[Corpora-List] Hacked email accounts

[Leon Derczynski]

Hanlon's razor certainly has its applications.

On 29/08/11 15:41, John F. Sowa wrote:
> On 8/29/2011 9:37 AM, Krishnamurthy, Ramesh wrote:
>> In 1991, I went to Buckingham Palace to receive a prize on behalf
>> of Cobuild. Although I knew it was probably against regulations,
>> I took photos of the inner courtyard, and a corridor with some
>> extremely valuable paintings. At the cloakroom, I was asked to
>> leave my raincoat and my briefcase (which now contained my camera).
>> A few days later, I got the roll of film developed at a local chemists
>> in Birmingham. The prints came back, but the final photo in the set
>> was of the outer courtyard. Neither the negatives, nor the sheet
>> of 'thumbnail' prints, contained any blank items... they had
>> somehow been selectively deleted....
>
> People constantly complain about bumbling governments that cannot
> compete in technology with private enterprise. Yet they somehow
> attribute miraculous powers to those same governments. Just think
> of the number of miraculous steps that would be required in 1991:
>
> 1. The amount of time, effort, personnel, and technology required
> to scan all items left in the cloakroom by all visitors, detect
> possibly suspicious contents, examine those contents, remove
> deeply hidden content, and reassemble the items in such a way
> that visitors would not suspect any tampering.
>
> 2. Even today, there is no known technology that can scan an
> undeveloped roll of film, display all the contents without
> disturbing the emulsion, but somehow delete some content
> while retaining the rest.
>
> 3. A more feasible method would be
>
> a) Remove the film from the cameras of some or all visitors.
> Then while they are visiting, develop the film and scan it
> for suspicious images.
>
> b) Use some photographic method to transfer a stream of just
> the innocent images to a fresh roll of film of exactly the
> same brand and type and place it back in the camera.
>
> I'll admit that method #3 would be technically feasible, but only
> at a very high cost and with very sophisticated technology and
> highly competent and dedicated personnel working with high speed
> and efficiency on items that are of minimal threat to the security
> of the government or the royal family.
>
> The inefficiency of the London police during the recent rioting is
> typical of how how large bureaucracies (governmental or commercial)
> work. I suspect that a nervous photographer who thought "it was
> probably against regulations" forgot to reset some latch or feature
> of the camera that prevented the film from being properly exposed.
>
> John
>
> _______________________________________________
> UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
> Corpora mailing list
> Corpora at uib.no
> http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora


-- 
Leon R A Derczynski
NLP Research Group

Department of Computer Science
University of Sheffield
Regent Court, 211 Portobello
Sheffield S1 4DP, UK

+44 114 22 21931
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~leon/

_______________________________________________
UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora