2 ms·
Not exactly on topic, but historical context maybe: Long ago (early 90s?) when it was guessed/assumed that intelligence agencies were scanning emails, emacs was
by jpmattia 6y ago
Not exactly on topic, but historical context maybe: Long ago (early 90s?) when it was guessed/assumed that intelligence agencies were scanning emails, emacs was still among the best ways to read and send email. So emacs provided a handy function to append a random list of "hot" words to each outgoing email in the signature, just to degrade the signal-to-noise of such surveillance.
It's still there today, and you can see the output via M-x spook.
- ianmcgowan 6y agoThat used to be the case on usenet too - people would put attention-grabbing words in .signature as "NSA Food" - to overwhelm the NSA data capture algos. It seemed like a futile gesture even at the time, but particularly poignant looking back from a post-Snowden world.
- eternalban 6y agoThe real poignancy is the shift in hacker political views. Call it post-software-is-sexy world. Those usenet sigs were by hackers who lived in a world where software engineer or programmer were social reject code words. That world changed after geeks came into money. Suddenly but soon thereafter, paranoia about privacy was rewarded by tinfoil hats. (And then yes, years later, came along this guy called Snowden.)
- shervinafshar 6y agoSuch an interesting context. Thanks for sharing this. I appreciate the nostalgia poetics of this today.