Monday, August 18, 2014

Are Google's überGeniuses Playing With The Tin-Foil Helmet Crowd?

When it comes to breaking news stories, I have observed that the first news stories are generally misdirections, and that it takes time for the real stories to unfold. Late last night, my favorite hard-core/right-on-the-money security blogger Brian Krebs broke a highly unusual story about how Google Translate fleetingly turned the Latin-to-English translation of the placeholder phrase "Lorem Ipsum" into modern geopolitical ideas, depending on capitalization, etc. (see the story here). Here is a snippet of variations from the article:
Until very recently, the words on the left were transformed to the words on the right using Google Translate.
Until very recently, the words on the left were transformed to the words on the right using Google Translate.
My own comment posted on the Krebs site sums up my "alternative theory" of the phenomenon:
Alternative theory: From my misspent career as a guerrilla warfare ad man (and my dalliance as a novelist) another possibility is that Google is having some fun with the tin-foil helmet crowd.
I would term the Google Translate story as "the displacement activity of Google übergeniuses having some fun." Furthermore, I posit that the pranksters are probably Chinese employees.

My own displacement activity manifested itself in my first novel, Destroying Angel, in which one of my characters spoke only in palindromes (sentences that read the same forward and backward). It would often take me a whole week to write one coherent of dialogue. Why did I do this? Because I wanted to "suspend reader disbelief" that my character was an off-the-charts genius who was capable of creating a self-aware/self-conscious AI program that could modify itself on the fly and take over the world.

Hence, I would place pretty good odds on my Google Translate theory. But time will tell, and I leave it up to Brian Krebs to follow this story to…The Truth.
 

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Implementation suggestions for THE MORGAN DOCTRINE are most welcome. What are the "Got'chas!"? What questions would some future Cyber Privateering Czar have to answer about this in a Senate confirmation hearing?