This is soooo weird: Krebs on Security, Lorem Ipsum: Of Good & Evil, Google & China.
Recent Bluessky Posts- Jotwell Torts: Gregory Keating, Sponsoring Torts: Reconceptualizing Platform Liability, JOTWELL (January 13, 2026) (reviewing Jordan Wallace-Wolf, A Novel Tort Duty for Platforms that Intermediately Produce Real World User Interactions, 18 J. Tort L. 439 (2025). ), torts.jotwell.com/sponsoring-t... January 13, 2026 Jotwell
- “On the one hand, it feels weird to say the US government is attempting some low-key ethnic cleansing. On the other hand, we have a masked secret police force attempting to kidnap brown people; one government agency daydreaming about deporting 100 million people…” open.substack.com/pub/thebulwa... January 13, 2026 Bill Kristol
- Every day, something vile. But even in that context this has to be special. Esp since Trump says he's running Venezuela. January 13, 2026 Michael Froomkin
- "Papers please". Putin would be so proud. Good to see that the victim had no truck with it despite the threats. January 12, 2026 Michael Froomkin
- Jotwell Legal Hist: Samy Ayoub, Equality Before Law: Just Zionism, Political Liberalism, and the Question of Palestine, JOTWELL (January 12, 2026), legalhist.jotwell.com/equality-bef.... 1/2 January 12, 2026 Jotwell
I think the explanation is quite simple.
That text, in it’s full version, is used in (among many other places) Latex typesetting software, which is used by all kinds of people that might be writing things about Nato or the Internet. When used, you often will make mock documents, fill it out with that text to see how they look, etc. Then you add in your REAL text as needed. I have numerous examples of this on my computer that I’ve used over the years.
It is 100% conceivable, if not inevitable, that examples of the above-described before and after, have been scanned by Google. maybe they were posted on line. Maybe they were emailed. Maybe they were in an on-line how-to page for typesetting. Maybe maybe maybe.
Then Google’s autonomous, apparently self-teaching software linked a default text to some completed documents and “learned” how to translate that text – leading to the odd results you cite.
The specific details are unknown, but that’s almost surely what happened.
The bigger issue is that Google IS scanning this stuff. This isn’t proof of anything going on with Google Translate, it’s proof that nothing on-line slips by Google’s gaze – and that’s far scarier.