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Email In the 18th Century
morphovar forwards a writeup in Low-tech Magazine recounting an almost-forgotten predecessor to email and packet-switched messaging: the optical telegraph. The article maps out some of the European networks but provides no details of those built in North America in the early 1800s. Man-in-the-middle attacks were dead easy. "More than 200 years ago it was already possible to send messages throughout Europe and America at the speed of an airplane — wireless and without need for electricity. The optical telegraph network consisted of a chain of towers ... placed 5 to 20 kilometers apart from each other. Every tower had a telegrapher, looking through a telescope at the previous tower in the chain. If the semaphore on that tower was put into a certain position, the telegrapher copied that symbol on his own tower. A message could be transmitted from Amsterdam to Venice in one hour's time. A few years before, a messenger on a horse would have needed at least a month's time to do the same."
Where is the obfuscation ? Read again: "The article maps out some of the European networks but provides no details of those built in North America in the early 1800s.": 1) The article maps out some of the European networks (presumably 18th century, as inferred from the title) 2) but provides no details of those built in North America in the early 1800s: ok, such kind of technology appeared later in the US, and the article does not detail any example of them. Is that so difficult to understand ?