taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Spam: The EFF are a great organisation — damn, I even helped set up an organisation based on its goals in Ireland, back in the day! But this white paper is shockingly clueless.

(Note: this posting has been updated. Original left intact, but there’s an update below worth noting.)

For example:

Spam Assassin, a popular program that does ad hoc pattern matching, assigns ‘points’ to various features of an email to determine whether it is spam. … One of the major problems with this system is that messages from certain countries — like China, for example — can be blocked purely on the basis of where they come from and what language they’re in. The implications for free speech here are very troubling indeed: … thus anti-spam technology unintentionally works as a political censorship mechanism.

SpamAssassin does not give points for country of origin, or language the message arrives in, unless the user explicitly either (a) adds rules from an external source, or (b) modifies the ‘ok_languages’ setting in their configuration, from the default, to specify that they do not want to receive messages in particular languages. No country- or language-blocking happens by default. This is by design.

It’s a shame that the authors felt the need to outright fabricate a danger, here.

The white paper features more broad generalisations about ’spam filters’, mostly using unsubstantiated friend-of-a-friend stories, without detailed data. And I do know that there have been cases of MoveOn.org, at least, being a source of UBE, in the past — so it’s not valid to claim that this is all a ‘free speech’ issue; political UBE is still spam.

They need to realise there’s a lot of very smart, very reasonable anti-spammers out there, and most of us agree with the rest of their goals, except for their spam position. This is hurting them.

Still, it appears they’re finally getting a clue about requiring subscription requests be confirmed using closed-loop opt-in, so that’s good. More political newsletters, and political campaigns, need to get this clue — just because it’s political speech does not mean it’s not spam. (I have several thousand political spams in my spam folder — most from that German anti-immigration virus from earlier this year.)

Note that Rod is unsure if they’re practicing what they preach…

Update: Annalee Newitz has been in touch, and pointed out that the white paper in fact says ‘mails … can be blocked’, rather than ‘are blocked’ based on country of origin. In other words, it’s purely a matter of this being possible, rather than the default, and that administrators apply these customisations.

In addition, she notes that the conclusions recommend that ISPs and administrators of spam blocking systems allow end users to control their own filtering settings, saying ‘If a user wants to block all mail from China, great. If a sysadmin does it for a bunch of users without permission, then that is a problem in our opinion.’

So I agree with that. Misdirected outrage hereby turned off ;)

(Mind you, I still think they need to work more with the reasonable anti-spammers… and fix that unconfirmed sign-up that Rod mentioned, if it’s really still unconfirmed!)

Tags: country, default, eff, example, language, organisation, paper, source, spam, speech

Funny: via swhackit! — Language registration: en-Spam-porn:

‘One is very much tempted. It is certainly a unique orthography.’

Indeed. When I was offered “[t]ons of dwolnaoadble mvoies, pohtos and sotires”, I quickly read past “mvoies” and “pohtos”, but was stumped for a while by “sotires”. Perhaps I was blocked by interference from “satires”.

But I think that registration will fail, because there are no descriptive works provided for the Language Tag Reviewer to consult.

Tags: en, funny, interference, language, orthography, registration, reviewer, spam-porn, swhackit, tag, while

Language: So, here’s a word worth noting — ‘Neverendum’. This Guardian article notes:

(Quebecois politician Mario Dumont’s) meteoric ascent is a sign of how weary voters in the French-speaking province have become about what has been dubbed the ‘neverendum referendum’, the debate over whether Quebec should become a country. It has dominated Quebec politics for three decades.

It looks like Ireland’s ever-recurring referenda (motto: ‘if at first the Government fails to get their desired result, try, try again’) have driven the word into usage over there too, judging by this Irish Family Planning Association press release:

‘The idea of holding another pro-life neverendum is clearly ludicrous and serves only to distract from the daily reality of Irish Abortion.’

And there’s even a song, referring to the Nice referendum:

‘The Government should not patronise us but should respect the views of the people,’ he said. Or, as he puts it in verse, ‘What part of our No don?t they understand?’

Tags: article, ascent, government, guardian, irish, language, neverendum, politician, quebecois, referendum, word

Language: AussieInAmerica on {up,down,mid}town:

Something that is common here in Atlantic Canadian and northeast American small cities is to refer to the CBD (or city centre/downtown) as ‘uptown’, especially if coming to the city from its environs. BUT… once I am ‘uptown’ , I would then refer to my location as ‘downtown’. In other words, ‘uptown’ is the city centre/ CBD only if you are not there yet. ‘Uptown’ becomes ‘downtown’ once you arrive there. AND, since many smaller cities have one main street that leads in and out, if you head out of ‘downtown’ up that street you are going ‘uptown’. Follow? It works for us and I can’t recall any confusion.

