this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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What's your evidence, Richard Easton??!?

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[–] [email protected] 222 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

Our mother who art in WiFi
Thy beacon come
Thou handshake be done
In ac as in 802.11

[–] [email protected] 95 points 6 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 43 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

Let me tempt you with some SYN

[–] PaintedSnail 24 points 6 months ago

No thanks, I'm FIN.

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[–] quaddo 20 points 6 months ago

Give us this day our daily bandwidth,
And forgive us our connectivity issues,
As we forgive those who disrupt our signal.

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[–] VubDapple 180 points 6 months ago (2 children)

From the wiki page

During the late 1930s, Lamarr attended arms deals with her then-husband arms dealer Fritz Mandl, "possibly to improve his chances of making a sale".[41] From the meetings, she learned that navies needed "a way to guide a torpedo as it raced through the water." Radio control had been proposed. However, an enemy might be able to jam such a torpedo's guidance system and set it off course.[42] When later discussing this with a new friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, her idea to prevent jamming by frequency hopping met Antheil's previous work in music. In that earlier work, Antheil attempted synchronizing note-hopping in the avant-garde piece written as a score for the film Ballet Mechanique that involved multiple synchronized player pianos. Antheil's idea in the piece was to synchronize the start time of identical player pianos with identical player piano rolls, so the pianos would be playing in time with one another. Together, they realized that radio frequencies could be changed similarly, using the same kind of mechanism, but miniaturized.[4][41]

[–] [email protected] 106 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Gotcha, WiFi is a bunch of tiny pianists in a box

[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 months ago

That’s why memes are hard to understand- I’m tone deaf.

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[–] Icaria 147 points 6 months ago (3 children)

This post is inaccurate. Neither WiFi nor GPS use FHSS, nor is Lamarr anything close to singularly credited with FHSS' invention (the earliest patent is credited to Nikola Tesla). This also implies that the Allies used her parent - they did not.

Also Richard Easton is the son of the man who invented GPS and had every right to be skeptical of this claim, and it looks like Internet dipsh*ts have bullied him into deleting his twitter account over this.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Eh, i saw easton's twitter before deletion, he was rather full of himself and prone to being pompously challenging without cause.

Also his father doesn't mean shit, i'm the kid of a master printer, buggered if i know anything about ink

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[–] zik 125 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (8 children)

This is mostly wrong: while she did invent what would later be called Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS), it isn't used in modern WiFi or in GPS. It is used in Bluetooth though.

I should point out that techniques like FHSS are only a part of what makes up a radio communication method. You can't say it was "the basis of Bluetooth" just because FHSS is one of the many technologies used in Bluetooth. She certainly contributed though.

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[–] [email protected] 111 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

To be fair, I'd be skeptical if you told me Andy Griffith was the father of 3D printing.

Though I'd google it instead of asking for evidence first.

[–] [email protected] 80 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] VerbFlow 13 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I don't know who this guy is. Did he do something to Lamarr?

[–] [email protected] 68 points 6 months ago (6 children)

Note that this frequency hopping is no longer used in most WiFi networks today. It is, however, critical to classic Bluetooth, and BLE still somewhat uses it. I have no idea how it's related to GPS.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Frequency hopping in wifi was never well supported. 802.11a was primarily DSSS and afaik, very few, if any consumer devices supported the FHSS mode.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Indeed. Just speaking from a signals point of view, frequency hopping is not competitive for high bandwidth applications. It is however surprisingly durable in the presence of interference despite its simplicity. We’re seeing this play out in newer Bluetooth standards.

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 6 months ago (7 children)

It goes to show that being a good actress doesn't mean that you can't also be good at tech, even if you don't like to to brag about it.

[–] PM_Your_Nudes_Please 64 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Reminds me of that time someone got into a Twitter beef with Rage Against The Machine. They dropped the “it’s not like you have a degree in political science or anything” line. The lead guitarist went to Harvard for social sciences.

[–] [email protected] 86 points 6 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 44 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I like both of Brian Mays carreers. The one as the guitarist of Queen, and the one as an astrophycisist

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[–] [email protected] 63 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (9 children)

Calling Hedy Lamarr "the Mother of Wifi" because she invented FHSS is like calling E. A. Johnson, who invented the first capacitive touchscreen in 1965, "the Father of the iPhone".

[–] [email protected] 42 points 6 months ago (6 children)

i’m pretty comfortable with calling him that. capacitive touchscreens are a big deal sounds like he deserves the praise.

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife 22 points 6 months ago (2 children)

You could always call him "the father of the capacitive touchscreen".

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 6 months ago (6 children)

Great to recognise this invention.

I was surprised by the choice of 'Mother of Wi-Fi' though - Wi-Fi hasn't used 'frequency hopping' as such since 802.11b was released back in 1999 - so very few people will have ever used frequency-hopping Wi-Fi.

GPS only uses it in some extreme cases I think, but I'm not an expert.

However, Bluetooth absolutely does depend on it to function in most situations, so 'Mother of Bluetooth' might have been more appropriate.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 6 months ago (2 children)

So her invention isn't used for Wifi now, but was used in the initial design of it? You might even say she helped give birth to it...

