The woman behind your WiFi (33c3)

Herald Angel: Anja Drephal studied
history, American studies, Japanese

studies in Berlin and Tokyo in Graz and
also in Vienna and when I asked her she

said kind of everywhere. So, it's her
third talk on a Chaos Communication

Congress. She was here three years ago and
two years ago and we are very happy to

have her back - please welcome her!
applause

Anja Drephal: Thank you! Oh I'm on -
that's good! I would have taken that

screwdriver but - okay, it's too bad!
Well, thank you all for being here I hope

you all having a good time so far. It's
day three and I'm having a good time. It's

a very good Congress. This year
unfortunately it's been hard for some

people to actually be here. It's been a
nightmare to buy tickets online. So in

addition I'd like to welcome everybody
watching a stream from at home or Congress

everywhere so thank you for watching!
Anyone of you watching this from at home

or anyone of you who has some sort of cell
phone mobile device connected to the

Congress Wi-Fi has actually been using
spread spectrum technology in the past

couple days. But this is not a talk about
spread-spectrum technology. Oh, and I

wanted to give a hint to the translations
team - in German, that's

"Bandspreizverfahren" and... je suis
desolé, je ne sais pas what it means in

French... So, this is not what I want to
talk about because I would never pretend

to be an electrical engineer or a fully
trained computer scientist who is

qualified to explain this very complex
technology.

What I want to do is tell you a story,
give you a short 20 minute overview of a

person, a remarkable person, who worked on
the development of spread spectrum

technology about 75 years ago and until
recently was not recognized for her

accomplishments. Let's say you are an
electrical engineer or you are a computer

scientist and you want to learn about this
technology. I try to avoid saying it

because it's such a tongue twister and I'm
gonna stumble over the spread-spectrum.

So yeah, so you go to your library and you
find lots of big handbooks, handbook on

spread-spectrum communication for example
and there you usually you have sort of an

introduction with something like this
never mind if you can't read it right now

I've uploaded my slides so you can look at
it later and I'll also explain anything

that's important this is from an Austrian
handbook and of course it mentions a

"Claude Shannon" in 1948 publishing a
mathematical theory of communication, a

very important paper, and before that
actually it mentions in 1942 "Markey" and

"Antheil" are patenting the first spread-
spectrum system ever.

So you're wondering who is "Markey" and
"Antheil"? Probably some guys at MIT,

right? Working for the military in 1942,
developing secret weapons? It could be.

So, ladies and gentlemen, this is Markey.

Hedwig Kiesler born in 1914 in Vienna.

She was a beautiful child, she was 16 when
she decided to quit school and become an

actress, she started hanging around the
Sascha-Film studio in Vienna. She also

stalked famous director Max Reinhardt
until he cast her in his play "The Weaker

Sex". She had a couple more minor roles,
she played "Sissi", she played opposite

Heinz Rühmann, and it was - oopsie - it
was Max Reinhardt who - promoting his play

- coined the phrase "Hedy Kiesler is the
most beautiful woman in the world!" and

the press picked it up very quickly. Here
she's again. Then when she was 18, she did

something very daring: she starred in
Czech film called "Ecstasy". It's very

interesting, please ask me about it or
watch it on YouTube. There was full

frontal nudity and she faked the first on-
screen orgasm. The film was banned, the

Pope denounced it and Hedy became famous.

But then after "Ecstasy", surprisingly,

Hedy stopped acting and she married: this
guy. She became the young trophy wife of

Fritz Mandl. He was - at that time - the
third richest man in Austria. He was the

owner of the "Hirtenberger ammunitions
factory", he was also an Austro-fascist,

he supplied weapons to a lot of unsavory
individuals and organizations and - as his

beautiful young trophy wife - she was
supposed to be there at parties, at

meetings with important industrialists,
weapons dealers, politicians and to just

stand there and look beautiful.
But she also listened when they spoke

about developments, about German glide
bombs being tested and developed. She

listened and she noticed. After a couple
of years, for whatever reason, I think

Mandl was pretty controlling and then
jealous, for one reason or another, Hedy

left him and used her "Ecstasy"-fame to go
to the US and get a contract at MGM in

1937. Her first film in the US was
"Algiers" and this film established her

fame, her new look, her hairstyle and this
very distant kind of unsmiling style that

