

Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker's 1903 lulz (2011) - bentaber
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228440.700-dotdashdiss-the-gentleman-hackers-1903-lulz.html

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forgottenpass
_" I will not demonstrate to any man who throws doubt upon the system," he
said at the time. Fleming, however, fired off a fuming letter to The Times of
London. He dubbed the hack "scientific hooliganism", and "an outrage against
the traditions of the Royal Institution". He asked the newspaper's readers to
help him find the culprit._

This kind of hubris looks so quaint from 100 years on, but powerful
institutions and people get treated as "serious" for the even higher levels of
nonsense today.

~~~
smhenderson
Yes, I imagine if Maskelyne did that today it would not have resulted in a
spirited debate amongst scientists, it would have ended in jail time.

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couchand
_" 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._

Yet another reminder that it's no challenge to create a cryptosystem that the
inventor themselves cannot break.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
I was just about to post the same quote, and say that making bold claims that
something can't be done will always been seen as a challenge.

Reminded me of when my computer teacher in high school said there was a game
on the computers, but it was impossible for us to play because he had it
'locked down'... I had to sit at a special desk in the front of the class for
a week.

~~~
knodi123
Haha, that's awesome. Our teacher told us each school had a different game,
and ours was some lame math puzzle. I found out how to get on the district-
wide network (back in DOS days) and access the moonbase sim game at a
neighboring school. Eventually he instituted a policy of "no games unless you
write them yourselves", which likewise prompted me to code up pong, light
cycles, and breakout, all in turbo pascal. Good memories! I don't know if he
was intentionally trying to inspire me to a career in programming, but that's
what happened.

