WordWacky

It’s an old trick, the dictionary hack. Hook up a server login page with a dictionary file and run all the words as passwords until you hit something. In this case, the program got to “H” for happiness, before the server opened up and all of the Twitter goodies fell out.

It’s not that impressive to me that the perpetrator was 18. Who else has all that time to spend, just to misspell Bill O’Reilly’s name on the FOX Twitter stream and let us all know he’s gay. What is impressive to me is that the security was so lax at Twitter that this was able to happen.

Via Twittown:

The details of the rudimentary hack reveal a startling lack of essential security within Twitter’s halls, and raises eyebrows about the potential for Twitter to be marketed as an internal collaboration tool for business use. The so called dictionary-hack has been a mainstay of hackers for decades, and the servers should have been configured to recognize the repeated login attempts. A lack of strong password enforcement (ensuring that passwords are complex) and a failure to “lock out” accounts after multiple failed attempts are a breeding ground for would be hackers and crackers - with a situation like that, it was only a matter of time.

As far as hacks go, this one was relatively harmless (though the Twitter execs trying to monetize the service may disagree with me on that point). Nobody’s bank account was drained. Nobody really believed O’Reilly was being outed by FOX News.

What’s interesting to me is how we use words as code. When we type them over and over into a server to get access to a website, they lose their meaning. Do you think that whoever set the “happiness” password felt happy every day while he or she typed it in? Devoid of context, words become little more than letter patterns, in this case motor commands from the brain. If there is any meaning, it’s “let me in, already.”

Say a word again and again, until the syllables run together, and you have a group of circular phonemes, not a word at all. (What the hell does “Om mani padme hum” mean, anyway?)

Names have a similar sort of meaning transfer. When I took the name Ruby, I thought a lot about its meaning. Now I rarely think about it, and I’m sure when my wife hears the word Ruby, she thinks of me before she thinks about a red stone with the hardness of nine mohs.

I am a word addict, but of all the qualities of words, the one I like best is that they mean something. They are the most basic metaphor of our human lives.

If there’s a moral to this story, it’s don’t use common words as passwords. I would argue further that we should not use anything with meaning as a password. Let’s keep those meanings sacred, shall we? After all, 8-letter/number/symbol patterns are infinite. The number of words in any dictionary, on the other hand, is decidedly finite.

Listening to NPR on the way to work this morning, my wife and I heard Ammon Shea, author of Reading the OED on Morning Edition. That book’s been on my reading list for awhile, as I am a fellow logophile who has been tempted to get neck deep in at least a few dictionaries, the venerable Oxford English Dictionary included.

The segment, which you can listen to on NPR’s website, is on the word bailout. The reference is to the dispute over whether or not the U.S. government is bailing out Freddy Mac and Fanny Mae by effectively taking them over with a large cash infusion.

As we probably all know, words have some weight, and I believe the argument is over whether or not the Treasury is putting too much into a lost cause. What Ammon Shea concludes is that whether or not you like the word, it’s appropriate to the situation — and you can tailor your definition by choosing the dictionary from which to draw its meaning.

Says Ammon:

Those who oppose the plan can point out that the Cambridge Dictionary of American English defines bailout as “the process of saving a company, plan, or other thing from failing by providing lots of money.” This would bolster their claim that the Treasury is subsidizing poor business practices and potentially throwing away billions of dollars that could help needy Americans.

Treasury secretary Henry Paulson could counter with the definition from the New Oxford American Dictionary. A bailout can also be an instance of giving assistance to a failing economy. That would bolster the claim that the government is acting to save the larger economy, and not simply trying to help the privileged few.

The dictionary wars continue on, and if you’re like me, you quickly lose track of which side is which, as the meanings blur together and collide.

For me, the most interesting part of the dictionary is not the fine lines between one meaning of a word and another, but the etymology of the word. In this case, the etymology is not out of current usage. To bail [out] still means the same thing it did when first used in the 1600’s: to dump water out of a boat that is leaking. The alternative, of course, is obvious — the boat would sink.

As an aside, I did learn about a new dictionary from the segment, the Merrriam-Webster and Garfield Dictionary. Who’s Garfield, you ask, and how did he get in on that exclusive dictionary team? Well, he’s a cranky orange feline, of course. [Editor's note: Personally, I prefer Garfield Minus Garfield.]