Verity is the pseudonym of a programmer based in the UK. She can be contacted at [email protected].
"'Microsoft has eliminated words from its thesaurus so as to 'not suggest words that may have offensive uses or provide offensive definitions for any words.' Entering a word like 'idiot' yields no hits in Word 2000 unlike the numerous hits in Word 97. I don't think there's anything evil here..."
—SlashDot's CmdrTaco,
citing a New York Times story
(http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/26/1334257&mode=thread)
It was a bright cold day in April, and Winston Smith's WatchMeFone.net was "striking" 13 times. Actually, it was only 7:00 am, but Winston had set the time zone wrong when he installed the latest upgrade, and he didn't know how to set it right. It was best not to question the configuration of software if one could avoid it. Winston cursed and broke into a stumbling trot. He was late for work. Grunting with effort, he managed to reach the glass doors of a large, ugly building: the Ministry of Truth. As he entered the lobby, a breeze stirred the 60-foot banner suspended high above from the roof. The three oh-so-familiar slogans of the Ministry were printed across the banner in huge letters:
REGISTRATION NOT LEGISLATION
MONOPOLISATION IS INNOVATION
WHERE DO YOU WANT TO GO TODAY?
The outside door swung shut behind him, locking him in. Winston went over to a corner where sat, behind a thick glass screen, a uniformed security guard. She stared at him accusingly for a moment, and then spoke into her microphone.
"Friendly greetings, colicensee. Please share your identity and intention."
"I am 190.168.12.203 Smith. I desire entry to my workplace."
"Please supply a corroborative genetic sample and enter your Passport password."
Winston spat into a small sink in front of him and typed briefly at a small keyboard mounted into the desk. A printed sign by the sink quoted one of the Ten Immutable Laws of Security to be found at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/columns/security/10imlaws.asp:
Absolute anonymity isn't practical, in real life or on the web. Now wash your hands.
"Thank you colicensee. You may proceed." The interior door clicked, and Winston scuttled through to the main part of the building. In the atrium, a throng had gathered before the enormous screen in preparation for the Two Minutes License.
"Hurry up Smith, you're late. It's beginning!" A few notes of music played over a tannoy system — an earlier generation would have recognised it as "that little tune that plays when you start up your PC" — and a voice announced: "Today's license is from the Canadian annex, paragraphs three to five. Show your support for innovation, friends!" Text scrolled up the screen in a huge font, like an autocue. The crowd repeated the words in unison, as though declaiming a prayer. "La seule obligation du Fabricant et de ses fournisseurs," chanted Winston who, in common with the others, didn't speak a word of French, "et votre recours exclusif seront, au choix du Fabricant, soit (a) le remboursement du prix payi..."
After the Two Minutes License, Winston went to his cubicle on the 10th floor and sat down at his PC. His e-mail inbox was already full of messages. To each message was attached a web story that needed updating. For example here — Winston double-clicked an attachment to bring up his word processor program — was a story from six months earlier, which stated that it had been promised that the next release of the Operating System would be entirely backward compatible, and obsolete applications would run fine. Unfortunately, the word "obsolete" had recently been declared an un-word (all its known uses being offensive) and withdrawn from the dictionaries. It would have to be removed.
As Winston began to type into the document, an animated paperclip appeared. Although Winston had been expecting this and had braced himself for it, he still failed to suppress a shudder of irritation and fear.
"It looks like you're altering history," said the paper clip, in a voice that Winston described to himself as cracked and yellow. "Would you like help?"
Daringly, especially as it was the third time that month he had done this, Winston clicked "Cancel" and began to edit the text manually. Misspelled words were underlined in red, grammatical mistakes in green. Words recently struck from the acceptable list, such as "obsolete," were underlined in purple. Words long since deemed offensive — "Jackson" or "Java" — were struck through in yellow. (Winston absent-mindedly typed in these words to remind himself of the convention.) Finally, and most risky of all, there were words that had never existed, but which expressed a self-evidently offensive thought. Such words, detected by an algorithm Winston could not even begin to imagine, were displayed in a crimson font. For example, "chintzerface" (Winston, pleased with his own lingual ingenuity, put it in to confirm that it worked), a noun that encapsulated the increasing tackiness and childishness of the Operating System's user interface as time passed...
"That's enough from you, my friend!" A meaty hand fell upon Winston's shoulder. He turned around. Two TruthCorps guards had appeared behind him in the cubicle. There was no point in struggling or arguing; his guilt was there, plain for all to see, on the screen.
"Where are you taking me?" asked Winston timidly as he was frogmarched away.
"Where do you think?" retorted one of the uniformed men as he dragged Winston into the elevator.
"No, no — not there!" shrieked Winston. "Not that place! Not Cubicle 101!"
He was still screaming when the guards threw him to the floor. Getting up on his hands and knees, he discovered that he was in another cubicle. Much like his own, it contained a chair and a desk with a PC on it. Mechanically, Winston climbed into the chair, and glanced at the PC's screen, where a splash screen showed that an application was slowly loading. Then he let out a wordless cry of despair that, despite heavy soundproofing, was heard in all the cubicles throughout the Ministry of Truth.
The splash screen said: "Welcome to the StarOffice productivity suite."
DDJ
