Comment by ndl

Also interesting: if you look at the acknowledgements of Hauptmann's paper (at the end, just before references), he says, "I would like to thank Norbert Blum for carefully reading preliminary versions of the paper, for helpful remarks and discussions, for his guidance and patience and for being my mentor." This means Blum knew about this past attempt and presumably thought it correct enough to put on arXiv. I assume from the current paper that he has changed his mind since then.