Happy 101st Birthday to Hedy Lamar

The woman who proved that you can really have it all:

- Beauty (she was called the "most beautiful woman in Europe")
- Movie Career with a Star on the Hollywood walk of fame
- Developed an improved traffic stoplight
- Patents for spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to thwart the Nazis that make our modern communications possible U.S. Patent 2,292,387 (but the US Navy did not use it until the patent had expired).

and she is today's Google Doodle

Celebrating 137 years of public telephone

Today is the birthday of good old Ma Bell:

The Bell Telephone Company, a common law joint stock company, was organized in Boston, Massachusetts on July 9, 1877, by Alexander Graham Bell's father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard, who also helped organize a sister company — the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company. (Source Wikipedia)

It constantly amazes me that we have come so far from Bell's original design to HD voice, fiber to the home, the internet, mobile phones, smart phones, and VoIP.

In so little time we have gone well beyond anything that could be imagined by the science fiction authors, some of whom influenced the current tech trend.

To please take a min. to think of good ol'Ma Bell and all her children (legitimate or otherwise) that bring you this post today.

History of Phone Crime - first Denial of Service (DoS) incident

Continuing the retelling of cases of telecom fraud and crime.

To review, topics I have covered were
1876 - First case of telecom related fraud - seems that Bell did not invent the phone, but that the man who did could not afford to patent it.
1889 - First denial of service (DoS) and crime _ see below.
1903-  The first telecom hacking - Marconi's demonstration and "secure" service were interrupted and listened to.

First Denial of Service (DoS) and crime

The story goes that Amon Strowger, a St. Louis undertaker, became upset on finding that the wife of a competitor was a telephone operator at the local (manual) telephone exchange who made his line busy and transferred calls whenever a caller asked to be put through to Strowger, the calls were deliberately put through to his competitor, her husband.(1)(2) 

"Necessity is the mother of invention" so Strowger developed the dial telephone system to get the operator out of the system. (1)

Now if you think about it, this was both a DoS attack, as the wife blocked calls to Mr. Strowger's company and to make it worse she illegally redirected those calls to a competitor.


Sources:
(1) Bill's 200-Year Condensed History of Telecommunications at http://www.cclab.com/billhist.htm
(2) Theory of Electromechanical Switching at http://www.seg.co.uk/telecomm/automat1.htm