Valde Mirum

Posted on August 19, 2014 by Michael Froomkin

This is soooo weird: Krebs on Security, Lorem Ipsum: Of Good & Evil, Google & China.

This entry was posted in Cryptography, Internet. Bookmark the permalink.

One Response to Valde Mirum

  1. Vic says:
    August 25, 2014 at 2:44 pm

    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.

Comments are closed.