

Who must you trust? - programd
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2630691

======
gone35
_In the late 1700s, a Frenchman named Claude Chappe3 invented a visual
telegraph that used semaphore towers spaced 10 to 15 kilometers apart. With a
telescope, each station could see neighboring towers and relay their semaphore
positions to the destination.

In a world where long-distance communication was via horse-carried letters,
Chappe's telegraph was a wonder. Signals from Paris were received in Lille,
where the first stations were built (about 218 kilometers or 136 miles apart),
after only a few minutes. The network soon spread to Brest, Toulon,
Strasbourg, and later even across the English Channel.

Semaphore positions were defined in a codebook allowing a variety of messages
to be sent. The well-crafted codebook provided easily recognizable semaphore
patterns for common symbols, as well as error-correction codes that allowed a
proper message to emerge despite errors in transmission or reception.

The Chappe network was in continuous use for more than 60 years. An electrical
telegraph network supplanted it once the technology of long-distance insulated
wires made that invention practical.

For our purposes, though, the most interesting aspect of the Chappe network
came about in 1836 with the discovery that stock market information was being
relayed across the network, buried in other messages, by means of what we now
might call steganography. The semaphore operators were paid to introduce
certain errors in the messages of various customers. Because of the error-
correction codes the messages arrived intact, but if someone was privy to the
raw symbols transmitted, the introduced errors contained a message that
provided an advantage in buying or selling stocks._

TIL 1830s European stock traders were already into latency arbitrage using an
early form of surreptitious DSL over optical telegraphs...

~~~
dredmorbius
In _The Wordly Philosophers_ , Robert Heilbroner tells of a tactic of John D.
Rockefeller in which the assistant hired by a competitor to signal trading
information was bribed to the benefit of Standard Oil.

One of the few apparently verifiable elements of the Rothschild legacy is
their use of time arbitrage to trade advantageously on early news of the
outcome of the battle of Waterloo:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family#The_Napoleon...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family#The_Napoleonic_Wars)

------
lifeisstillgood
I sit here looking up at a sky with Mars hanging just above the half moon and
realise that trying to enumerate who we trust is almost a fools errand - I
have never computed the paths of the planets from my own observations, never
verified we _do_ revolve around the sun. I trust the consensus of the
majority, based on the detailed calculationsnof the few.

Heartbleed was and is the same. I am not goingnto review the medical
literature on anti-biotics, read our politicians receipts nor any part of the
thousand other things that I need to trust apart from computer security.

I have no quibble with "know the ground upon which you stand and be able to
rebuild it" but we must all make a judgement on where to draw the line.

Looking at Mars I realised that the line is a darn sight closer than I
realised.

~~~
nkurz
_I am not going to review the medical literature on anti-biotics_

I'd argue that occasionally sampling such things is worthwhile. While you
aren't going to become an expert, I think that with a few hours spent on a few
key papers, you (I, some people, likely you) can often learn enough about a
tiny portion of a field to gain useful insight. Most likely this insight won't
take the form of "X is true" or "Y is false", but "I should give more credence
to X in the future" or "when I see Y reported in the media I should suspect
exaggeration of the underlying research".

------
Mz
"Forgiveness is a gift. Trust is earned."

The opening paragraph strikes me as just nuts. You don't create a trusting
atmosphere like that. That is the opposite of what it takes to create real
trust. Thus, honestly, I really did not read beyond that. I kind of skimmed
but just really could not get into it.

