FYI - !b404

["Rob, grandpa of Ryan, Trevor, Devon & Hannah" <rMslade () shaw ca>]

An interesting study.  As one who has published an infosec dictionary, I've seen, 
first hand, how fast our technical jargon has changed (and often degraded).  The 
effect of the technology, and the pervasive nature of the changes, is intriguing.

Highlights:
 - new communications technology, particularly text messaging abbreviations 
(textese), creating new terms entering the language
 - errors by the technology ("predictive" numeric keypad text interpretation of 
"book" instead of "cool") creating new slang (book now means cool or good) *
 - terms from local technologies (the Oyster card error codes) are entering the 
language more broadly
 - testese messages take longer to read, and generate more errors

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7775013.stm
ftp://ftp.royalmail.com/Downloads/public/ctf/po/TechChat-Draft2.pdf

(Unfortunately, a link to the Australian study seems to be missing.)

Relevance to security?  Well, I don't agree with the final statement in the BBC 
story.  Any change to the language that increases the error level in 
communications has got to be dangerous.


* I've heard my grandkids say this, and wondered where it came from.  The 
technical reasons for this are fascinating in themselves.  Predictive typing 
technology is based on the numeric keypad equivalent of words, and is based on 
the frequency of word usage in English.  "Book" and "cool" are equivalent (2665) 
on a numeric keypad.  In general English, book is going to be the more widely used 
word, and so the algorithm chooses book first when you type 2665.  However, 
textese is used by teens much more widely than by the rest of the population, and 
I am morally certain that teen textese uses cool much more frequently than it uses 
book.

I am also interested in competition in terms of the acronyms.  LAMP has been 
widely used in technical (and particularly online) circles to refer to the use of 
Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python/Perl for the creation of Websites.  It is 
interesting to note a completely different use of LAMP in the financial arena.  
(We already have a similar confusion of SOA depending upon whether the speaker 
is from the BS 7799/ISO 27K community [statement of applicability, aka scope] 
or the ITIL tribe [service oriented architecture].)

======================  (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer)
rslade () vcn bc ca     slade () victoria tc ca     rslade () computercrime org
Solve 90% of the problem as simply as you can, and then remove
the other 10% from the problem requirements.         - Marshall Rose
victoria.tc.ca/techrev/rms.htm blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/author/p1/
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