , which is a measure of the password's entropy, and the details of how the password is stored. Most methods of password cracking require the computer to produce many candidate passwords, each of which is checked. One example is brute-force cracking, in which a computer tries "every" possible key or password until it succeeds. With multiple processors, this time can be optimized through searching from the last possible group of symbols and the beginning at the same time, with other processors being placed to search through a designated selection of possible passwords. More common methods of password cracking, such as dictionary attacks, pattern checking, word list substitution, etc. attempt to reduce the number of trials required and will usually be attempted before brute force. Higher password bit strength exponentially increases the number of candidate passwords that must be checked, on average, to recover the password and reduces the likelihood that the password will be found in any cracking dictionary.


title: Password cracking

text: The ability to crack passwords using computer programs is also a function of the number of possible passwords per second which can be checked. If a hash of the target password is available to the attacker, this number can be in the billions or trillions per second, since an "offline attack" is possible. If not, the rate depends on whether the authentication software limits how often a password can be tried, either by time delays, CAPTCHAs, or forced lockouts after some number of failed attempts. Another situation where quick guessing is possible is when the password is used to form a cryptographic key. In such cases, an attacker can quickly check to see if a guessed password successfully decodes encrypted data.


title: Password cracking

text: For some kinds of password hash, ordinary desktop computers can test over a hundred million passwords per second using password cracking tools running on a general purpose CPU and billions of passwords per second using GPU-based password cracking tools . The rate of password guessing depends heavily on the cryptographic function used by the system to generate password hashes. A suitable password hashing function, such as bcrypt, is many orders of magnitude better than a naive function like simple MD5 or SHA. A user-selected eight-character password with numbers, mixed case, and symbols, with commonly selected passwords and other dictionary matches filtered out, reaches an estimated 30-bit strength, according to NIST. 2 is only one billion permutations and would be cracked in seconds if the hashing function were naive. When ordinary desktop computers are combined in a cracking effort, as can be done with botnets, the capabilities of password cracking are considerably extended. In 2002, distributed.net successfully found a 64-bit RC5 key in four years, in an effort which included over 300,000 different computers at various times, and which generated an average of over 12 billion keys per second.


title: Password cracking

text: Graphics processing units can speed up password cracking by a factor of 50 to 100 over general purpose computers for specific hashing algorithms. As of 2011, available commercial products claim the ability to test up to 2,800,000,000 passwords a second on a standard desktop computer using a high-end graphics processor. Such a device can crack a 10-letter single-case password in one day. The work can be distributed over many computers for an additional speedup proportional to the number of available computers with comparable GPUs. However some algorithms run slowly, or even are specifically designed to run slowly, on GPUs. Examples are DES, Triple DES, bcrypt, scrypt, and Argon2.


title: Password cracking

text: The emergence over the past decade of hardware acceleration in a GPU has enabled resources to be used to increase the efficiency and speed of a brute force attack for most hashing algorithms. In 2012, Stricture Consulting Group unveiled a 25-GPU cluster that achieved a brute force attack speed of 350 billion guesses per second, allowing them to check formula_1password combinations in 5.5 hours. Using ocl-Hashcat Plus on a Virtual OpenCL cluster platform, the Linux-based GPU cluster was used to "crack 90 percent of the 6.5 million password hashes belonging to users of LinkedIn."


title: Password cracking

text: For some specific hashing algorithms, CPUs and GPUs are not a good match. Purpose-made hardware is required to run at high speeds. Custom hardware can be made using FPGA or ASIC technology. Development for both technologies is complex and (very) expensive. In general, FPGAs are favorable in small quantities, ASICs are favorable in (very) large quantities, more energy efficient, and faster. In 1998, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) built a dedicated password cracker using ASICs. Their machine, Deep Crack, broke a DES 56-bit key in 56 hours, testing over 90 billion keys per second. In 2017, leaked documents show that ASICs are used for a military project to code-break the entire internet. Designing and building ASIC-basic password crackers is assumed to be out of reach for non-governments. Since 2019, John the Ripper supports password cracking for a limited number of hashing algorithms using FPGAs. Commercial companies are now using FPGA-based setups for password cracking.


