Are you being hacked?

The word 'hack', and derivatives thereof, get thrown around a lot these days.

It's a popular word that is becoming increasingly meaningless.

People use it to cover a lot of different behaviors and activities. It seems to be most commonly used these days to refer to finding an account open. It's kind of like claiming that someone broke into your house when you left the front door open.

People also use it to describe scam accounts, 'parody' accounts, and other doppelgänger (I love that word) accounts on social media sites. This isn't really hacking either. It's more of an old school con with new toys, and is pretty easy to do even if you turn your security settings up. If this does happen to you, I recommend following this link. More often than not they're used for marketing scams, but are occasionally used for more malicious activities.

As a result of all of this, the term 'hacking' is wearing a little thin. I'm all for the evolution of language (and 'hack' has done its fair share), but at some point we should restrict the number of definitions we offer up for a single word within a single arena.

I'm more on board with the 'life hack' use of the word, as it is more in line with the usage that led to the definition that I'm complaining is currently in the process of being bastardised.

There is a great history of the term in one of the books I have floating around. I did spend some time looking for it before I started writing this, but I was unfortunately unable to find it. If I find it. I will share the title of the book with you.

Hacking Facebook is very difficult, and something that Mark Zuckerberg has been known to take very seriously, but 'hacking' Facebook is very easy, and is something that is more often than not wholly reliant on somebody leaving their account open.

Look, those are the two far extreme ends of the 'unwanted access' spectrum, and there are a variety of 'hackings' that can go on in between the two. Some of these aren't really hacking, and some kind of are. For the most part we, as individual users, are only really capable of protecting ourselves from the one end of the 'hacking' spectrum, and the rest is up to the people that provide the service.

In the Facebook case, their end of the spectrum is relatively tight. They appear to be pretty good at it. I'm not privy to what's actually going on over there, which is fair, but they look like they know what they're doing.

Your end is probably another scene entirely. Maybe not yours specifically, but yours generally.

There are a few things that you should be doing, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. This is just a good place to start.

Always log out properly

Whenever you use a computer that other people might be able to access, log out of Facebook (or other service) properly. Once you have logged out, delete the history, and close the browser. Then reopen the browser, and go back to Facebook (or the other service) to make sure the password hasn't been 'remembered'.

This isn't fool proof. Actually, far from it. It is better than not doing it though.

Don't use public computers

Don't log-in to anything on a public computer. Don't check your e-mail. Don't check your Facebook. Don't check on your World of Warcraft anything. Absolutely never do online banking on a public computer. Even if you are in the habit of logging out properly, there isn't much of a guarantee that there aren't key loggers on the machine, or something else with a similar purpose.

If it is an absolute emergency, and you really need to check one of these things (not your bank account) you should change your password on a trusted computer as soon as possible afterwards.

You shouldn't be doing it in the first place though.

Don't reuse passwords across services

This is a really big problem. I'm not gong to explain it. I'm going to let xkcd explain it for you

http://xkcd.com/792/

Funny comic. Serious problem.

Even if a site isn't out to get you, you have no idea how good/bad their security is. It's that weak link in a chain metaphor that people are prone to harp on about. This same metaphor is good for talking about the one person on your network/system who has atrocious password practices. 

Don't write down your password

I wouldn't have even mentioned this one, except that it came up recently when I found out that it is being taught at my brother's expensive high school as a way of remembering passwords. No!! Bad expensive high school. Very bad! 

This is ridiculous. Don't ever do this.

This is an absurd habit to get into, and is an incredibly irresponsible thing to encourage others to do.

I could tell you stories. Crazy stories. Instead, I am going to tell you about a very dumb thing that I did.

Some years ago when I started a new job, and I was inundated with nine logins with random string passwords in two days, I wrote down three that were behind other logins. That is just an excuse, and it was still a super stupid thing to do.

Well before the end of that week I had changed the passwords to something else, and left the note in my top drawer as a reminder that I am very often prone to doing incredibly stupid things, where it was found at a later date by the data manager in our office. How embarrassment!

Remembering a multitude of passwords is a good skill to cultivate, and is something that will become even more relevant in the future.

It is better to be inconvenienced by forgetting a password than to make it accessible to others. Especially in a professional scenario where there is an IT department who can reset it for you. They do have better things to do than reset your password, but I promise you that they'll be far more annoyed if they ever have a serious breech.

