Art project adds tinge of terror to everyday email

http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2013/10/art-project-adds-tinge-of-terror-to-everyday-email.html

by blahedo • 13 years ago

14 12 13 years ago

blogs.chicagotribune.com

cperciva• 13 years ago

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose... when I came online in the early 90s this was already something people had been doing for a long time.

cstross• 13 years ago

TeMPOraL• 13 years ago

And M-x spook, available in Emacs since time immemorial.

aaronem• 13 years ago

Cute, but pointless; I strongly doubt the NSA's recognizers are naïve enough to be confused by random verbiage of this sort.

zacharydanger• 13 years ago

As if they're not already logging all emails.

forgetcolor• 13 years ago

direct link to the project (as opposed to the article about the project): http://bengrosser.com/projects/scaremail/

the artist uses NLP in Python to do analysis of an original text (Fahrenheit 451), uses that to swap out nouns/verbs with "scary" versions, then uses Markov chains on the fly in Javascript to generate unique scary stories for each email.

Sagat• 13 years ago

I find such "artistic" projects to be contemptible. If you want to change society, you have to go through political, legal or commercial challenge, otherwise you will be ignored. There are already too many smug artist types who take up causes; your message will thus be drowned out.

pessimizer• 13 years ago

Or technical challenge, which a program that inserted suspicious text into government monitored email would be.

hamiltonkibbe• 13 years ago

I always thought a better way to chaff the NSA/whoever would be sending off a bunch of emails with -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- and a bunch of /dev/random nonsense

shabble2• 13 years ago

And/or occasionally generate some fairly weak throw-away keys, and use them to encrypt jpgs of lolcats, or something.

Bonus points for "Hi there! NSA" steganographic embedding inside that :)

Art project adds tinge of terror to everyday email

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