November 2007 - Posts

• Slicing the Ham From the Spam

  Despite the CAN-SPAM Act passed by the U.S. Congress in later 2003 and Bill Gates' recent assertion that Microsoft has the "magic solution" that will solve the spam problem by 2006, the spam tsunami shows no signs of abating. (According to Brightmail, the anti-spam software company, the percentage of e-mail messages classified as spam rose from 42 percent in February 2003 to 60 percent in January 2004.) Instead of descending into spam rage, the silver-lining seekers among us take to the high ground to look for something, anything that's positive in the whole mess. Well, here's something: the more spam-related activity there is — from the spammers sending out their barfmail to the anti-spammers trying to stop them to the hapless users who spend inordinate chunks of their day deleting the stuff - the more spam-related coinages show up on the lexical radar. For example, those of us whose Inboxes are polluted throughout the day with dozens of samples of this online pestilence are fighting back by employing filters that automatically trash incoming missives with subject lines containing words and phrases such as "you're a winner" and "free money." Unfortunately, these filters sometimes corral legitimate messages, or false positives. Since Spam (the meat substance) is a kind of "fake" form of ham, and since these legitimate messages are "real" compared to spam messages, people have taken to calling them ham. Other spam types include fram, spam messages sent by your friends or family, and spim (or spIM), spam sent via an instant messaging system (hence the synonyms instant spam, messenger spam, IM spam, and IM marketing). Bloggers who have automatic commenting systems now have to deal with a new plague: blog spam (or comment spam). This is a comment that comes with an innocuous message (such as, "I agree with this") and a link to a spam site or to something more sinister. This is similar to picospam, a bare-bones spam message that contains only a single image or a one-line sales pitch along with a link to a web site. Heaven forbid that you actually click a picospam's link or respond in any way to a spam message, because then you'll get S4L: spam for life. (You can also get S4L by falling into a spam trap: a check box on an online form that's set by default to the "Send me e-mail" state in the hopes that most users will miss it and will thus give "permission" to be spammed for life.) The purpose of picospam is to ensure the spammers' message sneaks past any filter that may be in the way. Spam masters have learned that spam researchers are increasingly hip to their tricks. A straight sales pitch will be flagged as being too spammy (or its spam DNA will be too easily recognized), particularly by the sophisticated Bayesian filters that can be trained to recognize what's spam and what isn't. (Bayesian analysis predicts the probability of a future occurrence by using information gleaned from past experience.) To reduce the overall spamminess of their missives, bulk mailers are adding a patch of random words to each message. This is called a word salad or a hash buster. (Hashing is a spam filter technique that compares an incoming message with known spam messages.) The word "spam" has become so common and so pervasive that we're now seeing it used in contexts other than computing and the internet. For example, if you live in any reasonably large town or city, then you've probably seen street spam, advertisements posted on telephone poles, traffic lights, and other public areas. (Street spam is also called vertical litter. It's an example of a more general scourge called bandit signs, illegal commercial signs posted in a public area.) Then there's ticker spam, a small company's press release that includes the name and ticker symbol of a major but unrelated company. The idea behind this stunt is to ensure that the smaller firm's press release is seen by investors or analysts who search for releases containing the larger company's ticker symbol. The recent spam increases are, of course, merely the continuation of a long-standing trend as the amount of bad spam cholesterol clogging the Net's e-mail arteries continues to increase alarmingly. Solutions are hard to come by, but we can all start by practicing e-mail hygiene, principles and practices that reduce (or, at least, don't increase) spam. For example: never respond to spam; never visit a site mentioned in a spam; and turn off Outlook's preview pane when viewing suspicious messages that might contain a web bug, an invisible image embedded into an HTML-formatted e-mail and used to confirm that the message has been read and so the address is legitimate. Oh, and tell your friends and family to stop with the fram, already. This post appeared originally as my Technically Speaking column in the April 2004 issue of IEEE Spectrum. Posted Nov 29 2007, 04:16 PM by Paul with no comments Filed under: Neologisms, Technically speaking, Spam

