The British government says it is releasing two 70-year-old papers by computer pioneer Alan Turing on the theory of code breaking.

It is believed Turing wrote the papers during World War II while at Britain's code-breaking center at Bletchley Park working to crack German Enigma codes.

The fact the contents had been restricted for so long "shows what a tremendous importance it has in the foundations of our subject," a mathematician at GCHQ, the British government's communications headquarters, said.

The papers, one entitled The Applications of Probability to Crypt, and the other headed Paper on the Statistics of Repetitions, discuss mathematical approaches to code breaking, the BBC reported.

The release of the papers, available for public viewing at the National Archives at Kew in west London, comes amid celebrations to mark the centenary of Turing's birth.

Turing developed a number of projects while at Bletchley Park, including a secure speech system called Delilah, which encoded and decoded voice communications in a similar way to a telephone scrambler.

A recreation of the system is being built at Bletchley by a team led by volunteer John Harper.

"Alan Turing just had brilliant ideas way ahead of their time which were terribly important to the future of the world, if you like," Harper said.

'Chinese' hackers deface Philippine website
Manila (AFP) April 20, 2012 - Hackers claiming to come from China defaced the website of the Philippines' top university on Friday to assert their country's claim over the hotly disputed South China Sea, the government said.

The foreign department, which has been leading the government's response over its increasingly tense rift with China, immediately called for an investigation into the attack on the University of the Philippines website.

A screenshot of the defaced website, www.up.edu.ph, showed a map with Chinese script that highlighted islands in the South China Sea that are claimed by the Philippines and China.

"We come from China! Huangyan Island is Ours," the map's caption read.

Huangyan is the Chinese name for the Scarborough Shoal, where the two countries have had vessels stationed for nearly two weeks in a standoff to assert their rival claims to the area.

Foreign department spokesman Raul Hernandez suggested the hacking could be linked to the standoff.

"These computer hacking(s) are sometimes... done by some people who are passionately affected and involved in the discussion," he told reporters.

"There has to be an investigation first to find out who exactly did this."

The university temporarily shut the site down after the attack was detected on Friday, Jason Chao, network engineer of the school's computer centre, told AFP.

"We're in the process of restoring the site, but first we have to make sure that this will not happen again," he said.