5.0199 Responses: PC Discussions; E-Mail Security (2/40)
Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Thu, 27 Jun 91 14:51:10 EDT
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 5, No. 0199. Thursday, 27 Jun 1991.
(1) Date: Thursday, 27 June 1991 0125-EST (16 lines)
From: KRAFT@PENNDRLS
Subject: PC Discussions
(2) Date: Thu, 27 Jun 91 08:54:09 MDT (24 lines)
From: koontz@alpha (John E. Koontz)
Subject: Re: 5.0194 ... E-Mail; ...
(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thursday, 27 June 1991 0125-EST
From: KRAFT@PENNDRLS
Subject: PC Discussions
One place to stalk recent discussions of "PC" and
related issues would be commencement addresses by
various personages this past graduation. It was a
topic here at Penn (Sheldon Hackney, building on
the marvelous Doonesbury strip depicting a University
president reduced to silence by attempting to conform
to PC demands/expectations), and also at Yale, I'm
told, and doubtless in numerous other such situations.
Now, exactly how to get at those speeches may be quite
another problem -- campus newspapers often have ceased
functioning by graduation time, etc.
Bob Kraft, UPenn.edu
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------32----
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 91 08:54:09 MDT
From: koontz@alpha (John E. Koontz)
Subject: Re: 5.0194 ... E-Mail; ...
David Barry comments:
> ... I would point out that the sheer volume of mail is liable to protect
> against the nosiness of the systems programmer!
Note necessarily. There are available now applications that search a
text stream and extract textual units that contain certain words or
collocations of words. They are used to search documentation and
on-line news feeds, and could easily be used to search email feeds, too,
I think. One that I'm thinking of, called TOPIC, published by Verity,
allows users to collect libraries of such search patterns (called
`topics') and assemble them into a personal interest profile. While
definitely not marketed as a tool for spying, TOPIC could be applied to
the task quite nicely. I wish to emphasize that TOPIC is simply the
example I recall, and is not sold as spying tool. It is one of a number
of competing products (not so far removed in concept from the humble
Unix utility grep), all quite innocently targeted at reducing large
bodies of text to the parts that interest particular persons. In the
long run I am sure that it will be possible to do the same sort of thing
to audio transmissions, too. Big brother is quite possible, and fully
automated!