• Hacking Unplugged

  Most of the digital world lives in fear of the dreaded dark-side hackers, Jolt Cola-fuelled software scallywags who have succumbed to the dark side of The Force. However, I come not to bury these reprobate hackers but to praise their inventiveness with language. Eric Raymond, the compiler of The Jargon File of hacker slang, has said that although "linguistic invention in most subcultures of the modern West is a halting and largely unconscious process, [h]ackers, by contrast, regard slang formation and use as a game to be played for conscious pleasure." Indeed, some of the best and most useful neologisms of recent vintage were coined in the same dank basements and goatish-smelling bedrooms that witnessed the creation of the myriad digital pathogens that have plagued us in the 2000s. (Before getting to my main theme, let me take advantage of these parentheses to clear up a thing or two about the word hacker. Eric Raymond uses the word in its positive sense of a software or hardware enthusiast who enjoys exploring the limits of code or machine. However, there's a second, equally valid, sense that refers to someone who breaks into or disrupts computer systems or networks. Purists prefer the term cracker for these digital miscreants and mischief-makers. However, the term "hacker" — which has been in the language since at least the early 1960s — has always had malicious connotations attached to it. For example, the November 20, 1963 issue of The Tech, the MIT student paper, complained that "many telephone services have been curtailed because of so-called hackers, [who] have accomplished such things as tying up all the tie-lines between Harvard and MIT, or making long-distance calls by charging them to a local radar installation." In the mind's eye of the media and the public who read them, a hacker is a bad person, and that's unlikely to change anytime soon. This is perhaps why we're now seeing labels such as white-hat hacker, ethical hacker, and samurai being applied to those who use their computing skills for good rather than evil. But I digress.) The wireless world, in particular, is a prolific source of hacks and the new terms that describe them. One such term is wardriving, a hacking technique that involves driving through a neighborhood with a wireless-enabled notebook computer and mapping hotspots — houses and businesses that have wireless access points. (This is also called drive-by hacking.) Wardriving is a play on the older term wardialing: using a software program to automatically call thousands of telephone numbers to look for any that have a modem attached. This term comes from the 1983 movie War Games, now a classic in hacking circles. In the movie a young hacker (Matthew Broderick) uses wardialing to look for games and bulletin board systems. However, he inadvertently ends up with a direct connection to a high-level military computer that gives him control over the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Chaos, of course, ensues. A variation on the wardriving theme is warwalking which, as the name implies, involves a more pedestrian search for insecure wireless networks. (This is also called, not surprisingly, walk-by hacking.) The usual activity of the warwalker is warchalking, marking a special symbol on a sidewalk or other surface that indicates a nearby wireless network, especially one that offers Internet access. Warchalkers are also called wibos — wireless hobos — because the idea of marking hotspots was inspired by the old "hobo language": the marks used by actual hobos during the Depression of the 1930s to indicate houses and establishments that had available food or work. These whackers (wireless hackers) defend their practices by claiming that they don't take advantage of their unauthorized access to perform criminal activities. That's clearly not the case, however, since it's known that some of them indulge in warspamming, using an insecure network's Simple Mail Transfer Protocol gateway to send out a load of spam. Then there's the Toronto man who was caught driving the wrong way down a one-way street, naked from the waist down, while wardriving for child pornography. Police charged him with, among other things, theft of telecommunications. On a less sinister level, there's the relatively new practice of bluejacking: temporarily hijacking another person's cell phone by sending it an anonymous text message using the Bluetooth wireless networking system. Bluejackers tend to be merry pranksters. For example, an Associated Press reporter told of seeing a group of tourists strolling through Stockholm and admiring a collection of Swedish handicrafts in a storefront window when one of their cell phones beeped and displayed an anonymous message: "Try the blue sweaters. They keep you warm in the winter." It's not exactly white-hat hacking, but at least it's a long way from the Dark Side. This post appeared originally as my Technically Speaking column in the February 2004 issue of IEEE Spectrum. Posted Nov 23 2007, 03:46 PM by Paul with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Neologisms, Technically speaking, Hacking

