Show HN: I Built a Telegraph Simulator | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I Built a Telegraph Simulator

telegraph.13ug1mb.com

77 pointsleugim27 comments

I see this over and over: "I HAVE HIJACKED THE SERVERS WEBSOCKET TO SEND CUSTOM MESSAGES IF YOU WANT TO DO THE SAME SEE THE FOLLOWING LINK [...]"

Note to self: when doing HN demos, bulletproof your endpoints

I followed the link and surprisingly, instead of a scam, it was actually an explanation of how to send custom web socket messages.

https://rentry.co/MG5TR43

Braver than me!

Yeah, there was no hijacking of a server-side websocket at all, just sending client socket messages to the server since there is no auth or ratelimiting. Sucks thats it’s so frequent, ruins the experience. You can essentially do this to any websocket you’re connected to.

Nice. If you want to learn Morse try https://morse-learn.acecentre.net/ (I must throw cursor at this to fix some issues like working nicely on mobile).

I was reading "The Victorian Internet" by Tom Standage and decide to build a proof of concept of an online telegraph.

This is so cool. Knowing nothing about Telegraph standards are there no explicit signals for symbols or spaces?

ITU Morse does specify punctuation marks and a few symbols, but they're rarely used in practice.

A space is denoted by a gap equal to seven dots.

https://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/rec/m/R-REC-M.1677-1-20...

Judging by the comments I've seen go by the on the ticker, this is less a telegraph simulation than an observational experiment in how terrible people can be. It's a real shame.

Funny idea... but it's way too slow to react. (saying this as ham radio operator doing CW, so pretty biased, but I guess actual telegraph operators were much faster than I am...)

Maybe a stupid solution to that, but it would be cool if each city+location also had a callsign shown next to their messages, and would get highlighted on their screen if you include it.

That way you can at least get their attention after the minute or two it takes me to rattle off a message haha

It seems to only recognize symbols when sent at the exact rate that it expects, which is extremely slow. That wouldn't be much of an issue except that the actual signal is lost, so the only way to communicate is through the site's interpretation of the dits and dahs.

It is remarkable to see how shitposting is not a recent invention but seems to have been around in the Victorian age if the transmit logs on this thing are anything to go by.

That is wild, I recently updated my own Morse Code teaching tool to v2.0 yesterday, and it's somewhat similar in concept to this: https://popcar2.itch.io/morse-code-simulator

Being able to transmit your signals to other people here is really cool. Makes it a lot more than just typing to yourself.

I was rather hoping that a "Telegraph Simulator" simulated the electric and magnetic fields along a telegraph line. This is more of a Morse Code toy.

Still very cool.

How are you doing the timing for space? It feels off when I'm sending quickly, but also I never use a straight key, so my sending is probably terrible :)

Neat, but not nearly responsive enough. When I was your age, we had to key at 5000 wpm or they wouldn't even let us look at a radio.

Yeah, what a fun way to spend some time :)

Just reading “seveneves” (newl stephensom) - so this comes in handy!

Some fool is spamming

SOS

Save Our Socket

It's down! :(

It went down but working now

So much fun.

This electricity nonsense is just a fad. The future will be powered by steam.

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