

Art project adds tinge of terror to everyday email - blahedo
http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2013/10/art-project-adds-tinge-of-terror-to-everyday-email.html

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cperciva
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.

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cstross
Yup. See also: [http://catb.org/jargon/html/N/NSA-line-
eater.html](http://catb.org/jargon/html/N/NSA-line-eater.html)

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

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slowmover
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.)

~~~
shabble
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...](https://github.com/shentonfreude/dot-
emacs/blob/master/yow.lines) 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.]

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hamiltonkibbe
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

~~~
shabble
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 :)

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forgetcolor
direct link to the project (as opposed to the article about the project):
[http://bengrosser.com/projects/scaremail/](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.

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Sagat
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.

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

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

~~~
zacharydanger
As if they're _not_ already logging all emails.

