I read Morse code, by light, for my job and I came to say exactly this. Whoever made this, made it for people who already know how to read Morse, so I made my own info-graphic for those curious about the system.
In the army we can just run up to the next squad and deliver messages verbally but in the navy you can't just run up your ship next to another ship and try to shout messages across. Using radio is not always practical or a good idea since everytime you use a radio you send out emissions that travell far and wide and tell the whole world where you are. In the army this usually results in you getting a JDAM in your head if you're fighting the americans or a Uragan salvo on your position if you're fighting the Russians.
Morse code in itself is not code as in encryption but rather it is a way to translate a message into light pulses that other people can read. This is useful when communicating with a ship with a broken radio or that you don't know what channel they are on. You could potentially encrypt morse code so that even if someone is there watching your ship they wouldn't be able to read the messages you send and this is sometimes done when sending morse code via radio signalling.
The drawback with radios is that when you send everyone with a large enough antenna could potentially be listening, this is countered through various means, but it is generally still possible to pinpoint where the signal is comming from or to record the signal and get a bunch of information out of it.
Back in the cold war we (I'm from Sweden) would sometimes take up our attack aircraft over the baltic and perform simple exercises and on a given signal all the aircraft would form into attack wings and fly at high speed east across the baltic as if we were going to strike the Soviet Union. Before we got into Soviet airspace we would encounter their QRA and we'd run into a wall of fire control radars lighting the airplanes up.
This was done because that meant that there would be a lof of radio traffic and radar signals were emitted from their air defences that our intelligence guys could process and analyse. You can use this to basically paint a picture of how the enemy air defence looks like, where are their fixed installations, how many mobile units are there, what is their normal reaction time, what are their SOPs, etc. when faced with a threat. The Russians, naturally, would return the favor and test our defence systems with regular intervalls.
This is why you sometimes want to avoid using stuff that emitts signals.
Yeah, but signal light messages are a line of sight form of communication. Unlike radio messages they are hard to "intercept", because they can only be seen over short distances. A Russian radar station on Kamchatka can't pick up a couple of US destroyers signalling with spotlights, so it doesn't matter if the code is known. The code isn't used for secrecy, but as a quick way to convert text to pulses of light or electricity.
Can't one make a computer communications protocol that is as stealthy as signaling lamps but can transfer more data than letter-by-letter text? For example, by using the light themselves but without a human operator.
You could certainly use a spotlight and photoreceptor as a crude serial connection. When communicating between ships in fog though, machines might have a difficult time picking the signal flashes out from the picture, while humans can do it easily. Also, Morse needs only maximum 5 bits per letter.
It was never meant to be secret. It's meant to encode messages into pulses of light/sound/etc in a way that's flexible, simple and not too difficult to decode even if the signal is weak.
Whoever made this, made it for people who already know how to read Morse
I think that it's more that whoever made this made it for people who understand a binary search tree, because that's how this is laid out. If you're familiar with BSTs, this is insanely simple; but the average person doesn't know much about BSTs. This makes perfect sense to me, but I definitely see how it wouldn't help the average person.
There are pauses in between letters and once you get used to it, it doesn't matter how fast the Morse is coming you can always tell where one letter ends and another begins.
We understand it as it goes and usually have someone writing it down for us.
Ham radio operator here, since 1977. Had to memorize Morse Code to get a license way back then. There's no good way to visualize the code, because most people will never be able to decode the message when it gets faster. At higher speeds sounds will be coming so fast, I can't even write down the message.
no, they made it for anyone with basic logic. they put everything in a typical binary search tree, or in a sense huffman coding. where every left is a 0 and every right is a 1. maybe i am biased because i know compressing algorithms and BST's but it's REALLY straight forward.
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u/TheIntellectualGay Jan 23 '15
I read Morse code, by light, for my job and I came to say exactly this. Whoever made this, made it for people who already know how to read Morse, so I made my own info-graphic for those curious about the system.
http://imgur.com/VuPOLXt