title: Password cracking

text: Similarly, the more stringent the requirements for password strength, e.g. "have a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters and digits" or "change it monthly", the greater the degree to which users will subvert the system.


title: Password cracking

text: In "The Memorability and Security of Passwords", Jeff Yan "et al." examine the effect of advice given to users about a good choice of password. They found that passwords based on thinking of a phrase and taking the first letter of each word are just as memorable as naively selected passwords, and just as hard to crack as randomly generated passwords. Combining two unrelated words is another good method. Having a personally designed "algorithm" for generating obscure passwords is another good method.


title: Password cracking

text: However, asking users to remember a password consisting of a "mix of uppercase and lowercase characters" is similar to asking them to remember a sequence of bits: hard to remember, and only a little bit harder to crack (e.g. only 128 times harder to crack for 7-letter passwords, less if the user simply capitalizes one of the letters). Asking users to use "both letters and digits" will often lead to easy-to-guess substitutions such as 'E' → '3' and 'I' → '1': substitutions which are well known to attackers. Similarly, typing the password one keyboard row higher is a common trick known to attackers.


title: Password cracking

text: Research detailed in an April 2015 paper by several professors at Carnegie Mellon University shows that people's choices of password structure often follow several known patterns. For example, when password requirements require a long minimum length such as 16 characters, people tend to repeat characters or even entire words within their passwords. As a result, passwords may be much more easily cracked than their mathematical probabilities would otherwise indicate. Passwords containing one digit, for example, disproportionately include it at the end of the password.


title: Password cracking

text: On July 16, 1998, CERT reported an incident where an attacker had found 186,126 encrypted passwords. By the time the breach was discovered, 47,642 passwords had already been cracked.


title: Password cracking

text: In December 2009, a major password breach of Rockyou.com occurred that led to the release of 32 million passwords. The attacker then leaked the full list of the 32 million passwords (with no other identifiable information) to the internet. Passwords were stored in cleartext in the database and were extracted through an SQL injection vulnerability. The Imperva Application Defense Center (ADC) did an analysis on the strength of the passwords. Some of the key findings were:


title: Password cracking

text: In June 2011, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) suffered a security breach that led to the public release of first and last names, usernames, and passwords of more than 11,000 registered users of their e-bookshop. The data were leaked as part of Operation AntiSec, a movement that includes Anonymous, LulzSec, and other hacking groups and individuals.


title: Password cracking

text: On July 11, 2011, Booz Allen Hamilton, a large American consulting firm that does a substantial amount of work for the Pentagon, had its servers hacked by Anonymous and leaked the same day. "The leak, dubbed 'Military Meltdown Monday', includes 90,000 logins of military personnel—including personnel from USCENTCOM, SOCOM, the Marine Corps, various Air Force facilities, Homeland Security, State Department staff, and what looks like private-sector contractors." These leaked passwords were found to be hashed with unsalted SHA-1, and were later analyzed by the ADC team at Imperva, revealing that even some military personnel used passwords as weak as "1234".


title: Password cracking

text: In July 2015, a group calling itself "The Impact Team" stole the user data of Ashley Madison. Many passwords were hashed using both the relatively strong bcrypt algorithm and the weaker MD5 hash. Attacking the latter algorithm allowed some 11 million plaintext passwords to be recovered by password cracking group CynoSure Prime.


title: Password cracking

text: One method of preventing a password from being cracked is to ensure that attackers cannot get access even to the hashed password. For example, on the Unix operating system, hashed passwords were originally stored in a publicly accessible file codice_1. On modern Unix (and similar) systems, on the other hand, they are stored in the shadow password file codice_2, which is accessible only to programs running with enhanced privileges (i.e., "system" privileges). This makes it harder for a malicious user to obtain the hashed passwords in the first instance, however many collections of password hashes have been stolen despite such protection. And some common network protocols transmit passwords in cleartext or use weak challenge/response schemes.


