what happened to morse code in 206x Options

[xizor]

i know that morse code was discontinued a few years ago and is no longer an "official" code. meaning that it is not used by the police, fire or medical rescue crews.
now, what i want to know is did morse code survive the data crash?
is it still used or is it an "old code" used only by riggers and nostalgic geeks?

[Shev]

While I think Morse code would have survived the crash (through a few people that have it memorized), I doubt that it is widespread in the time of SR. I think it's safe to say that if you communicate using morse code in 206x, I would set it to an intelligence test for anyone to even recognize what you're using, let alone decipher it.

[Kagetenshi]

It's physically written many places that probably wouldn't get lost. It wouldn't be used, though; check the museum for the guide.

~J

[Misfit Toy]

Unless you want to assume that the virus that caused the Crash of '29 was so hardcore it jumped off the Matrix and burned books, periodicals, and murdered scientists and researches execution style, the idea that it would set knowledge back whatsoever is ludicrous.

Sure, it might have wiped out huge amounts of digital data on non-permanent mediums like harddrives or writable CDs but that's all it would have done. And yes, we are heading towards a future were the majority of our literature is found online, but there's no way it's all going to be there in 20 years time let alone irreplacably lost. But then just about everything relating to the Matrix is silly, so... who knows.

Anyway, no, I found it very hard to believe the Crash of '29 wiped out all knowledge of Morse Code. It may not be used by anyone outside of historical geeks and the occasional Boy Scout, but the knowledge of it is still going to be around.

So basically, yes, it's still around but no, no one of significance uses it. I also doubt if it would be at all secure considering that, while no one may personally know it, every codebreaker with a Skill of 1 or higher would be familiar with it and could "break" it without breaking a sweat.

[RangerJoe]

It's probably included as a basic "try this first" routine in most decrpyt programs. Right up there with A = 1, B = 2, C= 3.... ("That Japanese are going to bomb Pearl harbor!")

[xizor]

and one more question,
what has replaced morse code? has it been replaced?

and thank you all for a prompt and knownegable response

[John Campbell]

Morse hasn't been so much replaced as obsoleted. It's not an encryption scheme, as a couple of the posts here seem to imply; it's a digital character encoding with some built-in data compression (the rationale behind the Morse character assignments is pretty similar to that behind the Huffman compression algorithm). It's been made obsolete by transmission methods and tranceivers capable of handling data rates far, far higher than anything with a human in the loop and automatically handling much more complex encoding schemes, including non-text-based formats and much better compression algorithms, than any human can work with at any useful speed. In other words, by the computer (and not just your desktop PC, but all the embedded systems you never see), the telecom network, and digital packet radio (including cell phones), and replaced by ASCII, Unicode, WAV, MPEG, JPEG, PNG, and so on.

That said, it's still got its uses... when you're trying to communicate with another prisoner down the hall by banging your shoe on a pipe, sending Morse-encoded text is a bit more practical than sending ASCII-encoded text, and a lot more practical than sending MPEG video, though that is theoretically possible.

[Kagetenshi]

Psht. Real criminals bang in ASCII and use proper capitalization!

~J

[Black Isis]

Morse code is still used by ham radio operators on the HF bands; the good thing about Morse is that it's easier for a radio operator to pick out from static and background radiation. I think the reason you don't hear it much is that radios have gotten better and better so that they can pull the signal out of the static a lot better these days, except on the HF bands (where the signals tend to be pretty weak in comparison to your UHF and VHF signals usually).

That said, yeah -- it's a primitive way to encode a signal that can be easily decoded by a human, which makes it pretty damn handy at times. I can't see it being abandoned anytime soon.

[John Campbell]

Nah, if you're serious about your pipe-banging, you PGP-encrypt and sign it so that the guards can neither listen in on your comms nor fake messages from you. :D

[Kagetenshi]

[Kagetenshi]

And double-posts for all!

~J

[Crusher Bob]

Morse is still used at sea, when you want to talk to another ship and don't want to use the radio. Just blink a spotlight...