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Text of the page (random words):
ithout an s the pilgrims of course are looking for lourdes the statue some pilgrims have prostrated themselves in front of is not the famous statue of our lady at the grotto of massabielle but a simple village statue of the virgin lourde is 92 kilometers 57 miles to the east of the larger and more famous city with the very similar name given the similar names pilgrims have apparently been showing up at lourde for as long as the residents of the smaller village can remember but villagers report a very large up tick in confused pilgrims in recent years to blame apparently is the growing popularity of gps navigation systems pilgrims have typed in l o u r d e in their gps navigation devices and forgotten the final s indeed using the clunky on screen keyboards and automatic completion functionality it s often much easier to type in the name of the tiny village than the name of the more likely destination one letter and only 92 kilometers away in the same country it s an easy mistake to make because the affordances of many gps navigation systems make it slightly easier to ask to go to lourde than to lourdes apparently twenty or so cars of pilgrims show up in lourde each day sometimes carrying as many people as live in the town of lourde itself the gps navigation systems of course will happy route drivers to either city and do not know or care that lourde is rarely the location a driver navigating from across europe wants the gps is designed to show drivers their next turn so a driver won t know they re off course until they reach their destination the systems assume that destinations were entered correctly a human navigator asked for directions would never point a person to the smaller village indeed they would probably not know it even exists a municipal councilor in lourde suggested that the gps is not at fault people are of course she s correct pilgrims typed in the name of their destination incorrectly but the reason there s an increase in people making this particular mistake is because the technology people use to navigate in their cars has changed dramatically over the last decade in a way that makes this mistake more likely a dwindling number of people pore over maps or ask a passer by or a gas station attendant for directions on the whole navigation has become more effective and more convenient but not without trade offs and costs gps technology frames our experience of navigation in ways that are profound even as we are usually take it for granted unlike a human the gps will never suggest a short detour that leads us to a favorite restaurant or a beautiful vista we ll be driving by just before sunset as in the case of lourde it will make mistakes no human would the reverse is also true of course in this way the twenty cars of confused pilgrims showing up in lourde each day can remind us of the power that technologies have over some of the little tasks in our lives posted on october 17 2009 january 10 2013 transparency i caught this revealing error on the always entertaining photoshop disasters and thought it was too good to resist pointing out here the picture of course is a bag of tao brand jasmine rice for sale in germany the error is pretty obvious if you understand a little german the phrase transparentes sichtfeld literally means transparent field of view in this case the phrase is a note written by the graphic designer of the rice bag s packaging that was never meant to be read by a consumer the phrase is supposed to indicate to someone involved in the bag s manufacture than the pink background on which the text is written is supposed to remain unprinted i e as transparent plastic so that customers get a view directly onto the rice inside the bag the error of course is that the the pink background and the text was never removed this was possible in part because the the pink background doesn t look horribly out of place on the bag a more important factor however is the fact that the person printing the bag and bagging the rice almost certainly didn t speak german in this sense this bears a lot of similarity with some errors i ve written up before e g the welsh autoresponder and the translate server error restaurant and as in those cases there are takeaways here about all the things we take for granted when communicating using technology things we often don t realize until language barriers make errors like this thrust hidden processes into view this error revealed a bit of the processes through which these bags of rice are produced and a little bit about the people and the division of labor that helped bring it to us ironically this error is revealing precisely through the way that the bag fails to reveal its contents posted on august 12 2009 january 10 2013 akamai and ssl ssl stands for secure sockets layer and refers to a protocol for using the web in a secure encrypted manner every time you connect to a website with an address prepended with https instead of just http you re connecting over ssl almost all banks and e commerce sites for example use ssl exclusively ssl helps provide security for users in at least two ways first it helps keep communication encoded in such a way that only you and the site you are communicating with can read it the internet is designed in a way that makes messages susceptible to eavesdropping ssl helps prevent this but sending coded messages only offer protection if you trust that the person you are communicating in code with really is who they say they are for example if i m banking i want to make sure the website i m using really is my bank s and not some phisher trying to get my account information the fact that we re talking in a secret code will protect me from eavesdroppers but won t help me if i can t trust the person i m talking in code with to address this web browsers come with a list of trusted organizations that verify or vouch for websites when one of these trusted organizations vouches that a website really is who they say they are they offer what is called a certificate that attests to this fact a certificate for revealingerrors com would help users verify that that they really are viewing revealing errors and not some intermediary impostor or stand in if someone were redirect traffic meant for revealing errors to an intermediary users connecting using ssl would get an error message warning them that the certificate offered is invalid and that something might be awry that bit of background provides the first part of this explanation for this error message in this image a user attempted to connect to the whitehouse gov website over ssl visible from the https in the url bar instead of a secure version of the white house website however the user saw an error explaining that the certificate attesting to the identity of the website was not from the united states white house but rather from some other website called a248 e akamai net this is a revealing error of course the ssl system normally represented by little more than a lock icon in the status bar of a browser is thrust awkwardly into view but this particularly revealing error has more to tell who is a248 e akamai net why is their certificate being offered to someone trying to connect to the white house website a248 e akamai net is the name of a server that belongs to a company called akamai akamai while unfamiliar to most internet users serves between 10 and 20 percent of all web traffic the company operates a