[–] [email protected] 42 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I guess my point is that it isn't a particularly important part of the design of Wi-Fi - they included it in the very first iteration in 1997 and realised by 1999 they didn't need it. Therefore Wi-Fi would likely have been born regardless of the invention; Bluetooth would not.

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[–] grue 16 points 6 months ago

However, Bluetooth absolutely does depend on it to function in most situations, so ‘Mother of Bluetooth’ might have been more appropriate.

Considering the namesake of Bluetooth, the "Mother of Bluetooth" sounds like the kind of person who would have a tea party with "Grendel's Mother" from Beowulf.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 6 months ago (2 children)

The headcrab Kleiner keeps as a pet in HL2 was named after her!

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Woman make thing!? Me no likely! Woke lie!

Fucking troglodytes.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

There are plenty of women in STEM who deserve more recognition. Lise Meitner, discovered nuclear fission. Gladys West, came up with the theory that laid the groundwork for GPS. Grace Hopper, inventor of the program linker, without which modern software development would be impossible. Ada Lovelace, arguably the first programmer ever. But calling a woman whose name is one of two on a patent that furthered the development of a radio communication technique originally devised 40 years earlier by Nikola Tesla which Wi-Fi no longer uses "the mother of Wi-Fi" and putting her on a pedestal just because she's a woman, parading her (and only her) around every Women's History Month, and calling anyone who claims she didn't actually invent Wi-Fi (because she died around the time of its creation) a "troglodyte" is not a good look.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 6 months ago

https://patents.google.com/patent/US2292387A/en

For anyone else curious about this patent.

[–] AtariDump 33 points 6 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Okay, well, I'm a network professional with a specialty in wireless and a keen interest in historical wireless networking, and "non-standard" stuff is also quite interesting. I'm no Richard Easton.

I want to start with a disclaimer, by no means would I, nor should I be interpreted to be saying or implying that any contribution, regardless of source, isn't valuable. Whether it comes from a woman, or man, white, black, or any color in-between, non-binary, gay, bi, trans, whatever. The contributor is valuable and their contribution is always valued.

That being said, FHSS, has its uses, and it's been used in wireless. It's a valid technology that should be recognised as such. As with many things, it wasn't a singular effort, and nobody should imply otherwise.

As others have pointed out, the most commonly known technology which employs FHSS is Bluetooth; and trust me, trying to track down issues caused by BT interference is a nightmare because of it. Generally I avoid the problem by not using the 2.4ghz ISM band as much as possible, but I digress.

For those saying it's not part of 802.11, it actually is. It's an old part of the protocol which has long since been replaced and it is considered obsolete by the IEEE 802.11 group.

However, in the 802.11 protocol, sometimes called 802.11 prime (Wikipedia calls it "legacy"), it states: "[802.11] specified two raw data rates of 1 and 2 megabits per second (Mbit/s) to be transmitted via infrared (IR) signals or by either frequency hopping or direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) in the Industrial Scientific Medical frequency band at 2.4 GHz." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11_(legacy_mode)

All I want to really add, is that networking is a team sport. If companies and people didn't work together to make it function, then it wouldn't work.

Only by collaborating and working together towards improvement and an increase in the ability of the technology to work across all platforms, vendors, manufacturers, and devices, can we get it to function at all. This fact is as true now as it was when FHSS was invented. Everyone needs to work together in order to make any real progress. Otherwise, all of our wifi stuff would "speak" different languages, and nothing outside of a single companies product line, would work with anything else.

Everyone's contributions have helped wifi get to it's current state, and that should never be forgotten.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Shame how NeoLibs are destroying our greatest national asset by having it focus on profit generation and being independent of government funding.

https://smh.com.au/opinion/csiro-neoliberal-obsession-with-privatisation-leaves-australia-exposed-20160630-gpvbbq.html

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 months ago (1 children)

There is a great documentary about her on Netflix. It covers her love of science and her attempts to get her design to the military for the war effort.

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[–] Cornpop 21 points 6 months ago (1 children)

From my research it is not the basis of WiFi though, it was specifically for encrypting communications to torpedos.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 6 months ago

It was designed for encrypting communications to torpedos, but it laid the groundwork for wifi, bluetooth, and gps to be made.

[–] BilboBargains 21 points 6 months ago

Fire up the ROFL-copter, we got a live one.

[–] captainlezbian 16 points 6 months ago

Wait til he finds out that the first computer programs were written by some poet with daddy issues

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (4 children)
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[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

"Mother of Wifi" is a stretch. But "mother of Alka-Seltzer"? Definitely. "Midwife of the traffic signal"? Sure.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

Least sexist blue check

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Wifi doesn't use frequency hopping. That's bluetooth.

[–] friend_of_satan 23 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (6 children)

https://www.ieee802.org/11/Documents/DocumentArchives/1996_docs/1196049D_scan.pdf

Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum PHY of the 802.11 Wireless LAN Standard

Edit: [email protected] is correct. FHSS was quickly dropped for DSSS and OFDM, and FHSS is not used in any modern WiFi specs. You can see the list in table 7.6 here https://www.pearsonitcertification.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1329709&seqNum=4

[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 months ago (6 children)

It may be dropped, but it was used in the beginning

Wouldn't that not still make her the mother of Wifi?

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