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The Code-Breaking Women Who Unmasked Soviet Spies
- dingaling 8y agoHeadline should read 'The female cypher-breakers who...' I do hate such abuse of language. Would the Smithsonian have written 'a man mathematician'? Of course not.
- Spoygg 8y agoI'm not English native speaker, why is it abuse? There is also book "Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II" that uses the same term.
- mjw1007 8y ago"Female" is an adjective and "women" is a noun. In English you can very often use a noun to qualify another noun (like in "house brick"), but it's rare for "A B" to mean "B which is an A" (more often it's something like "B for an A" or "B concerning an A"). The form "Woman X" is relatively recent (it's appearing because using "female" for humans is becoming mildly taboo), so it seems odd to someone who isn't used to it.
- pvg 8y agoThe terms aren't perfectly symmetric and interchangeable so the Smithsonian is doing the sensible thing to avoid making it sound like they're talking about some species of fish.
- chongli 8y agoThis has started to crop up because the term female has taken on negative connotations. Similarly for girl. Thus woman is becoming the all-encompassing word in a way that does not parallel the male terms.
- oytis 8y agoJust curious: what are negative connotations of "female"? I'm not a native speaker.
- rhapsodic 8y ago>Just curious: what are negative connotations of "female"? I'm not a native speaker. I am, and I'm not aware of any. But if there are, they probably grew out of the weird taboos that, in some segments of English-speaking culture, tightly control what terms one is permitted to use when speaking about gender-related issues. Most of us, fortunately, don't consider ourselves bound by these taboos.
- chongli 8y agoIt's very subtle. "Females" is a term used for women in some of the seedier corners of the internet. It implies grouping women with female animals rather than grouping them together with men as human beings.
- enriquto 8y agoI have read your comment several times and still fail to find any meaning to it. Is it some sort of joke/sarcasm ?
- chongli 8y agoIt's completely sincere. I have seen it happen plenty of times. A quick search and perusal of the headlines backs me up. [1] [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=referring+to+women+as+females&t=iphone&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=referring+to+women+as+females&t=ip...
- leereeves 8y agoSeems to be an extreme fringe position supported by a few articles from Buzzfeed, Jezebel, The Root, Reset Era, a YouTube video, and a reddit post with 7 votes. The rest of the results are about calling women "girls" which can be offensive for obvious reasons. Perhaps you could point to a specific example where "it implies grouping women with female animals rather than grouping them together with men as human beings."
- gsich 8y agoIt's a problem of the english language. But it's stupid nonetheless.
- dang 8y agoAlright, we've given you "code-breaking women" per teddyh below. All: please step away from the title now. There's an interesting historical story here and no need to fill the thread with smoke.
- funkythings 8y agoWhy does the gender matter? I hate headlines like this
- kathydenver 8y agoGender matters because it was men who led the world into cold war (and most wars for that matter). Women helped bring peace. That is still true. Can you not see that?
- pvg 8y agoThe article talks about it. Right near the beginning "Enrolled in beauty school after graduation—cosmetology being one of the few fields open to women in the 1940s" or "At the peak of the Cold War—which was also the peak of the baby boom, an era when American women were urged to spend their lives as homemakers"
- funkythings 8y agoI get that. These types of headlines tend to try to highlight the fact, that these programmers are WOMEN. Well, yeah, ok, I don't care, and people shouldn't care, if programmers want to have an "inclusive" community. Do you understand where I'm coming from?
- pvg 8y agoDo you understand where I'm coming from? I do. You should try to get to a different place.
- funkythings 8y agogreat discussion
- pvg 8y agoIt's more of an exhortation.
- DoctorOetker 8y ago>Into the 1970s, certain key Soviet wartime agents remained unidentified; even then, only selected portions of nearly 3,000 messages had been read. Customer agencies—the CIA, the FBI and agencies in the U.K.—wanted the messages mined as long as they might yield something, but in 1978, the NSA evaluated the likelihood of any more matches and decided to phase out the program within two years. If it's declassified, are the raw cipher publically available (the decoded and nondecoded ones)?
- DoctorOetker 8y agoI don't see any bulk ciphertext dump yet, but conclusions after analysis seem to be available at https://archive.org/details/thevenonafiles&tab=collection https://archive.org/details/thevenonafiles&tab=collection If anyone knows if the raw ciphertexts with metadata (say date, source/"lane") are available please share! I think it would be more fun and educational to exercise on real quasi-OTP ciphertexts...
- belorn 8y agoA common practice after the second world was that everything got burned in order to prevent war from accidentally reigniting. Would be interesting to know how much of that practice was used after the cold war.
- DoctorOetker 8y agoit's often depicted in movies (hastily burning paperwork when the area is being invaded), but I always thought this was to destroy evidence of any war crimes.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kathydenver 8y agoLove it. Men gave us cold war. Women gave us a way to end it. More like this please.