Tag: history

First Cyberattack in 1834

The Blanc brothers traded government bonds at the exchange in the city of Bordeaux, where information about market movements took several days to arrive from Paris by mail coach. Traders who could get the information more quickly could make money by anticipating these movements. Some tried using messengers and carrier pigeons, but the Blanc brothers found a way to use the telegraph line instead. They bribed the telegraph operator in the city of Tours to introduce deliberate errors into routine government messages being sent over the network. The telegraph’s encoding system included a “backspace” symbol that instructed the transcriber to ignore the previous character. The addition of a spurious character indicating the direction of the previous day’s market movement, followed by a backspace, meant the text of the message being sent was unaffected when it was written out for delivery at the end of the line. But this extra character could be seen by another accomplice: a former telegraph operator who observed the telegraph tower outside Bordeaux with a telescope, and then passed on the news to the Blancs. The scam was only uncovered in 1836, when the crooked operator in Tours fell ill and revealed all to a friend, who he hoped would take his place. The Blanc brothers were put on trial, though they could not be convicted because there was no law against misuse of data networks. But the Blancs’ pioneering misuse of the French network qualifies as the world’s first cyber-attack.

Art from Overfitting?

We argue that hand marks initially supplied the idea to archaic humans that a graphic mark could act as a representation, however basic it was. This was a beginning of sorts, but how could hand marks give rise to the more complex animal depictions? Hunters entering the caves with an overactive visual system will have regularly “mistaken” the natural cave features for animals. The cave walls also simulated the outdoor environment, where hunters regularly had to be able to spot their prey in camouflage. All the hunters needed to do to “complete” a depiction was to add 1 or 2 graphic marks to the suggestive natural features based on the visual imagery in their “mind’s eye.” When later humans entered the same caves and saw these, the Neanderthals may literally have “handed on” to our own species the notion that a graphic mark could act as a figurative representation. Thanks to the primed visual system of the later hunter-gatherers—and the suggestive environment of the caves—it was Homo sapiens who took the final step creating the first complex figurative representations, with all the ramifications that followed for art and culture.

Brooklyn Bridge Champagne Vaults

The cavernous vaults, which are located closer to the foot of the bridge, were rented out as storage space holding wine, champagne and liqueurs, as well as newspapers from the Evening World and produce from the Fulton Fish Market. Year round, the alcohol was kept in the stable temperatures afforded by the Brooklyn Bridge vaults and the rent collected helped offset the cost of constructing the bridge.

It is known that the vaults were constructed first in 1876, likely to appease distributors like Luyties and Racky’s whose storage facilities were demolished to build the bridge. A faded logo for Pol Rogers, the French champagne house favored by Winston Churchill, is still visible. The vaults were closed during World War I and repurposed for non-alcohol storage uses during Prohibition. In 1934, 6 months after the repeal of Prohibition, the city ceremoniously turned over the keys to a new tenant, Anthony Oechs & Co., an alcohol distributor, at a party inside the vaults attended by 100s of revelers.

Another curious find was uncovered in 2006 inside the Manhattan-side tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. A veritable time capsule was discovered by city workers which contained a stockpile of supplies in the event of nuclear attack. Put into reserve at the height of the Cold War in the late 1950s and early 1960s, this space, intended as both fallout shelter and storeroom, was forgotten for nearly 50 years.

As reported by The New York Times at the time of the discovery, the vault contained “water drums, medical supplies, paper blankets, drugs and calorie-packed crackers — an estimated 352K of them, sealed in 10s of watertight metal canisters and, it seems, still edible.” Boxes with blankets were labeled “For Use Only After Enemy Attack.”

Worse Tanks are better

In April of 1945 the Germans have 90 tanks on all of the Western Front. All tanks, everything, Panthers, Panzer IV, Tigers. They had a handful of Tigers. They had 400 other armored vehicles, assault guns, Stug III and things like that. So they had 500 armored vehicles on the entire Western Front, from the North Sea all the way down to Bavaria and Southern Germany. At that point in time the United States had 11k tank and tank destroyers. One reason there is 11k US tanks and tank destroyers is because the US decided to concentrate on a tank that was extremely reliable and relatively economical to build. And I don’t think anyone would claim that the Sherman was the best tank from the perspective of the tank crew, it didn’t have the best armor, it didn’t have the best gun, but from commanders perspective it was an excellent weapon. There were just lots and lots of them, so they gave the commander a lot of battlefield power. That can’t be said for a lot of the better German tanks because they simply were too expensive to be built in large numbers and they weren’t reliable enough, you couldn’t count on them.

Nubia

Nature is a destructive force as well. Since the 1980s, sand storms have increasingly eroded the intricately carved walls of 43 decorative Kushite pyramids and 12 chapels at a UNESCO World Heritage site named Meroe. With funding from Qatar, archaeologists have attempted to remove sand accumulating in the necropolis. But a 2016 report on the effort reads, “the volume of the sand dunes by far exceeds all removal capacities.” An archaeologist who works at the site, Pawel Wolf, from the German Archaeological Institute, believes the uptick in erosion is partly due to droughts in the 1980s and 1990s that pushed Saharan Desert dirt northwards. Another reason, he suggests, is that overgrazing nearby stripped vegetation and promoted desertification. And once winds carried sand into the basin where Meroe lies, the sand got trapped within the surrounding mountains, sweeping violently back and forth each season.

Medieval Manuscripts

The honors and the texts de Hamel has access to are impressive, but not as impressive as his enthusiasm. Just look at how excited – manically happy – he is to talk about the subject of medieval manuscripts, in this video. It’s the enthusiasm of a man in love with his life’s work. It’s a wonderful thing to see

ParadiseOS

Paradise OS imagines an alternate version of 1999 where the personal computer is a gateway to a commercialized global network. Palm Industries, a former mall developer turned technology giant effectively controls all online experiences. Acting as a time capsule, the desktop captures the moments of December 30, 1999 — just days before a catastrophic Y2K event leads to the computer emerging in our dimension. Participants explore this frozen moment from time, using the content to discover more about the world from which it came. The project references the visual vernacular of the 20th century American shopping mall. It establishes a connection between the mall and the Internet as escapist experiences and hubs of social activity.

Ainu

For much of the 20th century, Japanese government officials and academics tried to hide the Ainu. They were an inconvenient culture at a time when the government was steadfastly creating a national myth of homogeneity. So officials tucked the Ainu into files marked “human migration mysteries,” or “aberrant hunter-gatherers of the modern age,” or “lost Caucasoid race,” or “enigma,” or “dying race,” or even “extinct.” But in 2006, under international pressure, the government finally recognized the Ainu as an Indigenous population. And today, the Japanese appear to be all in.

on the Ainu, which have been on the islands of japan for more than 10x as long as the japanese people, who came from korea 3 ka ago.