[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]
List: isn
Subject: [ISN] Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker's 1903 lulz
From: InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews ! org>
Date: 2011-12-27 11:42:35
Message-ID: alpine.DEB.2.02.1112270540580.4315 () infosecnews ! org
[Download RAW message or body]
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228440.700-dotdashdiss-the-gentleman-hackers-1903-lulz.html
By Paul Marks
NewScientist
27 December 2011
A century ago, one of the world˘s first hackers used Morse code insults
to disrupt a public demo of Marconi's wireless telegraph
LATE one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience
in the Royal Institution's celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before
the crowd, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming was adjusting arcane
apparatus as he prepared to demonstrate an emerging technological
wonder: a long-range wireless communication system developed by his
boss, the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. The aim was to
showcase publicly for the first time that Morse code messages could be
sent wirelessly over long distances. Around 300 miles away, Marconi was
preparing to send a signal to London from a clifftop station in Poldhu,
Cornwall, UK.
Yet before the demonstration could begin, the apparatus in the lecture
theatre began to tap out a message. At first, it spelled out just one
word repeated over and over. Then it changed into a facetious poem
accusing Marconi of "diddling the public". Their demonstration had been
hacked - and this was more than 100 years before the mischief playing
out on the internet today. Who was the Royal Institution hacker? How did
the cheeky messages get there? And why?
It had all started in 1887 when Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of
the electromagnetic waves predicted by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865.
Discharging a capacitor into two separated electrodes, Hertz ionised the
air in the gap between them, creating a spark. Miraculously, another
spark zipped between two electrodes a few metres away: an
electromagnetic wave from the first spark had induced a current between
the second electrode pair. It meant long and short bursts of energy -
"Hertzian waves" - could be broadcast to represent the dots and dashes
of Morse code. Wireless telegraphy was born, and Marconi and his company
were at the vanguard. Marconi claimed that his wireless messages could
be sent privately over great distances. "I can tune my instruments so
that no other instrument that is not similarly tuned can tap my
messages," Marconi boasted to London's St James Gazette in February
1903.
[...]
_____________________________________________________
Subscribe to InfoSec News - www.infosecnews.org
http://www.infosecnews.org/mailman/listinfo/isn
[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]
Configure |
About |
News |
Add a list |
Sponsored by KoreLogic