Sorry for the lack of postings the last few days. Both I and Blogger appear to have come down with some kind of bug. I hope both are back on their feet later today.
Update: More On Word Orders
Further to my posting yesterday about how we recognise words, here’s something from Mike Masnick, who runs the excellent Techdirt blog:I saw your other post on the mixed up letters, which I agree is absolutely fascinating. I had posted something similar about a year ago. Which also didn’t have a source associated with it, though, it appears to come from the same basic idea. Someone posted a comment on that post recently, saying it was written in a letter to New Scientist.At the time, I also wondered if such things could be useful as a sort of Turing test to fool a computer, but still have a human know perfectly well what you were talking about.Randomly, I also sent it to my parents when I first came across it. When I was a kid, they were very concerned with the way I learned to read, since I apparently would just look at the first two letters of a word and its length and then “guess” at what the word was. Apparently, that might not be so weird…
Thanks, Mike. I reckon we’re definitely onto something here. Sadly, the only use I can think of for it so far is for spammers, who already misspell words to fool spam filters. I can imagine their pitches: Wroreid aobut szie? Dpesresd by prferaomcne? Ok that took me a couple of minutes to do. This took me two seconds: Werorid by szie? Depersesd by prcaremfone? Courtesy of a funky site called Lerfjhax which lets you type in text and get a scrambled version out. Watch out for another wvae of sapm.
News: Instant Messaging, The Productivity Killer
A revealing survey by network security company Blue Coat Systems on instant messaging: Three quarters of British workers use it for personal purposes in the office, including abusive language (50%), conspiring against colleagues during conference calls (40%), sexual advances (nearly a third). Americans appear to be better behaved: less than one in five participants said they used IM to comment on senior management or to flirt. One explanation for the disparity, according to Reuters, is the Big Brother notion. Nearly 60 percent of British respondents did not believe or were unsure whether their IM conversations could be monitored by their employer while 71 percent of US respondents believed — correctly — that IM messages could be traced.I’d love to see some good, cheap small network chat programs to replace ICQ and AIM in the workplace, but so far I haven’t found a good one. Chat is a great way to communicate quickly; if users know they can be monitored, they’ll keep their flirting, outrageous language and Byzantine plotting to a minimum.
News: Wi-Fi For Commuters, And Bus Drivers
I know this sounds a bit Big Brother-ish, but I like the way a public wi-fi service can double as a facility for a public utility, in this case French buses. The excellent Wi-Fi Networking News blog carries a report from Paris about a bus route Wi-Fi network, Subscribers can use while they’re on — and presumably waiting for — a bus. But the buses can use it too: equipped with cameras that automatically take pictures of cars that are illegally driving in the bus lane, they send the photograph automatically via Wi-Fi to bus headquarters, where the system automatically produces a statement of the violation. I like it because it uses one network to do two things. Secondly, I hate cars parked in bus lanes, so I’m all for them being caught and given a good talking to.
News: How Not To Fight Spam
From the How Does This Work Again Dept? comes news of a company that pays spammers to take your name off their list. But the whole thing depends on trusting spammers, which is too early in the morning to find a suitable analogy for. Wired reports that Global Removal charges subscribers a $5 lifetime fee to have their e-mail addresses put on a permanent do-not-spam list. Addresses on the list are then compared with, and removed from, mailing lists maintained by Global Removal’s partnering businesses — more than 50 known spammers and an equal number of legitimate e-mail marketers. The idea: unlike other attempts at creating do-not-spam lists, this will work because it gives spammers an incentive to cooperate. Money.It’s not a terrible idea, but it rests on a fallacy: that spammers are not interested in email addresses of folk who don’t want to receive spam. I just don’t buy that. Spammers usually work for other people — they’re just a delivery mechanism — and they need to be able to deliver in bulk — in other words, send the pitch to as many email addresses as possible. They’ll be happy to take Global Removal’s money as extra cash on the side, and remove a few email addresses, but they are not going to stop harvesting — scouring the web for email addresses — or guessing (obtaining an ISP’s address, for example gormless.com, and then testing a telephone book full of regular names, from andy@gormless.com to zob@gormless.com to see whether they get through). So it means that you have no guarantee any other email addresses you have won’t get harvested in this way. Unless all spammers sign up for the service, and agree to stop harvesting new email addresses, it won’t work.
Lastly, the way spammers increasingly work is not through spam lists but by open proxy servers — other people’s computers, which are tricked into sending on spam, and in many cases, hosting the websites respondents visit — meaning that it’s very, very hard to trace where the spam came from. Global Removal will either have to offer forensic monitoring of the spammers signed up to its service to ensure compliance, or else it will only work with the (very, very small) number of spammers who are halfway legitimate, in that they do not disguise where their spam comes from, let alone comply with various state and country laws governing spam. Sadly, spammers are getting sleazier, and a service like Global Removal just adds another financial incentive for spammers to get into the game.