title: Password cracking

text: Another approach is to combine a site-specific secret key with the password hash, which prevents plaintext password recovery even if the hashed values are purloined. However privilege escalation attacks that can steal protected hash files may also expose the site secret. A third approach is to use key derivation functions that reduce the rate at which passwords can be guessed.


title: Password cracking

text: Another protection measure is the use of salt, a random value unique to each password that is incorporated in the hashing. Salt prevents multiple hashes from being attacked simultaneously and also prevents the creation of pre-computed dictionaries such as rainbow tables.


title: Password cracking

text: Modern Unix Systems have replaced the traditional DES-based password hashing function crypt() with stronger methods such as crypt-SHA, bcrypt, and scrypt. Other systems have also begun to adopt these methods. For instance, the Cisco IOS originally used a reversible Vigenère cipher to encrypt passwords, but now uses md5-crypt with a 24-bit salt when the "enable secret" command is used. These newer methods use large salt values which prevent attackers from efficiently mounting offline attacks against multiple user accounts simultaneously. The algorithms are also much slower to execute which drastically increases the time required to mount a successful offline attack.


title: Password cracking

text: Many hashes used for storing passwords, such as MD5 and the SHA family, are designed for fast computation with low memory requirements and efficient implementation in hardware. Multiple instances of these algorithms can be run in parallel on graphics processing units (GPUs), speeding cracking. As a result, fast hashes are ineffective in preventing password cracking, even with salt. Some key stretching algorithms, such as PBKDF2 and crypt-SHA iteratively calculate password hashes and can significantly reduce the rate at which passwords can be tested, if the iteration count is high enough. Other algorithms, such as scrypt are memory-hard, meaning they require relatively large amounts of memory in addition to time-consuming computation and are thus more difficult to crack using GPUs and custom integrated circuits.


title: Password cracking

text: In 2013 a long-term Password Hashing Competition was announced to choose a new, standard algorithm for password hashing, with Argon2 chosen as the winner in 2015. Another algorithm, Balloon, is recommended by NIST. Both algorithms are memory-hard.


title: Password cracking

text: Solutions like a security token give a formal proof answer by constantly shifting password. Those solutions abruptly reduce the timeframe available for brute forcing (the attacker needs to break and use the password within a single shift) and they reduce the value of the stolen passwords because of its short time validity.


title: Password cracking

text: There are many password cracking software tools, but the most popular are Aircrack-ng, Cain & Abel, John the Ripper, Hashcat, Hydra, DaveGrohl, and ElcomSoft. Many litigation support software packages also include password cracking functionality. Most of these packages employ a mixture of cracking strategies; algorithms with brute-force and dictionary attacks proving to be the most productive.


