10 posts tagged “computer”
Bletchley Park is the British equivalent of Langley in the U.S – it’s the central command for all codebreaking and encryption.
During World War II code breaking machines were developed on both sides, the most famous being the Enigma machine (an amazing story in itself).
These machines were the bridge between simple mechanical analog devices to the modern digital computers that we have today.
Ten machines called Colossus were built by the British to decrypt German message. These programmable computers worked by using statistical and mathematical analysis of data.
Even after the war, Colossus was kept confidential, and Churchill ordered the machines broken down into “pieces no bigger than a man’s hand”.
Now, Tony Sale of the National Museum of Computing has completed at 14 year long rebuild of the Colossus. When he began he only had some photographs of the machine. He tracked down still-living engineers who worked on the computer to help rebuild the machine.
Today they raced the Colossus and a virtual Colossus run on a modern PC to see which machine could decrypt a message faster. Unfortunately, the modern PC managed to crack to code first. On the other hand, your Dell or Mac probably never helped plan D-Day and win a world war.
Many think phreaking began in the US when AT&T (the only major phone company of the time) started using automated call routing instead of human operators. Analog signals sent along the lines alerted relay stations and switches, and phreakers slowly taught themselves the secret language of the phones.
The key discovery by a boy with perfect pitch who went by Joybubbles was that a frequency of 2600 Hz would trick the network into thinking the user had hung up when in reality the caller was still very much connected and calls could be made at no charge. A free cheap whistle that came in Captain Crunch boxes coincidentally produced a 2600 Hz sound. Two familiar phreakers of the 1960s-1980s include a certain Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs who had a small business together in the mid-1970s making and selling the "blue boxes" that produced the correct frequencies and had a dialing pad to make calls. As major businesses began to use modems, call forwarding machines and other technologies, phreakers found ways to intercept and exploit these to make calls at these businesses' expense.
As personal computers and the internet became more prominent, many phreakers joined up with the computer hacker community. Federal prosecution also stepped up on toll fraud even as AT&T was being broken up. These days the phone system is digital, not analog, so phreaking doesn't really work. Plus digitalization means that hacks are more easily traced. Additionally, the way calls are billed these days (free long distance, unlimited weekend minutes) make phreaking less financially rewarding. These days it's basically impossible to phreak in the US and most developed countries. There are still nations in the world with very old phone systems that can be hacked.
In many ways, this is very similar to the way computers add numbers, with small "logic gates" like the levers here. Watch the video where the builder explains and demonstrates the calculator - it's really cool! On the website there are complete build notes if you want to make your own. Looks a little complicated though.
If you are unfamiliar with how the binary system of counting works (I'm not really a pro at this) here is my explanation:
In the regular decimal system, each "place" or "column" is a successive power of 10. Therefore, the places (from right to left) are 1, 10,100,1000 and so on. Any of these places can have one of ten values from 0 to 9. So the number 125 is really 500+20+1, where each of the three columns has one value, either a 5, a 2, or a 1 (the zeros are placeholders).
Where do all those famous 1s and 0s come into the binary system? Well,remember that the decimal system gives you 10 options for each place (0-9), but binary only gives you two choices: 0 or 1. You could also say a column can be "off" or "on". So to represent the number 13 in binary, the 8, 4, and 1 columns are "on", but the 2 column is "off". Therefore, in binary, the number 13 is (8)ON, (4)ON, (2)OFF, (1)ON or simply 1101.
Computer
bugs are a modern annoyance and have been since computer have been around. Once, it actually was a bug though...
In 1945 when
computers were made of vacuum tubes and were the size of rooms, one crashed. It
was determined that it was because a moth was crushed between the electrical
contacts for an important switch. Since then they joked about computer having to be “debugged”.
It appears that the term "bug" for a technical glitch dates to the late 19th century (thanks lollerkeet)
The term computer virus was not invented until 1984, surprisingly late, but an excellent metaphor. Today, data about the spread of computer viruses are being used to predict the patterns of infection of biological viruses for such things like bird flu or SARS.
The gadget projects a standard QWERTY keyboard, then you "type" on it. it interprets your hand position to determine which keys you are "hitting" and it shows up on your tiny tiny little PDA or cell phone screen.
The device itself is only 3.5" (~9cm) tall, so smaller than a pack of cards. But it's also US$179.
There are actually a lot of really interesting and strange keyboards out there these days. You can see more at one of my favorite nerd emporiums Thinkgeek.com
Are you nerdy beyond belief? Here's an interesting toy for you. You may have heard about Mr. Negroponte's $100 Laptop engineered for children in the developing world.
The operating system is unlike the window-and-file systems we use now. You can run an emulation of the OS, called Sugar, on your own computer.
I'm not technically advanced enough to do this, but I'm definitely interested in new kinds of interfaces. Although I think it's nice to give kids a chance to learn to use computers, how hard will it be for them to adjust to the standard desktop-based OSes that the rest of us use?
This reminds me a little of the real instruments that would play themselves at House on the Rock, a highly eccentric home-now-museum in Wisconsin that I visited as a child. Incidentally, it played a significant role in the equally strange but wonderful book American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Visit, if you get a chance.
Very well done, and it hits close to home for anyone who has ever had to "fix" anyone's computer - or who has needed their computer fixed.
[This clip is in Norwegian, and subtitled in both Norwegian and English]
Essentially it's an explanation of why six year olds can program electronics without manuals, why video games are good at teaching specific forms of logic, and how the social networks of even the trashiest TV are often more complex than that of yore.
The same points are made frequently and emphatically, but it will help you justify your videogaming, reality-TV-watching ways to your critics.
Do you remember the really awesome computer that Tom Cruise had in Minority Report? Someone has created one, but without the lame glove.
Check out this spiffy-to-the-max demonstration from the annual TED conference in California in 2006.
Describing the demo is kind of pointless. You have to see to believe. I would settle for this kind of interface even over a personal jet pack.