• Blah, Blah, Blog

  Fads and manias erupt in every sphere of human life and technology is no exception. Technological crazes most often appear in computing circles, and for the longest time resulted in relatively harmless distractions such as flying-toaster screen savers and Solitaire addictions. The Internet was, of course, a bona fide fad in the mid-90s, but technological manias didn't truly come into their own until the Internet took its place within the mainstream. With tens and even hundreds of millions of people online, bandwagons could grow very large, very fast. The Internet's rages thus included everything from push media to portals, disintermediation to reintermediation, e-books to eBay. Of this list, perhaps only eBay is still faddish, but that's the nature of Internet manias: they tend to leave almost as fast as they came, with only the rarest of rages sticking around for the long haul. Of all the Internet's "in things" that have remained "in," perhaps the most surprising is the humble Web log, or blog. This is a kind of digital diary - a Web page to which a writer posts chronological entries on a particular topic. The main difference between a blog and a regular Web site is that the blog's information is updated frequently, often at least several times a day. No one knows how many blogs exist, but a WHOIS search of domain names returns over 20,000 domains that include the word "blog." A recent survey by Perseus Development Corporation estimated that there are over 4.1 million blogs just on blog-hosting sites such as LiveJournal and BlogCity. It's likely that there are at least as many standalone blogs. The Perseus survey also showed that about two-thirds of the blogs hadn't been updated in over two months, so the total number of active bloggers is probably in the neighborhood of three million. That so few blogs remain active highlights an undeniable fact of blogging life: it's difficult and time-consuming to keep a blog fresh with constant new entries (called blog blurbs). Yet blogs of all stripes still spring up every day like so many mushrooms after a spring rain. So most blogs may be transitory, but the community of blogs - called, variously, blogistan, the blogiverse, or, most often, the blogosphere - remains vibrant. Bloggers tend to be passionate about their hobby, and the best among them - the so-called blogerati or blognoscenti - are genuine stars with dedicated followers. These include the likes of writer Doc Searles (doc.weblogs.com), the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Cory Doctorow (boingboing.net), journalist Andrew Sullivan (www.andrewsullivan.com), and technoguru Esther Dyson (release4.blogspot.com). The vast majority of blogs are nothing more than ever-so-slightly glorified online diaries that record the daily trials and tribulations of the blogger. The worst of these journal blogs are dismissed as kittyblogs (since so many of them describe what their cat has done that day) or bloggerel (blog doggerel), and these bloggers are often accused of oversharing (providing too much detail about their personal lives) or blogorrhea (posting too much information in general). The rest of the blogosphere consists mostly of blogs devoted to specific topics. For example, a blawg is related to legal matters or is written by a lawyer; a bleg is used to beg for help or money; an advocacy blog supports a political cause; a news blog or pundit blog examines mainstream news media and punditry (not to be confused with a blog that breaks its own news, or blews); a linguablog covers language and linguistics; a tech blog focuses on technology; an edu-blog discusses education issues; a warblog tackles the war on terrorism; and a photog is a blog that posts pictures, particularly candid shots of people in public places. In recent months we've seen the rise of the moblog, a blog maintained and updated using a mobile device such as notebook, palmtop computer, or cell phone. (Photogs are often updated via the new camera phones that are all the rage.) The moblog has created an interesting new dynamic at conferences and business meetings as bloggers post critiques of the current speaker and other attendees read those critiques and comment on them. This creates an entire back channel of communication that the speaker is likely to be unaware of. Proof, perhaps, of blogging's arrival is the increasing roster of professional journalists who maintain blogs. These include the afore-mentioned Sullivan, Dan Gillmor (weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/), the technology columnist of the San Jose Mercury News, and Daniel Weintraub, a columnist with the Sacramento Bee (www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/insider/). But many blog types scoff at these relics from the ancient media and extol the virtues of the bloggers who remain independent and free from corporate fetters. They claim these pure bloggers are the ones who will let freedom ring in the 21st century and who will light the path to truth and justice. Many dismiss this as mere blog triumphalism, but surely three million bloggers can't all be wrong? This post appeared originally as my Technically Speaking column in the December 2003 issue of IEEE Spectrum. Posted Nov 15 2007, 04:29 PM by Paul with no comments Filed under: Neologisms, Technically speaking

