Talk to me, HAL

Thoughts on language, computer nonsense, and people'in.

[talktomehal]

“Crotch Anomaly”

Is apparently what happened as I stepped through the full-body scanner at DTW yesterday, as relayed to the TSA trainee who was tasked with giving me my first ever full blown pat-down. This is how we say “auf wiedersehen” in America. I say, “That’s no moon...”

[talktomehal]

Hack My Teenage Ghost (Delete your MySpace)

Due to some of the recent / ongoing hubbub over computer security - it’ll sometimes come up in conversation. I don’t think that the one cryptography class that I took in undergrad makes me any kind of authority - in fact, it probably only gives me a false sense of security that I won’t make the usual sort of mistakes online. Cryptography and privacy are both hugely important - but right now I want to talk about cleaning up your messes online. I recently had a deep think about what the hell all of my accounts and emails and everything were ultimately pointing to. On the surface, I use gmail, and my university emails, behind that is another email, and behind that is... ...the aol mail that I made when I was 10 years old Whose password is 6 characters long, composed of two common English words - lowercase. In all fairness, that email account in the middle wouldn’t directly give out what my aol email was - but the whole thing still represented a very weak link, so I cut it out. This led me to think about what else that old aol mail might still be attached to... like... the MySpace page I haven’t used since 2007/2008. I tried to log on with what I figured was my password from then - which didn’t work (maybe I just forgot, maybe not). After going back to aol mail to reset my MySpace password, I wasn’t all too surprised to find that the account had been sending out spam messages to everyone it was still connected to as of last December?!.  I decided I didn’t need anyone being able to use my page and its silly collection of pictures that the NEW MySpace had decided to retain from the bygone Classic MySpace era - and tethering the page to an email that I actually use seemed like too much trouble as well -> so I killed it.  ___ If you go on Facebook all the time and your Facebook gets hacked, your friends will kindly or not so kindly remind you to change your damn password and stop clicking on strange email attachments. You’ll probably know when something happens to your google+ account since it’s tethered to the much more useful gmail. But what about when a service (inevitably?!?) goes by the wayside and is replaced by the next great thing?  Don’t forget to clean up your own mess (if you even can) - or at least lock it down with a good password (that you won’t even have to remember!!) if you’re never coming back. If not, your social media ghost will haunt the desolate wasteland of long gone selfies - a mirror pic of a mirror pic where the comments are all links to malware.

[talktomehal]

The Republicans called today...

Not that that’s particularly newsworthy, or even politically stratifying - the Democrats do the exact same thing. No, the strange thing was the voice.  The call began with the general opening lines “Obama is ruining the country, Hilldog will too...” as are so often voiced in pre-recorded phone messages. I interrupted, asserting that I was speaking with a robot, but the voice corrected me, saying that it was a real person, speaking through a computer for quality-control purposes. Weird. This did not register with me immediately. “Yes,” I thought, “that’s what the robot wants me to think.” We carried on a normal enough conversation, as two people (even as strangers, one of whom is trying to extract some cash money from the other) are wont to do, but something just wasn’t quite right about the voice.  “uh-huh” “yeah”  We say all kinds of little things like that in the midst of a conversation, to reaffirm the other person that we are listening and comprehending. The voice said all of these things too - but the timing was never quite on point. The flow of our conversation was always weirdly stilted.  I had to know who (or what) I was talking to, and so I mustered the first DIY Turing Test that came to mind:

“Which is bigger, a hippopotamus or a dog?”

The voice responded, “A hippo... I am a real person, but I am speaking through a computer for quality control purposes.”

“Oh.”

I got sort of excited at this point, and I told the voice that I was really fascinated by the whole technological aspect of the interaction that we were in the middle of having, but that no, I wasn’t about to give any money to the GOP and that I hoped the voice would have a good day. The voice then (perhaps via the press of a large red button) launched into the closing marketing spiel, and the call was done. (There was even some canned laughter in the midst of the unscripted part of our conversation). 

That’s the thing - apparently it’s the same damn voice regardless of who is making the call. (Naturally, it was a male sounding voice). I’m not sure what considerations went into the particular choice that they made, or whether or not there are a range of options used for different demographics (and again, how this is playing out on the other side of the political landscape), but the end result was more than a bit unsettling. 

I wish I could remember any particular details about the voice’s dialect. I don’t know a ton about text-to-speech programs (or enough about phonology/phonetics at the moment) - but something of the sort must have been employed, unless perhaps the GOP is considering tossing a toupée on a hippo and calling it a dark horse candidate _1 - necessitating the inclusion of an even larger “HIPPO” button on the telemarketer’s control panel.  _1((bad etymology jokes))