There is this whole problem with this too, in that I would frequently argue that the security checks used to reset a password are far too often incredibly insecure. That is a story for another time though.

There is this whole misconception about password strength anyway, which is covered pretty clearly by this xkcd comic on password strength.

http://xkcd.com/936/

I guess the real takeaway from all of this is that you should be reading xkcd. It/he is the business. You will be totally emsmartulised. Also, it is funny.

Cleverness is the wombat's cummerbund. It increases one's nattiness.

Time Jam: Valerian & Laureline

I came to Valerian et Laureline comics through The Fifth Element, which might be a whole other story. The first few that I had access to were in German, and in the end most of the rest of the ones that I read were in German too. This was partly as a result of so few being translated into English, but it was mostly the result of the apparently minuscule print runs of the English translations. In the end it was easier to make use of the eleven years of German I endured and just order them from Germany.

It probably would've been even easier to order them from France, but I can't read French. I've had about two hours of French, and this came way after the whole thing had already happened. I like to think that my parents chose German over the official language of the UN because they foresaw the establishment of the European Union, and its eventual transformation into the Germany & Friends Club. As related as second language choices are to this particular tale, this is more about other things.

The other day I was all like, "Hey! take a look at this looming Space Dandy thing!", and there was something about its "crazy pulp science-fiction" that reminded me of Valerian et Laureline, and their animated adventures in particular.

Now, the trailer for Time Jam: Valerian & Laureline included above is in English, but I have never personally witnessed evidence that the series is actually available in English. I've read reviews, and seen the shells of once active streams that assure me that it is a real thing that really happened, but I've only seen it in French with German subtitles. I also haven't seen all of it. What I have seen is quite good. I like it. It's about this time travelling guy who breaks the timeline with a redhead. Sirs and madams, I shit you not. That is the actual plot from which they extract forty episodes. The time travelling guy (Valerian) finds this redhead (Laureline) in the past, and then takes her into the future. When he gets back to the future he finds that he has done the timeline a fairly solid mischief and the Earth is missing. He then opts to keep the redhead over restoring the Earth to its rightful place. This is some fine opting. Honestly, I think we've all been there. If we're being honest though, I should point out that there isn't really any opting. His time machine won't do its time machine thing, so he is just kind of stuck with her, but he doesn't complain much. He does actually complain a lot.

Shut up! I forgot where I was going. It was something along the lines of: Read the comics and/or watch the show, because they're great. Except I would've said it in a clever way, but you might have to do that for yourself this time around. I'll do my best to pick up the slack next time, but this one is on you. I was also going to work in this whole thing about this guy I met in India who named his daughter after the heroine from these comics. That's how good these comics are. He seemed like a really normal, straight-forward kind of guy at that. He was French. I'm not sure how I would've worked it in though, but that's your responsibility this time. 

"The best co-op, 3rd-person, fantasy, puzzle-strategy-defense-shooter of 2012"

The quote is mine. I wrote that. I wrote it is a jab at the way 'genres' and 'categories' are listed on Steam. I like Steam, but their publisher assigned genres and categories are basically nonsense now. Some people seem to just tick every box on the back of "Yeah, it's got some of that".

As I have previously mentioned, I do understand the need to make these distinctions, but there are times when it gets a bit out of control. My rule of thumb: if your 'genre' reads like the response to "give a description in twenty-five words or less", then you need an editor. When it comes down to it, do you need all of those words? Are they all required to get players into what your pimping? Historically, I have played a lot of fighting games, and when a new fighter comes out I give it a look-see. The term 'fighter' is enough in that regard. I have a look and I read some reviews and I then start to think about the expanded terminology. Is it a technical fighter? Is it a team-based fighter? Is it a true 3D fighter, or is it 2.5D? While these terms are useful for fighter community discussions, I don't want to see the next King of Fighters referred to as a 2D, team-based, technical-franchise-fighter every time anyone talks about it. Apart from the fact the entire King of Fighters series can be described in this way (except the first where you would switch out 'franchise' for 'cross-over'), it isn't really a super useful genre, because it is a very small party.

As it happens the English language, out of habit more than anything else, will usually find a term for something when the party gets large enough. It is a linguistic blob, amorphously digesting anything it comes into contact with, press-ganging the required vocabularic DNA into sometimes bold and unexplored usage. When it's stretched it will even mutate new words from what ever it can find. It'll take a noun and make it an adjective, or a noun and verb it. Sometimes stick words together (compound words), and sometimes jam them together so hard that some of the letters pop out (portmanteau, which is itself a metalanguage term that is a loan word from French that originally referred to luggage, and was itself a portmanteau before we had a good word for it).