• Mobs R Us

  Last week, not far from where I live, a few dozen people gathered at a mall, invaded a nearby Toys R Us, and started leaping like frogs from one aisle to another. Within a few minutes, the crowd dispersed quickly and the "event," such as it was, ended. The store, it turns out, had been visited by a flash mob, a large group of people who gather in some predetermined location, perform some brief action, and then quickly disperse. Flash mobbers have done similarly silly stunts in New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Rome and, by the time you read this, many other cities as well, this being the faddish feat of 2003. They've become so popular, in fact, that Sean Savage of cheesebikini.com, who coined the phrase "flash mob," has suggested that the large numbers of press and police who now witness these events should have their own monikers: press mobs and cop mobs. The phrase "flash mob" was inspired by two related phrases. The first is flash crowd, which is a sharp increase in the number of users attempting to access a Web site simultaneously, usually in response to some event or announcement. (This could be caused, for example, by the Slashdot effect, a rapid and often overwhelming increase in a Web site's traffic after the site is featured or mentioned on Slashdot.org. Being Slashdotted is similar to being Farked, which means getting lots of traffic after your site appears on Fark.com.) "Flash crowd" comes from the original sense of the term, which was coined back in 1971 in a short story called "Flash Crowd" by science fiction writer Larry Niven. The story takes place in a future society that has perfected teleportation. Flash crowds occur when thousands of people see a major social or political event underway on television, so they teleport to the site to witness the event. The second phrase behind "flash mob" is smart mob, a leaderless group of like-minded people who organize using technologies such as cell phones, e-mail, and the Web. This phrase was popularized by the writer Howard Rheingold in his 2002 book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.  Flash mobs - which are also called inexplicable mobs or flocks - use the same technologies to organize their gatherings. A related idea is social swarming, the rapid gathering of friends, family, or colleagues using technologies such as cell phones, pagers, and instant messaging. As the Washington Post noted recently, social swarming "involves sharing your life with others in real time. It means pulsing to the rhythm of life with one's posse." This idea of gathering one's "posse" together (I assume one has to be of a certain age to actually have a posse) has led to a synonym for social swarming: posse-pinging. Social swarming is a special case of the larger idea of swarming, the gathering and moving of people accomplished, once again, using technologies such as cell phones, pagers, and even walkie-talkies. For example, swarming is the modus operandi of the Critical Mass (CM) movement, which describes itself as an "unorganized coincidence." CM events consist of large swarms on bicycles that quickly gather in a location to block or slow down traffic as a way of protesting our automobile culture and to highlight CM's pro-bicycling agenda. Baby Boomer Babies Most participants in a flash mob, smart mob, or swarm are members of what the demographics profession calls the Baby Boom Echo: the children of the Baby Boom Generation. However, increasingly often these days they're lumped under the rubric Generation Y. Why? Because they came after Generation X, the post-boomers born between 1964 and 1977. Demographers, marketers, and headline writers have come up with lots of other names for this cohort over the years, including the Millennial Generation, Generation D (for digital), Generation 9/11, (usually defined as those who were enrolled in high school or college on September 11, 2001), and Generation Next. Inspired by the latter, another name has appeared in the past couple of years, one that threatens to make the others obsolete because it has a "just so" quality that seems to capture this generation's worldview: Generation Text. The name comes, of course, from the facility that today's teenagers and twenty-somethings have with text-based messaging systems, particularly wireless device messaging and instant messaging (the latter supplying us with another generational moniker: Generation IM). This demographic label seems right on a number of levels. First, this is the generation that turned the words text and message into verbs, a shift borne out of linguistic need and the desire for a shortcut term (since IM is all about language shortcuts). Second, this generation is supremely comfortable with this technology and has incorporated it into their lifestyles, to the point where it's as natural and ubiquitous to them as the telephone was to teenagers from a generation ago. No wonder that a few months ago Wired magazine - that arbiter of modern technological taste - pronounced Free Agent Nation "expired," Open-Source Nation as "tired," and crowned a new "wired" phenomenon: IM Nation. This post appeared originally as my Technically Speaking column in the October 2003 issue of IEEE Spectrum. Posted Nov 09 2007, 04:22 PM by Paul with no comments Filed under: Neologisms, Technically speaking