MGM had in mind for her and they also
promoted her as the most beautiful woman

in the world. Critics usually agreed that
she could not act, but, oh my god, she's

so beautiful, who cares? She... actually,
she was not just beautiful. She was also

bored with acting, because usually,
working for a studio, you made like two

movies a year, which took a couple weeks,
and the rest of the time, well, there was

no Netflix. So, she didn't like to party
that much, she read, she painted and she

always invented little gadgets at home.
And she also worried, of course, at that

time. She worried about the war going on
in Europe. She had... She was an

immigrant, after all. She had friends and
family still in Europe and, oh yeah, it's

just a couple of... that's Clark Gable,
Jimmy Stewart, and then she was Delilah in

"Samson and Delilah", Technicolor, yeah,
anyway she worried. And that's a fun tweet

I found: "The feeling when you are 3,000
percent done with glam photo shoots and

are inwardly planning a new radio
frequency system for torpedoes"

laughter
I like it.

So that's what she started doing, because
she remembered what she had picked up. She

knew about German bombs being controlled
by radio, she knew that Germany was using

18 different frequencies for their glide
bombs and usually dispatching 18 bombs at

a time so the enemy would have to jam
every single frequency and at least one

would - you know - get through.
So especially in 1914, when Germany

started sinking English ships in September
1940, 77 children who were being evacuated

to Canada died, she offered her knowledge
about weapons to the Navy. She thought

about offering it, because she had an
idea. These German glide bombs they were

radio-controlled. So why not make
torpedoes with radio control to increase

their chances of hitting targets and not
just going in a straight line and maybe

hitting something or not. Her second idea
was to use just really really short

signals just split-second radio signals
between the ship, the torpedo and a plane

overhead, in between longer intervals of
radio silence. And then her idea was

changing the frequency of the split-second
signal, making it harder to intercept and

jam. Let's check, she just said "Okay,
let's just use a lot of frequencies and hop!".

She called it "frequency hopping".
But of course, the question is: how to do that?

And here's where that second name

mentioned in the patent comes in. This is
"George Antheil". He was from New Jersey.

In the 1920s, he moved to Berlin and then
to Paris and became famous as an avant-

garde composer and pianist. There's
another one...

His most famous composition was the
"Ballet Mécanique" in 1924, where he tried

to synchronize 16 player pianos and he
also used airplane propellers and

sirens... You can also watch it on the
internet. Listen to, it's crazy! It was

the score for a movie, actually.
So, he knew about synchronizing mechanical

instruments when he met Hedy in 1940 at
one of those Hollywood parties.

And they started working together on their
secret communication system, which they

proposed to the National Inventors Council
in 1941. Ah, here he is. There's... The

tall one is Hedy and on the right is
George and the woman in the striped dress

is George's wife. So their secret
communication system suggested using 88

frequencies, because there are 88 keys on
a piano (it was just a little in-joke) and

hopping between them, synchronizing the
sender, the transmitter, and the receiver

and in addition using random signals on
three extra frequencies to just make some

noise. So, you have 88 frequencies and
you're hopping on some with the signal.

You're sending one signal there, one
signal here, and then you're sending

random signals that don't mean anything
and if the enemy actually manages to

intercept one of these frequencies, they
would be like just one "blip" and it

wouldn't make any sense.

What I want to just quickly
talk about is this.

So this is what they
thought might happen.

Here's an American ship going there
dispatching a torpedo that would usually

go here.
Here's a German ship and it doesn't go in

a straight line because it's trying to
evade the torpedo.

Here's plane and the plane is watching and
messaging the ship that the torpedo needs

to change its course and the ship is
messaging the torpedo "go left, go right,

go left, go right, go left", and then -
boom.

For synchronization between the sender and
the receiver they suggested using these

paper ribbons with punch holes just like
in those mechanical pianos that Antheil

used to be familiar with.

Oh here's actually a notebook
that they used for the

mechanism that was supposed to make the
sender and the receiver go off at the same

time, so they would be synchronized. The
New York Times picked it up and - like

they said - the National Inventors Council
actually was positive, liked the idea and

suggested that they should patent this.
The US patents office awarded them the

patent but the Navy rejected it,
eventually. The Navy said it's too bulky,

it's too big, we can't make this. But the
question is: Why?

The Navy actually thought because they had
said they wanted to use these paper

ribbons just like in a piano and they were
like: "We can't put a piano in a torpedo,

are you crazy? It's not gonna work!" In
fact it would have been much smaller, of

course. And then there was the issue of a
Hollywood star, known for her beautiful

face and a crazy composer inventing a
weapon system? I don't think so.

