Pseudo-security

I just saw this on Picocool, a site I usually like a lot for its interesting or beautiful geeky little objects.

Flash drive padlock (via Picocool)
Flash drive padlock (via Picocool)

It’s a padlock for a USB thumb drive, to insert the USB connector into. And it strikes me as a very bad idea. Why? A three-digit code contains only 1000 combinations. If the thief or finder of the drive takes 3 seconds to try out each one of them, the lock can be removed in under 1 hour (1000 * 3 / 60 = 50 min).

Anyone relying on this device to prevent data breaches may be lulled into a false sense of security. If more drives are lost because their owners reduce their vigilance, the net effect may be worse than not securing your flash drive’s business end at all.

Framing London’s “congestion tax”

If you want to drive a car into central London during business hours, you have to pay: a hefty £8 ($13.05, 9.27 €, as per today’s exchange rates) a day, or even more if you pay late. This payment is called the congestion charge (in official documents often capitalized), is managed by Transport for London, and explicitly serves the goal of lowering the volume motorized traffic by making motorists [BrE term] pay for the privilege of driving on streets the use of which by too many cars imposes a high cost on all central London’s permanent and transient denizens. As a payment for the use of a specific set of roads, the congestion charge is supposed to be understood as a type of toll — a fee for a service.

Map of London's congestion charge zone
Map of London's congestion charge zone
Countries whose embassies refuse to pay the congestion charge
Countries that refuse to pay the congestion charge for their embassy staff, 11/2008

Now the effectiveness of the congestion charge in actually lowering traffic into central London is debatable — and hotly being debated — but even its detractors tend to call it by its official name. Not so the US embassy’s representative, who — as cited in today’s Guardian — continues to refer to it as the “congestion tax”.

That’s a nice case of framing we’re encountering here. The embassy’s stance is simply that, if the charge is actually a local tax, the embassy doesn’t have to pay. So they call it a tax instead: 

“The mayor [of London] had hoped that Obama’s new representative in London, Louis Susman, who was sworn in two weeks ago and arrived in the capital today, would signal a change of approach due to the new administration’s green credentials.

But a spokesman for the US embassy confirmed that Washington’s position had not changed. […] The US embassy spokesman said: “Our policy on the congestion tax is a long-standing policy decided on by Washington. The US government’s position is that this a tax and therefore is prohibited by various treaties.”

TfL and the UK government, in contrast, liken the charge to paying or a toll road or bridge, something UK diplomats in the US are held to do.

The US embassy is not alone in this, although with a totted-up £3,446,420 in charges and fines by now (according to the Guardian article linked above) the worst offender among the quarter of London’s foreign diplomatic missions who just don’t pay up. A 9 month old BBC News article lists the non-payers, and I’m sad to see that Germany, too, is among them.

Eggcorn sightings!

  1. Only one more day available on BBC iPlayer, and unfortunately not available as a podcast, Stephen Fry’s wonderful August 11 episode of his BBC4 radio program(me) Fry’s English Delight mentions eggcorns appoximately 11 min into the show. It’s altogether excellent – including the notes on French, language change, the status of error etc.

  2. Eggcorns as a topic of academic inquiry! By pure chance I came across a page on the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity CALC-09, which took place in June of this year in Boulder, Colorado in the US, which had an entire session on eggcorns. Wow.

Yet another missive from the “misogyny in IT” department

My feeds are buzzing this morning about Electronic Art’s (EA) marketing stunt at Comic-Con for their Dante’s Inferno game, and, given their promo is a Twitter competition, not in a good way. Unsurprisingly, because what EA and its Dante’s Inferno team, complete with Twitter account, have come up with is so mindbogglingly inane and disgraceful that you wonder how such a culture of puerile boorishness could  not only have managed to strive within a major gaming outfit’s corporate structure, but even receive approval for this project: To invite Comic-Con attendees to “commit acts of lust” with a “booth babe”, be photographed in the process, and post the result to Twitter.

Oh, and what does the winner get? “Dinner and a sinful night with two hot girls, limo service and a chestful of booty”. SRSLY.

Alex, a self-described game programmer and feminist, has a good round-up, and the EA invite is also preserved for posterity on Mashable.

From Ars Technica’s report:

I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a booth babe, especially not at a show like Comic Con. You’re being pawed at by huge amounts of sweaty geeks, you have to smile and be pleasant to people who may or may not have showered… it always seems like a hellish existence. What doesn’t help? Having your employer offer a bounty if people sexually harass you.