title: Password cracking

text: The increased availability of computing power and beginner friendly automated password cracking software for a number of protection schemes has allowed the activity to be taken up by script kiddies.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: When the United Kingdom declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939 at the start of World War II, the UK controlled to varying degrees numerous crown colonies, protectorates and the India. It also maintained unique political ties to four of the five independent Dominions—Australia, Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand—as co-members (with the UK) of the then "British Commonwealth". In 1939 the British Empire and the Commonwealth together comprised a global power, with direct or "de facto" political and economic control of 25% of the world's population, and of 30% of its land mass.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: The contribution of the British Empire and Commonwealth in terms of manpower and materiel was critical to the Allied war-effort. From September 1939 to mid-1942, the UK led Allied efforts in multiple global military theatres. Commonwealth, Colonial and Imperial Indian forces, totalling close to 15 million serving men and women, fought the German, Italian, Japanese and other Axis armies, air-forces and navies across Europe, Africa, Asia, and in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic, Indian, Pacific and Arctic Oceans. Commonwealth forces based in Britain operated across Northwestern Europe in the effort to slow or stop Axis advances. Commonwealth airforces fought the Luftwaffe to a standstill over Britain, and Commonwealth armies defeated Italian forces in East Africa and North Africa and occupied several overseas colonies of German-occupied European nations. Following successful engagements against Axis forces, Commonwealth troops invaded and occupied Libya, Italian Somaliland, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Madagascar.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: The Commonwealth defeated, held back or slowed the Axis powers for three years while mobilizing its globally-integrated economy, military, and industrial infrastructure to build what became, by 1942, the most extensive military apparatus of the war. These efforts came at the cost of 150,000 military deaths, 400,000 wounded, 100,000 prisoners, over 300,000 civilian deaths, and the loss of 70 major warships, 39 submarines, 3,500 aircraft, 1,100 tanks and 65,000 vehicles. During this period the Commonwealth built an enormous military and industrial capacity. Britain became the nucleus of the Allied war-effort in Western Europe, and hosted governments-in-exile in London to rally support in occupied Europe for the Allied cause. Canada delivered almost $4 billion in direct financial aid to the United Kingdom, and Australia and New Zealand began shifting to domestic production to provide material aid to US forces in the Pacific. Following the US entry into the war in December 1941, the Commonwealth and the United States coordinated their military efforts and resources globally. As the scale of the US military involvement and industrial production increased, the US undertook command in many theatres, relieving Commonwealth forces for duty elsewhere, and expanding the scope and intensity of Allied military efforts. Co-operation with the Soviet Union also developed.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: However, it proved difficult to co-ordinate the defence of far-flung colonies and Commonwealth countries from simultaneous attacks by the Axis powers. In part this difficulty was exacerbated by disagreements over priorities and objectives, as well as over the deployment and control of joint forces. The governments of Britain and Australia, in particular, turned to the United States for support. Although the British Empire and the Commonwealth countries all emerged from the war as joint victors together with the USA, the USSR and the other Allies, and the conquered territories were returned to British rule, the costs of the war and the nationalist fervour that it had stoked became a catalyst for the decolonisation which took place in the following decades.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: From 1923, defence of British colonies and protectorates in East Asia and Southeast Asia was centred on the "Singapore strategy". This made the assumption that Britain could send a fleet to its naval base in Singapore within two or three days of a Japanese attack, while relying on France to provide assistance in Asia via its colony in Indochina and, in the event of war with Italy, to help defend British territories in the Mediterranean. Pre-war planners did not anticipate the fall of France: Nazi occupation, the loss of control over the Channel, and the employment of French Atlantic ports as forward bases for U-boats directly threatened Britain itself, forcing a significant reassessment of naval defence priorities.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: During the 1930s, a triple threat emerged for the British Commonwealth in the form of far-right, militaristic governments in Germany, Italy and Japan. Germany threatened Britain itself, while Italy and Japan's imperial ambitions looked set to clash with the British imperial presence in the Mediterranean and East Asia respectively. However, there were differences of opinion within the UK and the Dominions as to which posed the most serious threat, and whether any attack would come from more than one power at the same time.