Today I learned: A canary trap is a technique to identify an information leak by giving different versions of a sensitive document to several suspects and observing which version gets leaked. I was familiar with the technique, but I’d never heard the name before, and I was ignorant of the technique’s hist... mitchw.blog: mitchw.blog

@MitchW yes, sometimes techniques synonymous for a generation lose temporal connection to those with similar effect or intent, a ‘honey-pot’ was something else, now an easily cracked software container, and later will be something else again :-)

@bkryer What was the previous meaning of honeypot? I think of it now as an easily cracked service that alerts you to the presence of an attacker. A spamtrap is a kind of honeypot, or at least related.

@bkryer I think that was a honey trap.

@MitchW sure. pot, trap, box, bag, just make sure they’re in!

@MitchW Not happy about how flippant my initial response was—Are you working on authentic dialog, or locking down common regional usage, or something else entirely…? I play fast and loose with jargon if it sounds right to me…

@bkryer I just stumbled over the wikipedia page for “canary trap” in my web wanderings, thought it was interesting, and shared it. That’s about it. :)

@MitchW Cheers! I just really can’t get enough of this kind of stuff, jargon and argot and slang, especially in the domain of computing and espionage and related. Interesting anthropological data: spam is canned meat, then an absurdist insider joke, now the ’proper’ term for unwanted electronic messages. Later it might be “our bodies when asleep, ’I spammed out for 12 hours!‘”

@bkryer I’m absolutely with you on that. I’m a tech journalist and marketing writer. Funny thing: I love some of the jargon that makes many of my colleagues cringe in revulsion. For example: “Productizing” and “actionable.”

@MitchW Used by some, hated by many, familiar to all.

Verbify the Nounification? Adverbiatastic!

@MitchW What I meant, of course, was to adverbially nounify the verbification.

Not that it wasn’t crystal clear in the first place, but ridding our utterances of any last vestiges of agency is a preoccupation of self proclaimed problem solving
communicators everywhere. When this device is used for that end, I too recoil.

Otherwise, verb on peeps, verb on!