At Comic Con, if you commit “an act of lust” with an EA booth babe and take a picture, you could win dinner with said babes, as well as a great big pile of prizes related to the upcoming Dante’s Inferno. That’s right, the babes won’t just get the standard behavior and awkward advances—if someone is really obnoxious, they get rewarded for it, and then you get to see them again socially!

Folks, I may occasionally lust after (some) women just as much as the next lesbian, but I very much doubt I’m in EA’s target demographic here, even if I were a gamer. Neither is any straight woman or gay man. Or for that matter the numerous straight male gamers whose wet dream is not to objectify members of the other sex, kept at their beck and call to slobber over. You know, even if you don’t buy into the entire lust-as-sin concept (I don’t), sexual objectification is still despicable and sexual harassment a crime. Most geeks I know — heck, nearly all geeks I’ve ever met — understand that just fine.

EA have issued an awkward non-apology (“We apologize for any confusion and offense that resulted from our choice of wording…”), which, tellingly, was posted as an image on Twitpic, then taken down, at least in some locations, but of course preserved by a friendly netizen on Flickr.

The one good thing about the entire debacle is that is has been an immediate and very public debacle. Still, this year has been remarkably rich in mysogynist incidents, in web application development, F/LOSS, and now gaming. I wonder what is going on here. As a woman working in IT who considers herself a geek, my experience with the 20-35 year old geek crowd has been mostly very positive, and I’ve more than once relished an atmosphere that outspokenly rejects sexism, homophobia, racism and other forms of discrimination as a matter of course. Still, comment threads on geek forums speak a different language too often, and my personal experience has not been without ambiguity. What else do we have to do to make this crap stop?

Facebook mail: commenting on your photos makes you female

Over the last few days, Facebook quite clearly seemed to be upgrading its email notification components. This is what I concluded from the email from @facebookmail.com I found in my own mailbox: Because of some personal circumstances, I happened to post more often to my Facebook account than I usually would have, and more importantly received more comments. Comments are sent to my Gmail account as per my chosen Facebook settings. What I found, however, was that not all comments were being forwarded, and some of those that were appeared in the mailbox up to about 15 min after they showed up in the Facebook user interface.

Some performance glitch, I thought. But today the email notifications became somewhat creative. Here is a screenshot of the notifications of today that contain the text “also commented on” (I have covered up last names to protect my friends’ privacy):

Screenshot: Facebook notifications with gender confusion
Screenshot: Facebook notifications with gender confusion

There are two types of notifications: For comments on status updates and for comments on photos. Each can be done by the original poster (of the status update or the photo) or, more often, by someone else. To see the problem better, here are the update notes for comments on one’s own photos and status updates:

  • Ned also commented on her photo
  • Ned also commented on his status
  • Michael also commented on his status
  • Mike also commented on her photo
  • Jason also commented on his status

When I first saw this, I wondered on whose photo Ned had also commented on.

I haven’t follow Facebook’s UI choices in-depth, but Facebook used to use the singular “they” in their notifications, even if  the user’s (self-described) sex or gender was known. So what we can suppose happening here is that they’re reducing the use of singular “they”, and producing some glitches in the process. I checked: both Mike and Ned indicate their sex as male in their Facebook profile. So Facebook is currently reassigning a female gender to posters who comment on their own photos. What I don’t know is if women get reassigned to male.

The issue only shows up in email, that I could see. On the Facebook, Ned is male:

Status update note in the Facebook user interface
Status update note in the Facebook user interface

And who, exactly, are you?

I spent the last weekend, plus days before and after, in Portland, Oregon (at the 22nd annual convention of the usenet group soc.motss). This is a city that, even by the high standards of the urban European, has a truly impressive public transport system. Not only is it complete and fast, it’s also intelligently priced, ie, low, with free rides in the city center, and bike-friendly.

One bit of linguistic interest is worth mentioning here: The announcement made on some of the MAX light rail/streetcar/tramway (pick your term) lines to indicate at which side to get off the train at the next stop. Announcements in these trains are made by an automated, prerecorded voice, first in English, then in Spanish.

The text of the announcement, after indicating the next stop’s name?

Doors to my left.

This is a bit startling. I can see why an overly nit-picky planner would want to avoid “Doors to your left” — after all, passengers may be oriented every which way in the carriage. But saying “… my left” is presuming we have a speaker here. It’s not the driver. But someone or something speaking in a disembodied voice.

Now while there is indeed a well-defined left and right relative to a moving tramway, the problem is to ascribe a sense of agency to it that would allow it to speak to us in the first person.

