
Lessons from France's first cyber-attack, nearly two centuries ago - ForHackernews
https://www.1843magazine.com/technology/rewind/the-crooked-timber-of-humanity
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viksit
Obligatory Terry Pratchett Clacks reference here :) this was a great article
on how real life got into a story which got into a real life situation again..

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/short...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/shortcuts/2015/mar/17/terry-
pratchetts-name-lives-on-in-the-clacks-with-hidden-web-code)

[http://discworld.wikia.com/wiki/Clacks](http://discworld.wikia.com/wiki/Clacks)

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joemi
"Cyber-attack" seems like the wrong term in this case. They weren't trying to
attack or damage anything.

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KekDemaga
They were attacking the market in a sense as it relied on latency of
information to determine prices. Certainly I'd dub these gentlemen
posthumously as hackers, maybe they were the first.

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pseudolus
This was also taken up in a few of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels to some
great comic effect.

[http://discworld.wikia.com/wiki/Clacks](http://discworld.wikia.com/wiki/Clacks)

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wrinkl3
The Smoking Gnu! Pratchett was genuinely interested CS and crammed an
unusually high amount of modern tech references into his books. The imp-
powered PDA devices from Jingo still bring tears to my eyes.

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taneq
Bingley bongley beep!

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mabynogy
Reminds me a similar story evoked in The Count of Monte Cristo.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo#Summ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo#Summary)

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jalayir
Yeah that was classic Man-in-the-Middle attack.

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shallot_router
This seems more like a "hack" in the general tech sense than the security
sense (even though it's probably technically illegal). I even think it'd be
something YC would love to see on an application.

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mannykannot
The bribing of government employees might not have been a crime then, but it
is now. On the other hand, confidential contributions to help get politicians
elected is back with us...

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sharpercoder
Also interesting is that 2 centuries later, we're still trying to fight
latency. Now with specialized wireless lines and shorter distance fiber, then
with pigeons and couriers.

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NegativeLatency
Some people still use birds to send data (river rafting photographers):
[http://origin.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_6209735](http://origin.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_6209735)

also:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers)

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eric_h
That article about using actually, for real using homing pigeons as data
carriers is very cool, thanks.

Also - excellent handle responding to a comment about latency.

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pavel_lishin
I'm surprised the data was transmitted "live", instead of being copied down
and then re-transmitted.

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stephengillie
Cut-through[0] has always been faster than store-and-forward[1].

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-
through_switching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-through_switching)

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Store_and_forward](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Store_and_forward)