Video games are a relatively recent thing (when compared to art and literature), and we are filling out our glossary nicely. We have terms like metroidvania (portmanteau), tower defense, roguelike (compound word) and mmorpg (acronym) which my friends pronounce as 'more-pigger'. When the time comes that we absolutely need a term for games like Morrow Wind or Skyrim that aren't acctually part of the Elder Scrolls series, we will more than likely use a term like 'scrolls' (plural), and not first-person-hacktion-adventure-fantasy-RPGs. As a species, we're too lazy for that kind of tongue-twisting tomfoolery.

The title was in reference to Orcs Must Die! 2, which is hands-down the best co-op, 3rd-person, fantasy, puzzle-strategy-defense-shooter of 2012. No competition. It is also a fantastic game.

Means? Justified!

Anyone who has been, has had or has known of a teenage boy anytime in the last two decades can attest to the life consuming talents of videogames.  Somewhere along the line of one of the aforementioned was some kind of educator, or perhaps just a doe-eyed idealist who believed that there was some positive lesson to be taken from the beast and reapplied to a productive purpose and educational videogames were born.

For decades edutainment in all of its forms has generally been regarded as a fool's errand.  The kind of thing that committees push at board meetings six months before their entire department/company is looking for new jobs as they watch whatever isn't nailed down get sold off to pay each hand that is owed.

It could be argued that there have been some few success stories in the past, like the Carmen Sandiego  games that sometimes came packed with single volume encyclopaedias, but for the most part any educational content in a game that could be be deemed even remotely entertaining was purely incidental.

Then there was Duolingo.

Duolingo launched just over a year ago, and comes at it from a different tack.  Instead of starting from a desire to entertain, it starts with those core game mechanics that not so subtly engage our pavlovian responses.  The very same ones that have been employed to encourage us to drop coin to reach the next level or earn extra skills in World of Warcraft or Farmville.  Except Duolingo has a far more insidious agenda.  Polyglotism.  Yeah!  I'm not kidding.  They actually want you to learn and use languages other than English.  In the real world!

Whatever you do, do not go to duolingo.com and sign up to learn French, Spanish, German and/or Portuguese for FREE in an addictive format that will leave you conjugating verbs in your kitchen, on the bus  and in front of your children/parents.  You'll tell a friend and they'll tell a friend.  Lovers will meet up in darkened hotel rooms to master German nounal genders while the muted tv flickers in the corner washing their multilingual debauchery in a pallid light.   This is a disease.  This is a danger to all people.  Languages other than English could become an epidemic.  Imagine the havoc that would be wrought if this kind of thing were to spread. This is the nightmare.  The one they spoke about.

Duolingo is crack for people who like to travel.




For 10 points: An english word that pluralises by inserting the 's' into the word instead of at the end.

Cultural Invader J

I am a student again. This was an ongoing state for me for some eighteen years.

I am training to become a linguistic missionary so that I can take part in what remains of the great English tradition of imperialism.

"You there, boy! Speak as I speak. Don't worry though, we will take some of your words like thieves in the night. We will sprinkle them throughout our own dictionaries as exotic linguistic gap filler. In decades to come most people will only guess that they were once yours by the awkward spelling. We will however have smoothed out your nasty little tripthongs by then. Run now! Tell all that you see!"

An unrelated note:

I am continually frustrated when clever premises for films trade off the original ending for something more salable. Minority Report is a film that often springs to mind when this topic comes up. In this Spielberg creation the premise simply acts as the set up for a series of chase sequences. The ending could be on the end of another film, and you probably wouldn't notice. I am bothered by this, because the source material has a fantastic ending that ties directly into the premise and the themes, and leaves you thinking "Well...shit!" (in a good way).

I bring this up because Total Recall is being remade and it is another film that is guilty of this story telling faux pas, though to a lesser extent. The ending in the original "We can remember it for your wholesale!", like in "The Minority Report", is a much neater fit with the premise (and themes). That said, Total Recall is one of my favourite films, despite its many flaws.

I will make time in my schedule for the remake.

For other examples of this see:
Repo Men (which suddenly becomes Abre los ojos/Vanilla Sky)
The Island (which makes a half hearted fourth quarter return)