I had yesterday’s Times open at the breakfast table this morning, and saw this amazing story.

Evidently Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil hold the patent for frequency-hopping radio guidance. That’s basically the same technology that lets digital cellular avoid the type of easy eavesdropping that Scanner used to sample.

From Lamarr’s Wikipedia entry:

This early version of frequency hopping used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam.

Got that? A piano roll, skipping among 88 frequencies! That’s the most awesome hack I’ve heard in ages! If your only tool is a piano, everything looks like a key, I guess. I often worry that computers impoverish our hackish imaginations.

The ‘punk’ part of ‘voltpunk’ is extremely problematic in this case, of course— since what Lamarr and Antheil were anti- in this case wasn’t -authority but -fascism. Punk or not, I’m always happy for hacks in the service of anti-fascism (particularly since our local brand of fascism has friends at the top).