Fanboy Scouts has launched a series of Merit Badges for Geeks including achievements for Speedster, Mt. Doom, Tie Fighter Pilot, Away Team, and more.- Privacy in terms of contextual identity. How you present yourself to your friends is not how you present yourself to your colleagues, and what you’re willing to share in each context is going to be different.
- XKCD is probably right about the future of “old-timey” speech. “Forsooth, do you grok my jive, me hearties?” We have a hard enough time getting the mid-twentieth century right, and that’s with people around who lived it!
- Darryl Cunningham debunks the Moon Hoax in comic-strip form.
- The new Kindle looks nice. They’re starting to get to the price/feature/polish point where I’d be tempted. (Well, except for that pesky DRM…) Also, Amazon launched Kindle for Android recently, but I haven’t tried it out. While it will run on Android 1.6, it’s a bit big for my G1 unless I clear out some other apps.
Tag: language
Links: Yen Droid Mobile Woot Quake!
I’ve always wondered how the name of Japan’s currency ended up meaning “craving” or desire in English. It turns out to be coincidence, probably from the Chinese yáhn or yin, “craving.” Word of the Day: yen.
TweetUp acquires Twidroid and changes its name to Twidroyd “to ensure minimal confusion with products from Lucas Films.” Fortunately no one will mistake Lucas Films for Lucasfilm…
Last month, KTLA reported on a 3.3 earthquake in the Inland Empire. “Dozens of residents” in the region felt it. Dozens! Wow!
I have to agree with @rzazueta: Woot’s Amazon buyout report is an instant classic (via @boingboing)
Chart of the Day presents: What people are actually doing with their cellphones (aside from talking) based on a Pew survey on mobile internet use. (via @ThisIsTrue)
Tile Will Call
I wasn’t aware that the term “will call” was used outside the theater industry, but a quick search on the term indicates that yes, it’s used in other industries to refer to a place where buyers can pick up merchandise.
According to Wikipedia, the term’s origin is in the usage, “I will call on you,” in the sense of physically visiting someone.
The Thirteenth
It’s not off to a great start, but heres hoping today is less frustrating than yesterday.
Was hoping for more than 30% chance of rain, esp. the way TV news was going on last night w/LIVE DOPPLER 2000! Where’s that “Weird Al” Yankovic vid?
Appropriate. Today’s Word of the Day is triskaidekaphobia.
Slowest Patch Tuesday update ever. Of course that’s partly because Norton decided to run a full scan DURING the update.
Patches did eventually finish, but it took >1.5 hours to install them. Usually if I start it before lunch, it’s done when I get back.
Someone searching for “old photos of shoreline village long beach” hit this photo…taken last week. Oops.
What the Heck is a “Pilule?”
Spammers have been using misspellings, synonyms and malapropisms for years now. Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of Viagra/Cialis/etc. spam using the word “pilule” instead of “pill.” At first they’d just find misspellings for the drug name, but I guess some filters are blocking or scoring on “pill,” so they’ve substituted words for that…including the hilariously ironic “soft” as an abbreviation for “soft tabs.” (Comments on this post are going to give Akismet a workout, aren’t they?)
Anyway, I found it odd that so many different spams would use the same obfuscation, particularly since it looked like it was just adding letters. So I looked it up.
It turns out that pilule is a real word. According to Merriam-Webster, it entered the English language from French around 1543. Sadly, it doesn’t refer to a cute magical creature, but to a small pill — which means that (wonder of wonders) the spammers are actually using it correctly!
One question remained: was it simply an obscure word, or an archaic one? I did a search on Google Books and came up with mostly medical texts dating from the 19th century. Just about every match in the first 15 pages was either:
- An English-language medical text published between 1830 and 1930.
- French.
The few cases where I thought I’d found a more recent reference turned out to be reprints of older material.
So it looks like the word died out (in English, anyway) during the 20th century until spammers exhumed its corpse and pressed it into service.
Side Note: Twitterspam
On Friday, I posted the discovery to Twitter on @lol_spam, then retweeted it on KelsonV. Within 15 minutes, lol_spam picked up 45 new followers and KelsonV picked up 40. They were all obviously bots:
- From the time that the second post was made, each of them followed both accounts, making it obvious they were automatically following based on a keyword search.
- They all used the same scheme for the user name (first name + first 2 or 3 letters of last name + short number).
- Many of them shared name components, as if a random generator were taking a list of first names and a list of last names and mixing them together.
- None of them had posted a single tweet. I suspect that if I’d been foolish enough to follow any of them back, they would have started spamming me with links via direct message. (I caught a subtle one last week: someone had posted a series of inane tweets for the first couple of weeks, then switched to all tooth-whitening links.)
- Several profile photos appeared on more than one account.
- Many of them were following upwards of 1,000 users. (After the first few, I stopped looking at the numbers.)
- All of them claimed to be women. (A majority? That I could believe. But every single one of them?)
I will give them credit for using ordinary-looking snapshots of women with a wide variety of appearances, rather than going for the lingerie, downblouse, outright nude (the spam filters are going to be busy, aren’t they?) and other sexy (or “sexy”) poses that usually show up on these. They actually looked like photos real people might use on their profiles.
Nice try, spambots.