Boing Boing

Boing Boing

“Weird Little Devices”: first one listens to Cold War spy radio

Ellsworth Toohey
Mar 16, 2026
∙ Paid

Make 100: Cipherling - a numbers station robot, by Tim Burrell-Saward

Numbers stations — those ghostly shortwave broadcasts where synthetic voices read strings of digits into the void — have been sending one-way coded messages to intelligence agents since World War I. Nobody acknowledges running them. Nobody acknowledges listening. But now you can put a …

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