Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 

apport coven defrost petulant diagram arrack longevity

This morning, I am admiring the variety of words that are coughed up in spam headers, designed to trigger some curiosity or response, and also find something that might deceive a filter into misclassifying these little missives as friendly.

I suppose it is working -- all of these words are in subjects that made it to my inbox.  My favorite quarantined subject for today, beside a pot full of banally unimaginative ones, is "Aren't you tired of these messqages [sic]."

Those of this entry's subject have me think of refrigerator-magnet poetry, the little word scrambles that you can find on a Riverside Drive apartment door and on a California Avenue restaurant cash register where we create fly-by literary experiences while waiting for our take-out. A different wiki experience.

Which has me thinking about one-time pads, having just set down Tom Clancy's Red Rabbit.  I suppose we could hypothesize a scheme where spam zombies are used for secret communication in some nefarious scheme (or a wonderfully crafted hoax e-mail intended for the conspiracy-minded) and the words aren't really words at all, but codes that look like, well, spam.  A modern-day tribute to those great World War II personals read over the BBC.

What I was really thinking about one-time pads is that they are considered, in the setting of Red Rabbit, as the best device for secure communication involving a shared secret, the pad itself.  We're told that one-time pads are a bitch to use (unless you trust your computer to be a secure space, and these days, who does that?) but marvelous to produce with Reagan-era technology, according to Clancy's offerings to the gods of verisimilitude: "A computer system used for taking down the dot-dash signals of International Morse Code was connected to a highly sensitive radio tuned to a frequency used by no human agency, transforming the garbage noise into Roman letters.  One of the technicians at Fort Meade remarked along the way that the intergalactic noise they were copying down was the residual static produced by the Big Bang, for which Penzias and Miller had collected a Nobel Prize a few years before, and that was as random as things got--unless you could decode it to learn what God thought, which was beyond the skills even of NSA's Z-division."  I like that "no human agency" bit.  Of course, the SETI grid is predicated on it not being quite as random as all that, yet maybe e-t has to piggy-back in the entropy to winkle his mail through the spam that we and every other marginal intelligence is spewing into the heavens.

I wonder what "apport" is, and can you drink it with "arrack?"
posted by Dennis at 5/21/2004 08:58:48 AM