Bordeaux

One of the first examples of "hacking" was done by the brothers Blanc from Bordeaux in 1834. They were bankers who played on the local stock market. But the stock prices of Bordeaux were the same as these in Paris. Those prices were brought to Bordeaux on horseback. That took three days. A miltaire signaling system of the government was already in place at that time. It was called the Chappe telegraph system and worked with visual codes. A message Paris-Bordeaux took a few hours, signaling from signal tower to tower signal. But of course is was nto allowed to send private messages. The signaling system had an error code to indicate if a message was not correct. But the message was always sent first not to loose time. And confirmation or error code was sent afterwards. If the error code was received at the end, the message was not passed on to the supervisors. The Blanc brothers made an appointment with the person in Paris to send their messages about the stock prices. The specific signal was looked for just by spying one of the towers in Tours. This way they got the news two days earlier than anybody else.

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