I have not quite succeeded in finding out if the sentient tramway is restricted to the English — I thought I heard “puertas a la izquierda”, ie “doors to the left“, but this page claims it’s “puerta a mi izquierda”.

Portland, the City of Roses and sentient, anthropomorphic streetcars.

Why I like my showers with two degrees of freedom

Imagine your basic shower — in a cabin or above a bath tub. The ones I’ve known for most of my life tend to have two knobs: one to adjust the flow of hot water, one to to do the same for cold water. Or else they have a lever you can pull and rotate: pulling increases the flow rate, rotating changes the temperature. The end result is the same: you can make your water flow more or less copiously, and you can make it hotter or colder.

This means our shower has two degrees of freedom: You can change two variables independently (within limits). Unfortunately, some hotels seem to consider this system too hard for their guests to comprehend and present the hapless traveller with a single, often strangely shaped knob. What it does if turned, twisted, pushed, pulled, shoved or glared at, the traveller hasn’t got the foggiest.[*] In most cases, what you get is the single-degree-of-freedom knob: the more you turn on the water, the warmer it gets. However, the problem is: you don’t know this yet.

Here is why I think this is a bad idea, from recent practical experience:

  1. You get ready for the shower, and identify the shower controls. One single knob, function unknown.
  2. You twist it experimentally, taking care to stay out of the reach of the shower head (or tap). Water comes out. Good.
  3. The water is cold. Well, that’s probably normal: let’s let it flow for a while.
  4. The water doesn’t get any warmer. So this is probably the cold water knob. You go in search of any hot water knobs, levers, buttons, pedals or other controls.
  5. After having finished your search of the shower area (naked), you decide the knob is all you have. Water is still cold. The only thing you can do is to turn it on a little more.
  6. The water is still cold. Or maybe a little bit more lukewarm? You twiddle the knob. Water splashes back and forth. Yeah, definitely getting a little more lukewarm.
  7. You carefully close off all shower curtains, take your heart in both hands, and give the knob a good strong twist. And wait a while.
  8. YAY, finally, warm water. You take your shower.

Dear hotel designers: Presenting tired travellers who’ve likely never been to your establishment with anything but a regular, clearly labled, two-degrees-of-freedom shower control knob system is not good user interface design.

[*] These things can get exceedingly complex — the worst I’ve ever had was in a swanky resort in Windsor I stayed at for a company function: the knob had red and blue dots in odd places, ridges and ratchets, could be turned a little, then pushed or pulled, and then turned in an entirely different way again… the frigging bath mat came with instructions for use, but I wasn’t the only one who’d stood naked, wondering at it for 10 min, before succeeding entirely by chance (or, as were, going unshowered).

The (Google) wave of the (messaging) future?

So after a week of travelling (to MAAWG in Amsterdam, which was a thought-provoking experience) and several being busybusybusy all around, I finally managed to watch the Google I/O 2009 presentation about the upcoming Google Wave messaging and collaboration platform.

There are three thoughts that this video inspired:

  1. When I first heard about Wave, despite the positive noises from people I trust, I was sceptical: it sounded like something I’d very much enjoy using myself, but as a successor of email for a great number of people? Email may be antiquated, as internet technologies go, yet it is the primary means of addressing messages to those connected to the net — a great number of whom aren’t collaborating on documents or even using IM very much. After watching the presentation, I think this judgment was premature.

    To step back a little… Email right now comes in three forms: first, spam; second, what has come to be called “bacn” by some, ie automated but legitimate messages (from post-signup confirmations, via notifications of activities on social networks, to marketing messages and newsletters we opted to receive or that are addressed to us at work); and finally the prototypical email: conversations between real people. The first, we can discount for the moment — no one wants those. For the second, the added value from Google Wave is limited; at most, I might want to annotate such a message for my own use, or link it to my calendar or to-do list (“deadline for signing up to benefit X”, “interesting exhibition at museum Y”). The third is different. If, and from the demo it looks as if Google could pull this off, the user interface is seamless enough, I could indeed see regular people conversing in waves instead of cumbersome email threads. Even better, if, say, Facebook (replace with social platform of choice) messaging threads could be conducted through a Wave client, we’d probably have a winner.