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, on 3 September, after a British ultimatum to Germany to cease military operations was ignored, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Britain's declaration of war automatically committed India, the Crown colonies, and the protectorates, but the 1931 Statute of Westminster had granted autonomy to the Dominions so each decided their course separately.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies immediately joined the British declaration on 3 September, believing that it applied to all subjects of the Empire and Commonwealth. New Zealand followed suit simultaneously, at 9.30 pm on 3 September (local time), after Peter Fraser consulted the Cabinet; although as Chamberlain's broadcast was drowned by static, the Cabinet (led by Fraser as Prime Minister Michael Savage was terminally ill) delayed until the Admiralty announced to the fleet a state of war, then backdated the declaration to 9.30 pm. South Africa took three days to make its decision (on 6 September), as the Prime Minister General J. B. M. Hertzog favoured neutrality but was defeated by the pro-war vote in the Union Parliament, led by General Jan Smuts, who then replaced Hertzog. Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King declared support for Britain on the day of the British declaration, but also stated that it was for Parliament to make the formal declaration, which it did so one week later on 10 September. Ireland, though still a member of the Commonwealth, severed its legal ties as a dominion in 1937 and chose to remain neutral throughout the war.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: While the war was initially intended to be limited, resources were mobilized quickly, and the first shots were fired almost immediately. Just hours after the Australian declaration of war, a gun at Fort Queenscliff fired across the bows of a ship as it attempted to leave Melbourne without required clearances. On 10 October 1939, an aircraft of No. 10 Squadron RAAF based in England became the first Commonwealth air force unit to go into action when it undertook a mission to Tunisia. The first Canadian convoy of 15 ships bearing war goods departed Halifax just six days after the nation declared war, with two destroyers and . A further 26 convoys of 527 ships sailed from Canada in the first four months of the war, and by 1 January 1940 Canada had landed an entire division in Britain. On 13 June 1940 Canadian troops deployed to France in an attempt to secure the southern flank of the British Expeditionary Force in Belgium. As the fall of France grew imminent, Britain looked to Canada to rapidly provide additional troops to strategic locations in North America, the Atlantic and Caribbean. Following the Canadian destroyer already on station from 1939, Canada provided troops from May 1940 to assist in the defence of the British Caribbean colonies, with several companies serving throughout the war in Bermuda, Jamaica, the Bahamas and British Guiana. Canadian troops were also sent to the defence of the colony of Newfoundland, on Canada's east coast, the closest point in North America to Germany. Fearing the loss of a land link to the British Isles, Canada was also requested to occupy Iceland, which it did from June 1940 to the spring of 1941, following the initial British invasion.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: From mid-June 1940, following the rapid German invasions and occupations of Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, the British Commonwealth was the main opponent of Germany and the Axis, until the entry into the war of the Soviet Union in June 1941. During this period Australia, India, New Zealand and South Africa provided dozens of ships and several divisions for the defence of the Mediterranean, Greece, Crete, Lebanon and Egypt, where British troops were outnumbered four to one by the Italian armies in Libya and Ethiopia. Canada delivered a further 2nd Canadian Infantry Division, pilots for two air squadrons, and several warships to Britain to face a possible invasion from the continent.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: In December 1941, Japan launched, in quick succession, attacks on British Malaya, the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, and Hong Kong.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: Substantial financial support was provided by Canada to the UK and Commonwealth dominions, in the form of over $4 billion in aid through the Billion Dollar Gift and Mutual Aid and the War Appropriation Act. Over the course of the war over 1.6 million Canadians served in uniform (out of a prewar population of 11 million), in almost every theatre of the war, and by war's end the country had the third-largest navy and fourth-largest air force in the world. By the end of the war, almost a million Australians had served in the armed forces (out of a population of under 7 million), whose military units fought primarily in Europe, North Africa, and the South West Pacific.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: The British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (also known as the "Empire Air Training Scheme") was established by the governments of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK resulting in:


