30 Jan

Meltdown

Category: Web-related

Eck!

The combination of warm temperatures and the dirt the city puts on the streets to melt the ice has turned the beautiful, snowy winterwonderland of Moscow into a metropolis with a bad case of the runs. I felt like I was walking in a maze this morning as I left the apartment; I had to change my direction multiple times due to the huge puddles of brown, sloshy, muck that blocked my way.

Thanks to the wonders of WiFi, I’m sitting in a downtown cafe surfing the net on my own laptop. I really hope this technology catches on. It would be awesome if someday WiFi became similar to what radio is today, so that we could jump on a WiFi network to surf the web from virtually anywhere. For now though, I can only find four WiFi hotspots in Moscow.

I started classes this week as well as my consultations with an advisor for the research paper on the proposed orthographic reforms of the Russian language. I’ve only just begun my research, but I am excited by the fact that I might get to interview the linguist Lopatin (he is leading this controversial movement) as part of my research.

Posted Friday, January 30th, 2004 at 2:05 pm
Filed Under Category: Web-related
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Responses to “Meltdown”

Chris
February 7th, 2004 at 12:28 am

Hey Tom, are you alright? I just heard about the terakt in Moscow…

Justin
February 8th, 2004 at 11:39 pm

WiFi is cool, but even with WEP encryption, it’s still a bad idea to submit any plain text information over a wireless network. I can’t even count the number of e-mail passwords I’ve seen while sitting on FSU campus with my wireless card in promiscuous mode, mostly from people who unknowingly keep Outlook open. I can only imagine how popular wireless sniffing would be in Moscow.

If your host/webmail/etc doesn’t use SSL to encrypt your login sessions, don’t use them on the wireless network. That goes for AIM/MSN/ICQ, as well, and doubly so if you use the same password for everything.

On a tenuously related note, there’s also good reason to believe that many of the Internet cafes in Moscow record sensitive information from their users, either through keystroke recorders or traffic analyzers on the routers. I logged into YIM from CafeMAX once, and later saw myself log in when I got home. I checked the IP with a Yahoo script kiddie program, and felt my gut churn as I saw that it was from Moscow, Russia. I instantly knew what had happened, and proceeded to change the passwords on every account I could think of.

I wonder how you say “Big Brother” in Russian.

PF
February 20th, 2004 at 4:55 pm

proposed orthographic reforms of the Russian language

!

Could you give us some details?

digenis
February 21st, 2004 at 3:08 pm

PF-

Sure, I?ll elaborate:

A few years ago a committee was formed in Russia to investigate the ?necessity? for a new spelling and punctuation reform of the Russian language. The committee is headed by V. Lopatin of the Rossiskaya Akademiya Nauk. In 2000 they published their suggestions in a project titled ????? ?????? ???????? ????????????. ??????????. ???????????.

Many changes were proposed, but here are a few examples:

???? would change to ????.
??????? and ?????? would change to ??????? and ?????? to be more consistent with Russian spelling rules (they are both pronounced with a hard ?).

Several changes were proposed regarding hyphen usage:
??????? would change to ???-???? (any word with the component ??? would use a be written with a hyphen).

??????????? and ??????????????? would change to ???-??????? and ???-???????????.

However, words like ?????-?????????? would become ???????????????.

There are also some changes proposed to the ?? in long form adjectives. To me, this is probably the most confusing of the new rules. These changes are points 61 and 62-63 of the svod pravil.

You can read more about those changes here and here.

The project was met with a good deal of opposition from politicians, journalists, and linguists who considered it to be unnecessary, untimely, and far too expensive for its own good. Now, nearly four years later, many consider the project practically dead. In reality, the committee is still working on it, hoping that it will be considered more seriously in the coming years (this is not that strange if you consider that the committee that proposed the 1918 reform began the project in 1904, and that work on the 1956 reform began when a committee was formed in 1929).

I?m not arguing for or against this reform in my paper (as a non-native speaker of Russian, I don?t know that it?s my place to do so), but rather describing the conflict and reasoning behind both sides.

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