Then again the timing was kind of bad
right after Pearl Harbor the Navy was in

shock and busy fixing their existing
torpedo system. Because in 1942 about 60%

of American torpedoes were duds. They
exploded too soon, they didn't explode at

all, they went anywhere and so the Navy
was like "Okay, we got to fix this and we

can't really develop anything new right
now." And then one point that I've been

thinking about is Hedy at that point was
still technically an enemy alien.

She wasn't naturalized until 1953. So there's
obviously always the question of loyalty,

I think.
Instead, she was... it was suggested that

she should help the war by selling war
bonds, which she did very successfully.

She sold seven million of... seven million
dollars of war bonds in one day which is

in today's money about
100 million dollars.

She also served cake at the
famous Hollywood Canteen.

But her patent seemed
to have been forgotten.

It ran out in 1959.
She never got anything from it.

She never got any financial gain.
Nothing.

But in fact, there was secret military
research on this topic.

From the 1940s until the 1970s,
it was classified.

The first time spread-spectrum technology
was used by the military was in 1962,

during the Cuban Missile Crisis. A system
called "BLADES" was installed in ships in

the Caribbean and later also in the
Mediterranean Sea. And this system using

frequency-hopping spread-spectrum was the
only one that could not be jammed at that point.

Civil use of this technology came much

much later in the 1970s, 1980s when the
FCC started with a deregulation of

frequencies and allowed civil use of
various frequencies in... let's say

microwaves, later mobile phones,
Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, etc., etc., it actually

started being used in the civil sector.
In the early 1990s Dave Hughes, who is

known as an internet pioneer, came across
Hedy, researched her patent and lobbied

for her recognition for the first time.

He got her nominated for the Electronic

Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award, which
she was awarded in 1997. She was 82 years

old, she didn't leave the house anymore.
Her son went there and got that award on

her behalf and supposedly she was very
happy about it that she finally got some

recognition.
In the past 10 years especially in Austria

there has been at last more recognition of
Hedy. There was an exhibition around the

country. The Austrian Republic awards the
Hedy Lamarr award for achievements by

women in information technology. And
Vienna named a street after Hedy. Her

birthday is now "Inventor's Day". In the
United States she was finally inducted in

the National Inventor's Hall of Fame two
years ago.

Well, I've been trying to speak just 20
minutes giving you an overview of this - I

think remarkable - person who should get
much more recognition than she did.

I think I've been a bit faster, actually -
that's good. I'm hoping that maybe I've

been able to inspire some interest in this
person and maybe inspire as someone to

read up on her or maybe watch her movies.
Sadly, she's been all but forgotten.

Her career was... was big and very short. And
then she lived on for decades, she was

forgotten, her inventions were forgotten.
So, I'm hoping that maybe you'd like to

look at some sources, watch the movies you
could contact me. I have some... some

really good books that I read on her that
I would recommend. And that would be good.

That would... That would make me very
happy, because doing research on Hedy was fun.

It kind of you kind of develop a
relationship to a person like that and I like her.

She was she was considered
difficult, as a woman, as an actor,

but I think she was considered difficult for
doing things that any man would have been considered:

"Yeah, he's a strong guy and he knows
what he wants and he does what he wants!"

She was always doing things her own way.

She came to America on her own, alone.

She made her way. She was...
She was basically, you could say, she was a refugee.

I mean, she came with a contract,

but she couldn't go back. Austria was
gone, there was war. She always missed it

and she had to make her own way. She had
to fight for a place in life and she

always tried to find happiness.
Unfortunately, she didn't really find it.

And so, in closing, before, we can have a
couple minutes for questions, I hope.

I'd like to ask you to give
a hand to Hedy.

applause

Herald Angel: Thanks a lot, Anya, for this

very nice talk. We have a couple of
minutes for questions and answers, so if

you have something that you would like to
know, please feel free to go to the mics.

There's something going on online I think.

AD: Okay

Questioner: Yes thank you. I would like to
know, are there any compatible stories,

where non-technical people / persons
contributed to technology.

AD: I'm not sure

Q: Is there another Hedy?

AD: Oh another Hedy... I'm pretty sure

there is. I can't come up with any example
right now, but... maybe someone does.

Because there are so many people,
especially women, who are being overlooked

for what they're doing like she was. I'm
sorry, I can't really come up with any

examples right now. But especially when it
comes to women, it's still, sadly, it's

still so hard for women, to be recognized
in a technological field like a man would.