title: British Empire in World War II

text: Britain borrowed everywhere it could and made heavy purchases of munitions and supplies in India and Canada during the war, as well as other parts of the Empire and neutral countries. Canada also made gifts. Britain's sterling balances around the world amounted to £3.4 billion in 1945 or the equivalent of about $US 200 billion in 2016 dollars. However, Britain treated this as a long-term loan with no interest and no specified repayment date. Just when the money would be made available by London was an issue, for the British treasury was nearly empty by 1945.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: In June 1940, France surrendered to invading German forces, and Italy joined the war on the Axis side, causing a reversal of the Singapore strategy. Winston Churchill, who had replaced Neville Chamberlain as British Prime Minister the previous month (see Norway debate), ordered that the Middle East and the Mediterranean were of a higher priority than the Far East to defend. Australia and New Zealand were told by telegram that they should turn to the United States for help in defending their homeland should Japan attack:


title: British Empire in World War II

text: Commonwealth forces played a major role in North and East Africa following Italy's entry to the war, participating in the invasion of Italian Libya and Somaliland, but were forced to retreat after Churchill diverted resources to Greece and Crete.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: The Battle of Singapore was fought in the South-East Asian theatre of World War II when the Japanese Empire invaded British Malaya and its stronghold of Singapore. Singapore was the major British military base in South East Asia and nicknamed the "Gibraltar of the East". The fighting in Singapore lasted from 31 January 1942 to 15 February 1942. It followed a humiliating naval engagement in December 1941 in which two British capital ships were sunk.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: It resulted in the fall of Singapore to the Japanese, and the largest surrender of British-led military personnel in history. About 80,000 British, Australian and Indian troops became prisoners of war, joining 50,000 taken by the Japanese in the Malayan campaign. Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill called the ignominious fall of Singapore to the Japanese the "worst disaster" and "largest capitulation" in British history.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: Africa was a large continent whose geography gave it strategic importance during the war. North Africa was the scene of a major campaign against Italy and Germany, which itself included the Tunisian Campaign, the Western Desert Campaign (resulting in tide-turning battles such as those in El Alamein and in Tobruk) and, with large-scale American support, Operation Torch. East Africa was also the scene of a major campaign against Italy which resulted in the liberation of Somalia, Eritrea and most chiefly Ethiopia which had been conquered by the Italian Empire in 1936. The vast geography provided major transportation routes linking the United States to the Middle East and Mediterranean regions. The sea route around South Africa was heavily used even though it added 40 days to voyages that had to avoid the dangerous Suez region. Lend Lease supplies to Russia often came this way. Internally, long-distance road and railroad connections facilitated the British war effort. The Union of South Africa was part of the British Commonwealth of Nations, and had been an independent self-governing country since 1931. The British possessions in Africa were ruled by the colonial office, usually with close ties to local chiefs and kings. France had extensive possessions in Africa, but they played a much smaller role in the war, since they were largely tied to Vichy France. Portuguese holdings played a minor role. Italian holdings were the target of successful British military campaigns. The Belgian Congo, and two other Belgian colonies, were major exporters. In terms of numbers and wealth, the British controlled the richest portions of Africa, and made extensive use not only of the geography, but the manpower and the natural resources. Civilian colonial officials made a special effort to upgrade the African infrastructure, promote agriculture, integrate colonial Africa with the world economy, and recruit over a half million soldiers.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: Before the war, Britain had made few plans for the utilization of Africa, but it quickly set up command structures. The Army set up the West Africa Command, which recruited 200,000 soldiers. The East Africa Command was created in September 1941 to support the overstretched Middle East Command. The Southern Command was the domain of South Africa. The Royal Navy set up the South Atlantic Command based in Sierra Leone, that became one of the main convoy assembly points. The RAF Coastal Command had major submarine-hunting operations based in West Africa, while a smaller RAF command Dealt with submarines in the Indian Ocean. Ferrying aircraft from North America and Britain was the major mission of the Western Desert Air Force. In addition smaller more localized commands were set up throughout the war.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: Before the war, the military establishments were very small throughout British Africa, and largely consisted of whites, who comprised only two percent of the population outside Africa. As soon as the war began, newly created African units were set up, primarily by the Army. The new recruits were almost always volunteers, usually provided in close cooperation with local tribal leaders. During the war, military pay scales far exceeded what civilians natives could earn, especially when food, housing and clothing allowances are included. The largest numbers were in construction units, called Pioneer Units, with over 82,000 soldiers. The RAF and Navy also did some recruiting. East Africa provided the largest number of men, over 320,000, chiefly from Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda. They did some fighting, a great deal of guard duty, and construction work. 80,000 served in the Middle East. A special effort was made not to challenge white supremacy, certainly before the war, and to a large extent during the war itself. Nevertheless, the soldiers were drilled and train to European standards, given strong doses of propaganda, and learn leadership and organizational skills that proved essential to the formation of nationalistic and independence movements after 1945. There were minor episodes of discontent, but nothing serious, among the natives. Afrikaner nationalism was a factor in South Africa, but the anti-British and pro-neutrality Afrikaner prime minister J. B. M. Hertzog was replaced by a narrow vote of the South African parliament in 1939 by Jan Smuts, a fellow Afrikaner who was an enthusiastic supporter of the British Empire. The Smuts government closely cooperated with London and raised 340,000 volunteers (190,000 were white, or about one-third of the eligible white men).


