4 ms·

Story has not so much as a single word about how it was invented.

by ncmncm 4y ago

eps 4y ago
By stuffing not one, but two briefcases with the latest technology, but of course! The article is super shallow.
- netsharc 4y ago
  Such terrible writing. It mentions how the machine didn't work very well with high frequency (female) voices, it sets up a tense moment where there were only women working in the office and an agent called them, it builds the tension with > "We knew that every piece of information we were sending out to our chaps was significant," she says, recalling watching the importance of their work reflected back on the TV news. And then.. what happened next? The author deviates and doesn't conclude the story! Is he a 7th grade high schooler, this is their level of writing...
anigbrowl 4y ago
That's because it is (subtle) propaganda, designed to elicit feelings rather than deliver facts. Self-actualization, it suggests, requires external endorsement. "We knew that every piece of information we were sending out to our chaps was significant," she says, recalling watching the importance of their work reflected back on the TV news.
- Terry_Roll 4y ago
  I was a kid at primary school when the Falklands war was underway, I remember how the teachers were telling us Argentina was bad for invading and we should support the armed forces. We had to draw pictures of the Falklands conflict from images we might see in the papers, because I was made to draw silhouettes of the Navy boats! Even at Primary School here in the UK, kids were being propagandised and I bet it still goes on today, most recently with the Jubilee! The Royal Family have the nickname "The Firm" here in the UK, but it also extends out the wider military forces and members of the armed forces both active and retired, as a term of endearment for themselves when they are intimidating and harassing members of the public in an organised crime syndicate manner.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - gadders 4y ago
    Argentina was bad though? If ever there was a just war, it was this.
    - Gibbon1 4y ago
      The Generals lost their war and got booted so there is that.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      Without in any way endorsing Argentina, you might like to reflect on why Britain (qua state) cares so much about the Falklands. Hint: it's not out of tender feeling for a small number of sheep farmers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Antarctic_Territory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Antarctic_Territory
    - Terry_Roll 4y ago
      Well have far back in time does one go to settle a dispute? I think Isreal's existence claim goes back to the time of Christ, Roman & Egyptian times, so is that the precedence we should adopt globally because we know how many clever Jewish scholars there are and they wouldn't be wrong would they? However my point is, with hindsight I object to the propaganda and one sided nature of the clearly biased teaching I was subjected to at the time, possibly even without parental consent because its not like many parents even get a say in what their kids are taught. The knock on effect is now starting to play out, decades later!
      - gadders 4y ago
        How would you have expected the state broadcaster to behave? This was the usual behaviour up until the Falklands (and I was in Junior school in the UK as well at the time). More recently, the BBC seems to prefer to talk down their home country armed forces.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  By this meaning of propaganda, likewise, so is your comment. It's designed to elicit feelings rather than facts. State discussion of its technologies is suspicious, this comment says.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
Yes, disappointing on technical content. AFAIK digital speech codecs were a thing in 1980, and implementing a symmetrical block cipher on 2.4KHz would have been possible using discrete logic or a processor like the Z80. Up to that point a different system was used, called a "scrambler". Speech was fed into a vocoder (parallel filter bank). The energy in each band would be used to resynthesise the speech using a reverse vocoder (noise/oscillator bank). In a scrambler the bands are shuffled before sending, and unshuffled at the other end. The result is speech-like, but incomprehensible. In terms of security this is no more complex than a simple transposition cipher. An adversary would have to record the conversation and then set about trying every band transposition. In practice you'd only have to get a few right for the speech to become intelligible once again, so the value was really to stop real time snooping and slow down an eavesdropper. The BBC article fails to communicate how the move to a digitised block cipher offered considerable security advantages over the incumbent systems.

Story has not so much as a single word about how it was invented.

by ncmncm 4y ago

Story has not so much as a single word about how it was invented.

eps 4y ago

By stuffing not one, but two briefcases with the latest technology, but of course! The article is super shallow.

netsharc 4y ago
Such terrible writing. It mentions how the machine didn't work very well with high frequency (female) voices, it sets up a tense moment where there were only women working in the office and an agent called them, it builds the tension with > "We knew that every piece of information we were sending out to our chaps was significant," she says, recalling watching the importance of their work reflected back on the TV news. And then.. what happened next? The author deviates and doesn't conclude the story! Is he a 7th grade high schooler, this is their level of writing...

anigbrowl 4y ago

That's because it is (subtle) propaganda, designed to elicit feelings rather than deliver facts. Self-actualization, it suggests, requires external endorsement. "We knew that every piece of information we were sending out to our chaps was significant," she says, recalling watching the importance of their work reflected back on the TV news.

Terry_Roll 4y ago
I was a kid at primary school when the Falklands war was underway, I remember how the teachers were telling us Argentina was bad for invading and we should support the armed forces. We had to draw pictures of the Falklands conflict from images we might see in the papers, because I was made to draw silhouettes of the Navy boats! Even at Primary School here in the UK, kids were being propagandised and I bet it still goes on today, most recently with the Jubilee! The Royal Family have the nickname "The Firm" here in the UK, but it also extends out the wider military forces and members of the armed forces both active and retired, as a term of endearment for themselves when they are intimidating and harassing members of the public in an organised crime syndicate manner.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gadders 4y ago
  Argentina was bad though? If ever there was a just war, it was this.
  - Gibbon1 4y ago
    The Generals lost their war and got booted so there is that.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    Without in any way endorsing Argentina, you might like to reflect on why Britain (qua state) cares so much about the Falklands. Hint: it's not out of tender feeling for a small number of sheep farmers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Antarctic_Territory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Antarctic_Territory
  - Terry_Roll 4y ago
    Well have far back in time does one go to settle a dispute? I think Isreal's existence claim goes back to the time of Christ, Roman & Egyptian times, so is that the precedence we should adopt globally because we know how many clever Jewish scholars there are and they wouldn't be wrong would they? However my point is, with hindsight I object to the propaganda and one sided nature of the clearly biased teaching I was subjected to at the time, possibly even without parental consent because its not like many parents even get a say in what their kids are taught. The knock on effect is now starting to play out, decades later!
    - gadders 4y ago
      How would you have expected the state broadcaster to behave? This was the usual behaviour up until the Falklands (and I was in Junior school in the UK as well at the time). More recently, the BBC seems to prefer to talk down their home country armed forces.
mjburgess 4y ago
By this meaning of propaganda, likewise, so is your comment. It's designed to elicit feelings rather than facts. State discussion of its technologies is suspicious, this comment says.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

Yes, disappointing on technical content. AFAIK digital speech codecs were a thing in 1980, and implementing a symmetrical block cipher on 2.4KHz would have been possible using discrete logic or a processor like the Z80. Up to that point a different system was used, called a "scrambler". Speech was fed into a vocoder (parallel filter bank). The energy in each band would be used to resynthesise the speech using a reverse vocoder (noise/oscillator bank). In a scrambler the bands are shuffled before sending, and unshuffled at the other end. The result is speech-like, but incomprehensible. In terms of security this is no more complex than a simple transposition cipher. An adversary would have to record the conversation and then set about trying every band transposition. In practice you'd only have to get a few right for the speech to become intelligible once again, so the value was really to stop real time snooping and slow down an eavesdropper. The BBC article fails to communicate how the move to a digitised block cipher offered considerable security advantages over the incumbent systems.