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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday May 08 2019, @02:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the equal-opportunity-dark-net dept.

The Tor Project, which created the Tor browser and administers it to this day, says it isn't surprised or takes issue with the CIA using its software.

"We believe onion services are a key next step in securing the web, similar to the standardization of https as more secure configuration than http, so it[sic] that sense, it is not a surprise that the CIA would want to take advantage of the privacy and security protections that onion services provide," said Stephanie Whited the communications director for the Tor Project in an email to Motherboard. "Tor software is free and open source, and so anyone can use it, including the CIA."

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xwnyew/the-cia-will-use-its-new-dark-web-site-to-collect-anonymous-tips


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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday May 08 2019, @03:28PM (6 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 08 2019, @03:28PM (#840811) Journal

    Don't we have nouns on the internet anymore?

    The internet stopped having nouns when Alexander Haig [wikipedia.org] introduced the remarkable modern invention of verbing a noun, as I just did there.

    Prior to that an emergency supply of nouns could be airlifted / airdropped in, but if that happened today, they would all get verbed remarkably quickly.

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday May 08 2019, @04:09PM (5 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 08 2019, @04:09PM (#840830) Journal

    That wasn't introduced by Haig. I think it was George Bernard Shaw who first said "you can verb any noun in the language", but that this was at the end of a sentence, whose front I can't remember. Unfortunately, when I searched this topic was drowned by more recent re-uses of the quote from multiple sources (including "Calvin and Hobbs").

    A paraphrase of the quote I can't quite remember the source of was "A remarkable thing about English is that you can verb any noun in the language", but since that's not a direct quote I don't know how to search for it.

    One reference I found https://epdf.tips/why-we-talk-the-evolutionary-origins-of-language-studies-in-the-evolution-of-lan.html [epdf.tips] said: "Take the English noun ‘verb’, which can function as an adjective in ‘a verb phrase’; and as is well known, in English ‘you can verb any noun’—water and house can mean things or actions."

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    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday May 08 2019, @04:21PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 08 2019, @04:21PM (#840840) Journal

      Maybe Shaw first properly explained it while Haig first practiced it in public.

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    • (Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday May 08 2019, @10:26PM (3 children)

      by Arik (4543) on Wednesday May 08 2019, @10:26PM (#841056) Journal
      It's a characteristic of the old proto-germanic language that English (and a few others) descend from. Probably of some other languages I'm not familiar with as well, but it is particularly salient as a characteristic of the Germanic tongues in Europe, because it contrasts with the Romance tongues in a context where Latin was for centuries the measure against which other languages were judged.

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      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday May 09 2019, @04:21AM (2 children)

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 09 2019, @04:21AM (#841197) Journal

        Do you know of any other words that follow the pattern:
        Sing, sang, sung, song?

        Bring, brang, brung, brong fails. And for some reason my spell checker only recognized the first of that series. When I checked Google it was of the opinion that the past was brought. Well, ok, but that takes it totally out of the pattern.

        Hing, hang, hung, hong fails. Only the middle two words fit. (But for some reason the spellchecker liked "hing". The problem is "hang" is present tense.)

        It feels like that four step "tense" should be a standard form, but I haven't been able to find any backing for that feeling.

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        • (Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday May 09 2019, @04:56AM (1 child)

          by Arik (4543) on Thursday May 09 2019, @04:56AM (#841206) Journal
          "Sing, sang, sung, song?"

          The last one doesn't actually fit (though I get that it looks like it should.)

          The form of song doesn't actually reflect a regular inflection like sing/sang/sung. It wore down over time from something like *sangwaz which is a form exactly parallel to singing. Sang+waz being equivalent to sing+ing today. Sound changes then sublimated the second syllable, assimilating it into the initial vowel essentially, to get us near the modern form.

          Once we clip that false friend off, there are several parallels for sing/sang/sung. As you say, bring/brang/brung. Ring/rang/rung comes to mind as well, and fling/flang/flung.

          Hang/hung is a little different, obviously, since there's no hing and never was. Again, the word actually has a different history, even if the forms currently look similar. In protogermanic I sing/I sang/I sung would have been something like *singwo/sangw/sunganaz - the pattern we have today is still recognizably related to that. But I hang etc. would have been something like *hanho/hehanh/hanganaz which just doesn't. In protogermanic they were verbs of different classes so they conjugated very differently.

          Sometimes words start out similar and become unrecognizable over time - sometimes the opposite occurs, one changes to more closely imitate the other.

          "It feels like that four step "tense" should be a standard form, but I haven't been able to find any backing for that feeling."

          I don't think you will.

          Let me point out this is actually not exactly what we were talking about, btw, though clearly related/apropos. We were talking about verbing nouns. Song is an example of the opposite - nouning verbs. Nouning verbs is much less controversial, since Latin permits it. The regular way to noun the verb sing produces 'singing' but there's also 'song' - essentially just an older variant of the same thing.

          We have a lot of those in English - pairs of words that are essentially synonyms. Well used they give great scope for nuance, but poorly used they just make the language more difficult and confusing.
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          • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday May 09 2019, @04:30PM

            by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 09 2019, @04:30PM (#841386) Journal

            Yes, but it's specifically the four part match that I was looking for.

            And the claim that it has a different history is, essentially, irrelevant, though interesting. But much of language has a tangled history, and usually a lot more tangled that those tidying up afterwards care to admit. The parts that stick are the parts that fit. If you go back a ways you'll find things like "axen" and "shoen". They didn't fit, so they didn't stick. I'm not really convinced that common words change more slowly than uncommon words, I think rather that changes to common words are less likely to fit, so they get dropped.

            E.g., I can easily imagine a time when "bing", "bang", "bung", "bong" was a legitimate four-pair. The meanings would be roughly:
            bing: The hitting of something resonant.
            bang: The sound that something resonant has been hit.
            bung: Evidence that something resonant was hit. (see "bung hole")
            bong: The sound produced by hitting something resonant.
            The precise definitions need a bit of work, and they were shaped to match currently existing residues, so the tenses aren't quite right, but that's a form that could have fit and been accepted. It didn't, in this reality, as at least "bing" didn't stick. The others may well have totally separate sources, but that wouldn't keep them from being pieced together, and once pieced together they might well have stuck. Ancestry be damned, people speaking a language at any one time don't really know or care about the ancestry of the words they use, merely that they fit together well and be useful.

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