title: British Empire in World War II

text: The Viceroy Linlithgow declared that India was at war with Germany with no consultations with Indian politicians.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: Serious tension erupted over American support for independence for India, a proposition Churchill vehemently rejected. For years Roosevelt had encouraged Britain's disengagement from India. The American position was based on principled opposition to colonialism. The politically active Indian population was deeply divided. One element was so insistent on the expulsion of the British, that it sided with Germany and Japan, and formed the Indian National Army (INA) from Indian prisoners of war. It fought as part of the Japanese invasion of Burma and eastern India. There was a large pacifist element, which rallied to Gandhi's call for abstention from the war; he said that violence in every form was evil. There was a high level of religious tension between the Hindu majority and the Muslims minority. For the first time the Muslim community became politically active, giving strong support for the British war effort. Over 2 million Indians volunteered for military service, including a large Muslim contingent. The British were sensitive to demands of the Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, since it needed Muslim soldiers in India and Muslim support all across the Middle East. London used the religious tensions in India as a justification to continue its rule, saying it was needed to prevent religious massacres of the sort that did happen in 1947. The imperialist element in Britain was strongly represented in the Conservative party; Churchill himself had long been its leading spokesman. On the other hand, Attlee and the Labour Party favoured independence and had close ties to the Congress Party. The British cabinet sent Sir Stafford Cripps to India with a specific peace plan offering India the promise of dominion status after the war. Congress demanded independence immediately and the Cripps mission failed. Roosevelt gave support to Congress, sending his representative Louis Johnson to help negotiate some sort of independence. Churchill was outraged, refused to cooperate with Roosevelt on the issue, and threatened to resign as prime minister if Roosevelt pushed too hard. Roosevelt pulled back. In 1942 when the Congress Party launched a Quit India Movement of non-violent civil disobedience, the Raj police immediately arrested tens of thousands of activists (including Gandhi), holding them for the duration. Meanwhile, wartime disruptions caused severe food shortages in eastern India; hundreds of thousands died of starvation. To this day a large Indian element blames Churchill for the Bengal famine of 1943. In terms of the war effort, India became a major base for American supplies sent to China, and Lend Lease operations boosted the local economy. The 2 million Indian soldiers were a major factor in British success in the Middle East. Muslim support for the British war effort proved decisive in the British decision to partition the Raj, forming of the new state of Pakistan.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: On 8 May 1945, the World War II Allies formally accepted the unconditional surrender of the armed forces of Nazi Germany and the end of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. The formal surrender of the occupying German forces in the Channel Islands was not until 9 May 1945. On 30 April Hitler committed suicide during the Battle of Berlin, and so the surrender of Germany was authorized by his replacement, President of Germany Karl Dönitz. The "act of military surrender" was signed on 7 May in Reims, France, and ratified on 8 May in Berlin, Germany.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: In the afternoon of 15 August 1945, the Surrender of Japan occurred, effectively ending World War II. On this day the initial announcement of Japan's surrender was made in Japan, and because of time zone differences it was announced in the United States, Western Europe, the Americas, the Pacific Islands, and Australia/New Zealand on 14 August 1945. The signing of the surrender document occurred on 2 September 1945.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: By the end of the war in August 1945, British Commonwealth forces were responsible for the civil and/or military administration of a number of non-Commonwealth territories, occupied during the war, including Eritrea, Libya, Madagascar, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Italian Somaliland, Syria, Thailand and portions of Germany, Austria and Japan. Most of these military administrations were handed over to old European colonial authorities or to new local authorities soon after the end of the hostilities. Commonwealth forces administered occupation zones in Japan, Germany and Austria until 1955.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: World War II confirmed that Britain was no longer the great power it had once been, and that it had been surpassed by the United States on the world stage. Canada, Australia and New Zealand moved within the orbit of the United States. The image of imperial strength in Asia had been shattered by the Japanese attacks, and British prestige there was irreversibly damaged. The price for India's entry to the war had been effectively a guarantee for independence, which came within two years of the end of the war, relieving Britain of its most populous and valuable colony. The deployment of 150,000 Africans overseas from British colonies, and the stationing of white troops in Africa itself led to revised perceptions of the Empire in Africa.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: In terms of actual engagement with the enemy, historians have recounted a great deal in South Asia and Southeast Asia, as summarized by Ashley Jackson:


