Art project adds tinge of terror to everyday email | Hacker News Reader

Art project adds tinge of terror to everyday email

blogs.chicagotribune.com

14 pointsblahedo12 comments

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.

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

I still score geek points when I demonstrate this function to other Emacs users. I wonder if the word list is still maintained. Last time I checked it was getting a little dated.

Also, please bring back M-x yow. (I know, copyright this and that, etc.)

It's still there afaik, but you need to download the `yow.lines' file separately and put it in the right place or M-x customize-variable yow-file to point to it.

https://github.com/shentonfreude/dot-emacs/blob/master/yow.l... seems to contain a copy, and google finds a whole bunch of others.

spook uses the same format as yow[1], so you can dump your favourite PRISM-related OCR nonsense.

[1] M-: (find-file spook-phrases-file)

[Looks like you need to run M-x spook at least once to get autoload to set things up, at least here.]

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

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 :)

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.

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.

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

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

As if they're not already logging all emails.

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