This always... Maybe especially when
you're this pretty. Nobody thinks that

there's anything behind this pretty face
and I know, I would... like, if anyone has

an example that would be great? I'm sure
there's a lot of people who are another Hedy.

HA: I think the person on microphone 2 was
nodding to that, but you have a question

there right?

Mic 2: Yeah, that actually kind of covered
my question. But I just... first of all

wanted to thank you so much for doing this
talk and also maybe to sort of respond to

you. I think, one of the things we could
think about is not only women but also

people particularly in what we still call
"The Global South" who are doing amazing

work that doesn't get recognized and - you
know - we come to conferences and there's

oftentimes not a lot of communication
between developers in those places. So I

think it's very likely that's where our
next Hedy Lamarr could come from.

AD: Probably.

Mic 2: So that being said I do have a

question for you. Which is: What can
everybody here do to try to help avoid

this? How can we think outside the box and
be reaching out

to people and maybe uncovering hidden work
and sort of breaking the mold? Because

that's what happened to her like, she got
stuck in this structure that existed.

AD: By thinking outside the box I think.

By supporting - not just girls - from an
early age, you know? To just not look at

this gender stereotypes. You have a girl
and so "Yeah, she can't be interested in

technology." You should just be open and
be open to anyone who's asking questions,

who wants to learn and support that.

Mic 2: It's really awesome to see so many
little girls here - yeah, thanks to all

the parents who are doing that.

applause

HA: We have one more question online.

Q: Yes thank you. Can you elaborate a
little bit on her formal education?

Was there anything else than Normal School?

AD: Yes. Well, she was born in 1914.
She went... Typically a girl of her status,

she was from a well-off family, her dad
was a banker, went to a girl's school,

which she did. But as far as I've read up,
her dad actually supported her learning.

He taught her a lot, he took her hiking,
he told her how technical apparatuses work

and he always supported
her learning a lot.

But then again, she had the typical formal
education of a girl of her age and status.

And when she was 16, she was at a
finishing school in Switzerland and she

ran away, because she wanted to be an
actress. So I guess, it was not that challenging.

it was nothing that really
interested her in that school.

I'm guessing, girls
they learned how to be a good wife.

How to, you know, know enough so
that you're not too boring for your future husband.

That was the goal of educating girls.

HA: We got another question on Mic 1.

Mic 1: I would like to thank you for this

talk as well and for the intervention just
on microphone number 2. I would like to

know what led you to researching Hedy's
life and how did you stumble upon this

personality? Because as you said yourself
it's hard to, I mean, they're not

recognized - how how do you find her at
all? Thank you.

AD: So, how did I find her? I found her

last year. I had never ever heard of her.
Never seen any of her movies. Somebody on

Twitter, who I follow, posted a link about
her. Like an article online about her

inventions. And I read that and I thought
"Wow... That's interesting! Who is that?"

And then I just started googling her and
in the end I started buying all these

books and reading and watching her movies
and I'm really happy about that because,

as I said, I really like her.
So, yeah, Twitter.

HA: , I think... There's someone at Mic 6. Yeah, I

wasn't sure because you sat down again...
So please, ask your question now.

Mic 6: I'm not sure, you said like, the

name of the talk was "The Woman Behind Wi-
Fi" - can you explain the title and her

position and what was made out of her
theory?

AD: Yes, I chose that title, because a lot

of articles... there's a lot of short
mentions of her online and they often

stressed that she was one of the pioneers
of these technologies that eventually led

to today's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. And
there's still always this discussion, when

somebody says well yeah she invented Wi-Fi
(which I wouldn't say, because she didn't)

but she was one of many pioneers working
on this technology the past decades and

there's still always kind of misogynistic
backlash when somebody recognizes her

achievement. Then people are always "Yeah,
it's so different Wi-Fi and spread-

spectrum today from what she did and she
didn't really do anything, it's not that

important!" and that's still today. And I
think it is important, what she did. She

was ahead of her time. She thought about
something that scientists during that time

could not grasp. It was possible her
patent was feasible and it's - to answer

your question - it's kind of a little
provocative, maybe, the title.

Intentionally to just make you think about
"What exactly did she do?". Which is not

that little, I think.

HA: I think regardless of a provocative
title it was a really amazing talk and we

would like to thank you one more time, Anja Drephal

applause

music

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