Security, Information, Code

cats/dogs: for eliza,

" (Tourist Traps): Online commercial sites, including eBay, MySpace, and Amazon, have employed acrobatic ciphers as police, a fully achieved “implementation of a writing that is only cipher, not meaning” . Cognitive recognition of a sign’s assimilation into pixilated mutation is now even used to programmatically refuse non-human inquiry; password discovery must correctly reaffirm the sign, suggesting that this ability is stable, natural and a definitive qualifier of human vision. Perhaps in a pluralistic attempt to account for the visually disabled, one may also choose to listen to a polyphonic, anonymous, and fragmented dictation of the code. Human to human security is enforced as computer language is inverted to police itself. The cyborg orators collide in sterile recitations, vocal mathematics, numero-sadean fantasies of forced and necessary intercourse."

From: Poetry in /BIG>
On Literary Code and Informative Text
Eliza Wicks-Frank, December 2007 [1].



A new cipher (above) demands that you only type the symbols that have a cat climbing on them. The other beasts resemble puppies, although sign-semblance is really not the crux of the code here. In typical US security fashion, measures are ritualized and performed to create the feeling (and this use of semblance may be appropriate) of security, particularly of one's private property on the internet: personal information. The practical effects of the cumbersome puzzles hardly "measure up" to the cracking abilities of global spam-ers and credit hackers, much in the same way that the flu vaccine must evolve every year to combat the increasing strength of the immune virus (in relation to the exponentially decreased strength of the infected's immune system). Requiring consumers to identify characters on a linear plane and then re-type them gives each individual on the net another minute to abstract the process of their financial, or "personal" disclosures; one extra click secures the consumer of their own identity online. Only in the time between the previous page and the loading page does one have to reflect on the actual dispersal of property-information. The next page insures an eventual return through 2-3 day shipping.

[1] The code in Eliza's title is not able to be shown because it does not constitute a legitimate html read-able code or recognizable letters.