title: British Empire in World War II

text: British historians of the Second World War have not emphasized the critical role played by the Empire in terms of money, manpower and imports of food and raw materials.


title: British Empire in World War II

text: The contributions from individual colonies, dominions, mandates, and protectorates to the war effort were extensive and global. Further information about their involvement can be found in the military histories of the individual colonies, dominions, mandates, and protectorates listed below.


title: Doctor Who (series 8)

text: The eighth series of the British science fiction television programme "Doctor Who" began on 23 August 2014 with "Deep Breath" and ended with "Death in Heaven" on 8 November 2014. The series was officially ordered in May 2013, and led by head writer and executive producer Steven Moffat, alongside executive producer Brian Minchin. Nikki Wilson, Peter Bennett and Paul Frift served as producers. The series is the eighth to air following the programme's revival in 2005, the thirty-fourth season overall, and the first series since series five not to be split into two parts.


title: Doctor Who (series 8)

text: The series is the first to star Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor, an alien Time Lord who travels through time and space in his TARDIS, which appears to be a British police box on the outside. It also stars Jenna Coleman as his companion, Clara Oswald. Also playing a major recurring role in the series is Samuel Anderson as Danny Pink, Clara's boyfriend. The main story arc revolves around a mysterious woman called Missy (portrayed by Michelle Gomez), who is often seen welcoming people who have died throughout the series to the "Promised Land", a place that serves as an apparent afterlife to deceased characters. Missy's true identity is later revealed to be the Doctor's arch-enemy, the Master, who has hatched a plan using the help of the Cybermen and through manipulation of the Doctor and Clara's relationship.


title: Doctor Who (series 8)

text: Steven Moffat was directly involved with the writing of seven episodes; he received sole credit for four episodes, and was credited as a co-writer for the remaining three. Other writers who worked on this series included Phil Ford, Mark Gatiss, Stephen Thompson, Gareth Roberts, Peter Harness, Jamie Mathieson (who wrote two), and novelist Frank Cottrell-Boyce. Directors of the series included ones who had previously worked with Moffat on the show, and brand new ones. Filming began on 6 January 2014 and lasted exactly seven months, ending on 6 August 2014.


title: Doctor Who (series 8)

text: The series premiere was watched by 9.17 million viewers, the highest ratings for a premiere since Matt Smith's first episode as the Doctor back in 2010. Ratings remained consistent throughout the course of the series, seeing a low of 6.71 million viewers with the episode "Flatline", and ended with 7.60 million people watching the finale (up 150,000 viewers from the previous season finale). The eighth series became the highest-rated series ever in the US with an average audience of 2.04 million viewers. Critical reaction to the series was highly positive, with praise going to the writing, directing, and acting, with a number of individual episodes receiving critical acclaim.


title: Doctor Who (series 8)

text: The first episode of the series, "Deep Breath", has a running time of 76 minutes, making it the second-longest episode of the revived "Doctor Who" era beginning in 2005, the longest being "The Day of the Doctor" with a running time of 77 minutes (now beaten by


title: Doctor Who (series 8)

text: Power of the Doctor with its 88 minutes). As with the previous series, Series 8 consists mainly of standalone episodes; the series finale was the first two-part story after "The Rebel Flesh" / "The Almost People" from the midpoint of Series 6 in 2011.