overstated

Do you ever feel like your cat can read your mind? Mine can, but that’s beside the point. I think this “technology” that they’re calling “T9” is actually a lot more sophisticated than I’ve given it credit for. In fact I would go so far as to say that “T9” isn’t “predictive,” it’s “mind reading.”

A little bit of background at this point would help. I hate eggs. Don’t get me wrong, I love to bake and I’ll even eat french toast, but the sight, smell and texture of cooked eggs has always made me gag. I have distinct childhood memories of being given eggs and wanting to yack. My mom even says that I used to spit them out as a baby (before the memories started). And I’m not militant about it—I have nothing against people who like to eat unborn fetuses.

Another piece of context that might be relevant to the story (it’s coming, I swear) is that while in Ireland recently I became a pretty skilled text messager. I’m not quitting my job as a grad student just yet, but I can walk down the street, write text messages without looking, and avoid traffic, all while juggling and eating ice cream. But seriously, I don’t look at the phone anymore, I just proof let T9 do it’s business and proof the message before I send it.

So I’m walking home today and a friend sends me a message that she’s looking for some eggs. Of course I keep eggs around for baking purposes, but I don’t really use them that often, and I don’t know how old they are. So I write her a message to convey this information, and this is what I got:

Which of course is not what I meant to write, but by golly, it was nearly coherent and pretty much true. The real message, after a couple of corrections:

I’ve come into some pretty funny T9 substitutions in the process of writing messages, but this is the god darndest, most stupifying experience I’ve ever had. T9 people, I bow down to you.

Come on, we all have a reason to hate the Lakers. If it’s not Rick Fox and his beautiful wife, well, it’s Rick Fox again with his I wear a facemask because I don’t want to hurt my beautiful smile attitude. Or maybe it’s the way that they always squeak out a lucky victory that makes you want to rethink statistics. Or how about Rick Fox? Did I mention Rick Fox? Well, I hate to break it to them, but if you flip the coin enough times, eventually it’ll come up tails, and the entire country will rejoice in your defeat.

The only other dynasty in my sports-watching years was the Bulls, a charismatic team led by a charismatic Michael Jordan. When MJ pulled up for a jumper at the buzzer you were convinced the Bulls would pull it off, and that luck would not be a factor. How can two teams so similar in prowess create such a different reaction from America? My answer: Rick Fox.

I watched the Blazers lose three rough playoff battles (well, rough for me) to the Lakers, and that kind of anguish is bad for a player like Rasheed Wallace. This guy already gets technical fouls without agitation, and you make him guard Mr. Myself-AND-Vanessa-Willams-think-I’m-hot Rick Fox, and you’re bound to give the poor guy a heart attack. It gave me such pleasure tonight to watch Rasheed embarass the Lakers (and Rick Fox) wearing a Detroit uniform. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a team in sports as widely hated as the Lakers, and with this defeat I feel like we can all go to work tomorrow with a little less tension in our shoulders. With only one technical foul tonight, it might even add a few years to Rasheed Wallace’s life (courtesy of Rick Fox).

I feel like my Bayesian spam filter is winning the arms race against spammers, or at least making the filtering process managable. One of the side effects of having my mail presorted is that I can evaluate which of my email addresses are attracting the most attention. Over the past few months I’ve been watching this statistic very closely, and found that two addresses produce an overwhelming majority of my garbage: mit.edu and uchicago.edu. The irony there is that I never use either address. Where are they harvesting my email from? My best guess is finger.

While companies tend to use more sophisticated directory systems, most universities use finger as an open white pages for students, faculty and administration. In the stone age of the internet, it was ostensibly the only way to find a person’s email address, and it still remains as the most effective means of tracking down a user of an academic network. In most cases, all one needs is a first or last name and the university they work for. On most unix systems, simply typing name@host.edu will return a list of entries in the host.edu database matching "name."

This is a veritable gold mine of data for spammers: current students that will be graduating at some point, starting families, and needing loads of xanax, valium and viagra to cope. All the spammer has to do to tap into the finger database is know a first or last name, query the server, and take the email address. Or, alternatively you can just finger all of the names, ranked in descending order of popularity thanks to the 1990 census statistics. Since Cameron is the 336th most common name, it’s no surprise that I’ve been getting a flood of email from my fingerable addresses.

MIT does provide one level of indirection by giving each user an alias, mine being C-marlow. If you turn around and finger C-marlow at mit.edu, MIT responds with all of my contact information. I am in no way a privacy pundit, I just don’t appreciate getting unsolicited email. At this stage in the game, it seems to me that finger must die. Schools that still want to provide a directory service should do it through a web email interface, obscuring the addresses of students and employees. Otherwise they threaten to render their email addresses useless by serving them up wholesale to spammers.

While walking home from work the other day I passed a group of guys emerging from a pizza joint. After a few handshakes and goodbyes they parted ways and made arrangements for their next meeting. And then one of them yelled across the street, "something me on Thursday." His friend looked a little confused, but I knew exactly what he was talking about. He added, "IM, call, email… I don’t care."

Despite our proximity to MIT, these guys did not strike me as the type who wear t-shirts that say Go away or I’ll replace you with a simple shell script or tote around Leathermans in their utility belts. These were just normal people with too many ways to talk to each other.

I’m guessing that we have reached some saturating point in communication technology where the actual medium itself has become unimportant. When I thought about the expression, "something me," I realized that we don’t have a satisfactory, general expression for communicating in our common vernacular. It seems like an issue that will only become more important as we add media and devices to the current equation, but at current I can’t come up with anything better. If you have a better idea, something it to me.