Monday, October 19, 2009

Conspiracy!

Many programs, including facebook, sometimes ask you to type "random" words to confirm your identity as a human being. Are such words, however, really random? Or are they, in actuality, evidence of facebook's intelligence--and maliciousness?

Take a quick look at Exhibit A, a photo a friend posted from a performance in Utah County:




Now look at Exhibit B, the words Facebook made me type to confirm my recent comment:



Coincidence, or conspiracy?

8 comments:

  1. When I posted a link to this post on facebook, it made me type "childe cellar." Ask yourself: are those also "random" words--or are they some sort of twisted threat?

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  2. Now this photo your friend posted...Is that photo really of you? You really do look homeless in it. I've heard that being homeless can actually bring in a higher income than blogging...you may want to at least consider it...say in NYC.

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  3. "Mirti" was what I just had to type in to post. And as everyone knows (at least everyone who has searched it on Google) Mirti is a leather company in NYC. Your point is proven!

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  4. Conspiracy, always conspiracy. As a culture of voyeurs we are obsessed with conspiracy because that is the one window we can't peek into. I also suspect that the social panopticon that is Facebook is the latest version of the New World Order.

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  5. Does "pingshi" mean anything? I'm doubting this theory of conspiracy since I'm only ever given nonsense words.

    Oh dear. Does that mean I am all nonsense?

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  6. Just went to facebook to announce the return of the blog after an apparent two-week hiatus and got the words "miking one." I'm assuming this is a reference to microphrones, and facebook use 'k' instead of 'c' to avoid confusion with mice.

    What I can't figure out is if facebook was trying to win back my trust by pointing out that it is helping empower me to spread the blog's messages, or whether "miking one" is a reminder that whatever I say online, facebook is somehow listening.

    So if you are listening now, oh piece of Mark Zuckerberg's soul that has taken on new and potentially menacing life in electronic form, please try to be clearer in your cryptic messages. They don't work if we don't understand them.

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  7. Google's confirmation words are almost always nonsense, while Facebook's are almost always words. This leads us to two potential conclusions:

    a) Google is not a conspiracy.

    b) Google encrypts its messages, proof that it is an even more malicious conspiracy than Facebook.

    As KP notes, conspiracy is meant to be inscrutable. The fact that Facebook shows it's nature so directly proves that they're either not a conspiracy, or not very good at it.

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  8. OK, just posted the link to the Vampioneers movie promo on my own and some friends' pages and got things like "shameful under" and "Bronte haves."

    KP, this conspiracy is a window I'm peeking into all the time lately. Do that make it no longer a conspiracy?

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