(Author:) Hmm, I’m glad you folk have got it sorted out! I am reminded of Grover’s existential crisis on Sesame Street as he was coming to grips with ‘here’ and ‘there’. Every time he pitter-pattered over to ‘there’, it turned into ‘here’.

Great site. Some pretty good Strine, too — ‘Jeggoda Sinny?’ really is a common query!

Tags: aussieinamerica, but, cbd, centre, city, downtown, language, something, street, town, uptown

If you plan to get a tattoo in a language you don’t understand, this should serve as a cautionary tale. (via the forteana list)

Tags: forteana, language, list, tale, tattoo

The Rockall Times reports that Mel Gibson is to shoot Finnegan’s Wake in Hittite:

Highly talented Hollywood all-rounder Mel Gibson is to direct a film version of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake made entirely in the ancient Anatolian language Hittite, we can reveal.

Respected linguist Gibson — whose flawless Scottish accent in 1995 epic Braveheart wowed audiences worldwide — has further stated that the film will carry no subtitles. Hopefully I’ll be able to transcend language barriers with visual storytelling, he told a press conference. People think I’m crazy, and maybe I am, Gibson added. But maybe I’m a genius.

Hollywood agrees. Take any project, stick Mel’s name on it and you’ve got a surefire blockbuster, the film’s producer told The Rockall Times. In any case, we’ve rewritten the script to include a suitable anti-English imperialist slant and a couple of big battle scenes. That’ll pack ‘em in. …

Gibson hopes that the success of Finnegan — Cry for Freedom will enable him to bankroll some of his other pet projects, including a Inuit remake of Bridget Jones’ Diary and his eagerly-anticipated Macbeth, set in 1970s Belfast and spoken entirely in Etruscan with Sanskrit subtitles.

Tags: anatolian, film, finnegan, highly, hittite, language, rockall, times, version, wake

Microsoft’s Spanish thesaurus, included in Word for Windows 6.0 in Mexico, contains some unfortunate synonyms:

• Indian: man-eater or savage
• Western: Aryan, white, civilized
• Lesbian: pervert, depraved person

That would be the risk when you use a mid-1930s source document, it sounds like!

Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 13:42:02 +0100
From: Barbara Barrett (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected) (spam-protected)
Subject: Micro$oft’s Spanish language problems

——– Original Message ——–

Microsoft Apology for Errors in Spanish

MEXICO CITY (Reuter) - Microsoft Corp, the world’s biggest software company, apologized Friday to Mexicans for “grave errors” in its computer thesaurus that equated Indians with cannibals. Several Mexicans telephoned the company to protest after a newspaper reported Wednesday that the Spanish thesaurus included in Microsoft’s popular word processor program Word for Windows 6.0 contained some unfortunate synonyms. Used by up to 200,000 people in Mexico, a country whose population is mainly descended from Aztec and Maya Indians, the Microsoft program sugggested as alternatives for the word “Indian:” “man-eater” or “savage.” Consulted for synonyms for “Western,” the Spanish language program gave “Aryan,” “white” and “civilized.” Lesbians were equated with “pervert” and “depraved person.”

“Microsoft Mexico offers an apology to its users and to the public in general for some grave errors in the synonyms of the Microsoft Word dictionary in Spanish, whose mistaken connotations are offensive,” the company said in a full-page newspaper advertisement published Friday. Microsoft Mexico marketing manager Alejandra Calatayud said the company was dispatching a language expert next week from its software development center in Ireland to discuss changes to the thesaurus with El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico’s most august cultural body.

“We accept our responsibility and hope to have a new version of the dictionary available in about five weeks,” she told Reuters. The revised version will be made available free of charge via the Internet. Ignacio Blum, Microsoft Mexico’s product manager for office products, told Reuters that the computer thesaurus was based on existing dictionaries. “If you check these words in most dictionaries, you will find the same definitions,” he said.

Mexican politicians and intellectuals condemned the pejorative computer thesaurus anyway. “I see this as profoundly dangerous because it is a lack of respect for our dignity as Mexicans and for our indigenous roots,” said Adriana Luna, an opposition party congresswoman on the lower house’s culture committee. “We must give battle to combat this specter of conservatism and fascism which is appearing all around us” Florentino Castro, a legislator from the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), was quoted as saying in the newspaper La Jornada. The English version of the Microsoft Word program does not give the same synonyms. Homosexual was equated with “gay” or “lesbian” and Indian was “cave dweller,” “ancient tribe” or “aborigine.”

Tags: company, language, microsoft, person, pervert, program, thesaurus, western, windows, word