vast network of servers around the world and rents space on these servers to customers who want their websites to work faster rather than serving content from their own computers in centralized data centers akamai s customers can distribute content from locations close to every user when a user goes to say whitehouse gov their computer is silently redirected to one of akamai s copies of the whitehouse website often the user will receive the web page much more quickly than if they had connected directly to the whitehouse servers and although akamai s network delivers more 650 gigabits of data per second around the world it is almost entirely invisible to the vast majority of its users nearly anyone reading this uses akamai repeatedly throughout the day and never realizes it except when akamai doesn t work akamai is an invisible internet intermediary on a massive scale but because ssl is designed to detect and highlight hidden intermediaries akamai has struggled to make ssl work with their service although akamai offers a service designed to let their customers use akamai s service with ssl many customers do not take advantage of this the result is that ssl remains one place where through error messages like the one shown above akamai s normally hidden network is thrust into view an attempt to connect to a popular website over ssl will often reveal akamai the white house is hardly the only victim microsoft s bing search engine launched with an identical ssl error revealing akamai s behind the scenes role akamai plays an important role as an intermediary for a large chunk of all activity online not unlike google akamai has an enormous power to monitor users internet usage and to control or even alter the messages that users send and receive but while google is repeatedly if not often enough held to the fire by privacy and civil liberties advocates akamai is mostly ignored we appreciate the power that google has because they are visible right there in our url bar every time we connect to google search gmail google calendar or any of google s growing stable of services on the other hand akamai s very existence is hidden and their power is obscured but akamai s role as an intermediary is no less important due its invisibility errors provide one opportunity to highlight akamai s role and the power they retain posted on july 5 2009 january 10 2013 deals failure and fun i ve found that the always entertaining failblog is a rich source for revealing errors here s a nice example every reader on failblog can chuckle at the idea an item is being offered for 69 98 instead of an original 19 99 as part of a clearance sale the idea that one can save 49 is icing on the cake of course most readers will immediately assume that no human was involved in the production of this sign it s hard to imagine that any human even read the sign before it went up on the shelf the sign was made by a computer program working from a database or a spreadsheet with a column for the name of the product a column for the original price and a column for the sale price subtracting the sale price from the original gives the savings and with that data in hand the sign is printed the idea of negative savings is a mistake that only a computer will make and with the error the sign producing computer program is revealed errors like this and failblog s work in in general highlights one of the reasons that i think that errors are such a great way to talk about technology failblog is incredibly popular with millions of people checking in to see the latest pictures and videos of screw ups mistakes and failures for whatever reason sadism schadenfreude reflection on things that are surprisingly out of place or the comfort of knowing that others have it worse we all know that a good error can be hilarious and entertaining my own goal with revealing errors centers on a type of technology education i want to revealing hidden technology as a way of giving people insight into the degree and the way that our lives are technologically mediated in the process i hope to lay the groundwork for talking about the power that this technology has but if people are going to want to read anything i write it should also be entertaining errors are appropriate for a project like mine because they give an a view into closed systems hidden intermediaries and technological black boxes but they they are great for the project because they are also intrinsically interesting posted on april 12 2009 january 10 2013 quorum of the twelve apostates a number of people including the new york times wrote about a costly error at brigham young university last week that was originally reported by the utah valley daily herald the error itself was subtle first it is important to realize that brigham young is a private university owned by the church of jesus christ of latter day saints i e the mormon church or lds for short the front of the the daily universe the byu university newspaper featured a photograph of a group of men who form one of the most important governing bodies in the lds church with the heading quorum of the twelve apostates the caption should have said the quorum of the twelve apostles which is the name of the governing body in question an apostle of course is a messenger or ambassador although the term is most often used to refer to jesus twelve closest disciples the term apostle is used in lds to refer to a special high rank of priest within the church an apostate is something else entirely the term refers to a person who is disloyal and unfaithful to a cause particularly to a religion shocked that the paper was labeling the highest priests in the church as disloyal and unfaithful thousands of copies of the paper 18500 by one report were pulled from news stands around campus new editions of the paper with a fixed caption were produced and replaced at what must have been enormous cost to byu and the daily universe the source of the error says the university s spokesperson was in a spellchecker working under a tight deadline the person spell checking the captions ran across a misspelled version of apostles in the text in a rush they clicked the first term in the suggestion list which unfortunately happened to be a similarly spelled near antonym of the word they wanted from a technical perspective this error is a version of the cupertino effect although the impact was much more strongly felt than most examples of cupertino like cupertino byu s small disaster can teach us a whole lot about the power and effect of technological affordances the spell checking algorithm made it easier for the daily universe s copy editor to write apostate than it was to write apostle and as a result they did exactly that a system with different affordances would have had different effects the affordances in our technological systems are constantly pushing us toward certain choices and actions over others in an important way the things we produce and says and the ways we communicate are the product of these affordances through errors like byu s we get a glimpse of these usually hidden affordances in every day technologies posted on february 21 2009 january 19 2016 the case of the welsh autoresponder last year i talked about some of the dangers of machine translation that resulted in a chinese restaurant advertised as translate server error and another restaurant serving stir fried wikipedia this article from the bbc a couple months ago shows that embarassing translation errors are hardly limited ...