  2. Second thought, if we do think if Google Wave as a potential successor for email, the one central problem that the protocol should be solving is that of spam and abuse. From the limited time I’ve spend with the documents, it seems that the danger of spamming an existing wave is reduced, as each wave carries a globally unique wave id, and messages are transmitted encrypted. What about starting a new wave though? How would one wave provider authenticate with other wave providers? Maybe someone could point me to the relevant section in the protocol, that woud be great. Then there’s the problem of compromised wave accounts, especially if desktop clients appear on the scene. Last, if Wave accounts with Google are free and tied to Google accounts, there’s a need to become more efficient preventing automated account creation for abusive purposes: Nearly all of the Eggcorn Forum‘s spam problems came from accounts registering with a Gmail address, who managed to navigate the confirmed registration process just fine and were without doubt created by bots.

  3. Two short segments in the video particularly piqued my interest: automated translation — on the fly — between 40 languages? Google Translate has become much better over the last two years or so, and it would be great to run some large-scale quality checks on translation features. Oh and that spellchecker, which is the first I’ve ever seen to take context into account. Maybe Google would be interested in throwing eggcorns into the spellcheck-heuristics mix? [My own spellchecker, untrained and brand-new, just complained about “aren” … in “aren’t”. Sigh.]

A construction the likes of which I’ve never been able to let go

So an Air France Airbus A330 disappeared over the Atlantic last night. It’s a frightening event, and the quasi-certainty that 228 people died, maybe without a trace, in a cataclysmic accident, is terribly sad.

BBC news quotes the French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s public address: “It is a catastrophe the likes of which Air France has never seen.” The wording of the quote made me think. It sounds a bit overly convoluted to my ear, but then, this may very well express a level of pathos appropriate to the situation. Sarkozy, of course, spoke French. Interestingly, this exact wording is all over the English-language press. It must have come from an early press release: it’s doubtful there are official English translations of the pronouncements of the French president.

What is the French original? The paper Libération’s habit of publishing such things verbatim — though cleaned up — helps us out. Here is the first bit of Sarkozy’s public declaration:

Cette nuit nous avons perdu la trace d’un avion d’Air France avec 228 personnes à bord, passagers et personnels d’équipage. Nous n’avons aucun élément précis sur ce qui s’est passé. C’est une catastrophe comme jamais la compagnie Air France n’en avait connue.

The French construction employed by Sarkozy, which has no one-to-one correspondence in English, goes a long way to explain the translator’s choice. Ne … jamais can mean “never” or “ever”, depending of polarity, and there’s the partitive pronoun en, which refers back to une catastrophe. We could gloss the French as “This is a catastrophe like never the airline Air France [of it] had known,” or, using the more idiomatic present perfect, substituting seen for known, and cleaning up the word order, “This is a catastrophe like the airline Air France has never seen.”

The translator’s thought process now becomes clearer:

  • They aimed at preserving the comparison “like”, but getting rid of the informal aspect
  • They were quite happy to preserve the partitive en, somehow

“Like” therefore becomes nominalized as “the likes of which”.

In order to to get input from other English speakers, I asked around on Twitter and Facebook, provocatively, whether “the likes of which Air France had never seen” sounded clumsy. Several people were kind enough to reply:

  • Some found nothing remotely remarkable about the formulation, or even consider it the preferred way of rendering the original French
  • Some came out close to my gloss, with “a catastrophe such as Air France has never seen” or even “a catastrophe like Air France has never seen”
  • Some preferred turning “never” into “ever” (or left it out) and “like” into “unlike”, and even managed to slip the en back in in the form of “any”: “a catastrophe unlike any Air France has (ever) seen”
  • Some, including myself, went for a bold recasting: “an unprecedented catastrophe for Air France”
  • Finally, the linguist John Lawler came out in favour of “a catastrophe like Air France hasn’t never seen”, but implicitly admitted this version was really quite impossible, adding: “Alas, English Negative Concord was lost with the Dative case, and has been replaced with Negative Polarity.”

Quite a cornucopia of choices here.

Word of the day: kvell

On Twitter today, Neil Gaiman posted this:

Neil Gaiman using the verb kvell on Twitter
Neil Gaiman using the verb kvell on Twitter

The verb kvell was unfamiliar to me. The dictionaries revealed that it is, unsurprisingly, of Yiddish origin, related to the German verb quellen, which can mean several things, among which well up. The OED’s notes it as “US slang” and gives the definition as “[ad. Yiddish kveln, ad. G. quellen to gush, well up.] ” while the dictionary that comes with OS X, which is based on the New Oxford American Dictionary, has “feel happy and proud”. The word is also on Wikipedia’s very useful List of English words of Yiddish origin (“to feel delighted and proud to the point of tears”)

So Neil was overjoyed to the point of tearing up about Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie figuring on the National Portrait Gallery’s picture of the month.

A beautiful word, which I’m sure to keep in mind.