• Our Posthuman Lingo

  Human beings are defined, in part, by an irrepressible urge to overcome our biology. We feel hemmed in and restrained by our bodies and long to break free of our fleshly confines. Like Daedalus and Icarus imprisoned on Crete, we fashion wings out of feathers and wax and use them to fly toward some freer state. Until recently, these wings were nothing but the tools and technologies we use to harness nature and extend or repair our senses. But our imaginations have long fantasized more elaborate schemes: not just guns and glasses but Six Million Dollar Man bionics and Johnny Mnemonic "wet-wired brain implants." However, it may not be long before these fantasies become reality. Joe Rosen, a plastic surgeon, wants to add "wings" to the menu of cosmetic surgery possibilities; cochlear implants enable some deaf people to hear and may soon be used to enhance normal hearing; in 1998, cybernetics professor Kevin Warwick had a chip implanted in his arm that communicated via radio waves with sensors scattered around the building where he worked, thus enabling doors to open and lights to turn on automatically whenever Warwick approached. These are but the first tentative steps toward a radical revision of the human, to what many people are now calling posthuman, an imagined species that will evolve from human beings by manipulating their genetic makeup and augmenting their bodies with robotics and other technology. The posthuman fantasy is an intriguing and frightening prospect that raises complex technological and profound ethical questions. (Icarus, it should be remembered, fell to his death after flying so close to the sun that it melted the wax holding his wings together.) However, my concern here isn't the technology or ethics of posthumanism. Instead, I've come to marvel at the amazing language that people are using to describe this possible future. Ignoring Nietzsche's Übermensch and the similar homo superior from the 1940s, perhaps the first truly posthumanist word was cyborg - cybernetic organism; something that is part-human, part-robot - which entered the language around 1960. MIT's Alexander Chislenko recently proposed a variation on the theme: the fyborg, or functional cyborg, which he defined as an organism with "external technological extensions." The scientist Joel de Rosnay coined symbiotic man, a symbiosis between humans and communications technologies, as well as cybiont, a kind of "macroorganism" that consists of humanity, the environment, and technology. Not surprisingly, science fiction has been a prolific source of posthumanist neologisms. Sci-fi writer Greg Bear has used the term neomorph to refer to a posthuman with a non-humanoid body, while a homorph is a posthuman with a humanoid body. Writer David Brin coined augment to refer to a person whose physical or mental abilities have been expanded using implanted technologies (or imps). A similar term is enhant, a person who has been genetically enhanced. Synonyms for posthumans are exes (ex-human beings) and ultrahumans. (Bill McKibben, in his book Enough, pokes fun at the rampant prefixation in this field by positing that someday we'll surely become "doublesuperultrahuman." In the evolution from human to posthuman, there will be an intermediate form called a transhuman, a transitional human. Note, however, that this word also applies to those people actively seeking or desiring the posthuman condition. In that sense, transhumanists seek morphological freedom, the ability to use various technologies to change their bodies whenever they see fit. They reject biological fundamentalism, the conservatism of those who resist or seek to ban or control these technologies. Of course, the move from human to transhuman to posthuman is not true evolution. Rather, it's post-Darwinian evolution where we "decommission natural selection" (to use Edward O. Wilson's evocative phrase) and rely instead on autoevolution or self-directed evolution: that is, evolution as governed by human beings using technology instead of natural selection. The driving force behind this move to self-evolution is the belief that humans are inherently flawed: we have limited senses, we suffer and, of course, we die. We are mehums - mere humans. So the goal of many transhumanists is paradise engineering or utopian biotechnology, which promises not just a reduction in physical and mental pain, but the complete absence of pain; not just a feeling of well-being, but mental superhealth. One author asserts that we should "design" for our kids "a genetic makeup to ensure every moment of every day is a sublime revelation." We enhance our senses and reduce pain by deanimalizing, replacing body parts with artificial versions. We become immortal either by using nanobots to repair our cell damage or by becoming an upload or a brain-in-a-jar, a human whose personality and cognitive abilities have been uploaded into a computer or some other electronic matrix. Whether you're excited or alarmed by these ideas, the words are worth knowing because we need to talk about where we want to go as a species. We need to take a good look at who and what we are, understand that there's nothing inevitable or unstoppable about future technologies, and then make some hard choices about what comes next. Do we go for the posthuman or do we stick with being what writer Cullen Murphy has called "our pre-posthuman selves"? This post appeared originally as my Technically Speaking column in the August 2003 issue of IEEE Spectrum. Posted Nov 01 2007, 04:18 PM by Paul with no comments Filed under: Neologisms, Technically speaking