>For example, it is inadvisable to look up information about abortion from within some U.S. states, war crime in Russia, or democracy and human rights in China.
This seems to be an exaggeration. I live in Russia and just the word itself, "war crime", when taken alone out of conext, is safe and not punished for. Maybe I'm reading an article about American war crimes in Vietnam, who knows. I would never think it's dangerous to say this word. Unless it's a public statement, it's pretty safe. I don't know about China, but I doubt it's a huge problem in the US as well.
That's getting wildly speculative. A government potentially flagging a behavior that it's potentially monitoring, and potentially adding it to a potential watchlist for it?
Returning to the topic of the article, how does DICT - a network protocol - makes a difference here? Are there any states where traffic gets recorded or queried for keywords? That seems like a huge privacy violation and would be a more interesting article.
This seems like pointless scaremongering to me. Nobody's getting thrown into a re-education for looking up a word in a dictionary. This kind of cartoonish exaggeration of how totalitarian regimes operate only muddies the water on the actual harm done by such governments.
All else being equal, more privacy is always good. I think the examples given are just there to get normal people to care about this too.
Similar to when abortion was outlawed in the US and suddenly people cared a lot about all that Google Maps location history that Google was saving. It's much easier to convince people to mitigate a real problem than it is to prevent a hypothetical future problem. So convince them to mitigate this "real" problem that governments can see your dictionary queries, and hopefully that might prevent an actually real future problem.
> This kind of cartoonish exaggeration of how totalitarian regimes
operate only muddies the water on the actual harm done by such
governments.
What do think you know about "how totalitarian regimes operate"?
Worked for some have you?
What we do know, from well sourced documents, is that real-time
keyscore type filtering and flagging of every byte of unencrypted data
occurs at ISPs, and that is common practice in our own
non-totalitarian nations. What do you imagine goes on in less savoury
dictatorships to whom we sell the same intercept equipment and DPI
firewalls?
To describe that landscape as "cartoonish exaggeration" seems either
naive or disingenuous.
XKeyscore is/was used to fight terrorism and it's only available to federal agencies, not local law enforcement. Abortion isn't prohibited on a federal level and it's not a national security concern. It doesn't explain why people should avoid using GNOME Dictionary at all.
> Nobody's getting thrown into a re-education for looking up a word in a dictionary.
Tell me you've never been in that situation without telling me you've never been in that situation. Check your privilege.
I was hauled in front of the police, and they went through my search history. I'm innocent and still thought I was going to get the chair.
Every little search is taken out of context and the worst intentions are assumed.
I honestly can't stand this kind of flippant attitude by people who've never experienced anything remotely like this. And now it's even worse for say American women looking for an abortion etc.
No, I'm not (and I wouldn't tell you if I were!) I don't need to be directly affected to have an opinion. "Either you are directly affected, or you're a virtue-signalling ghoul" is a false dilemma, and I say your argument is dishonest.
> In documents filed Thursday in Denver District Court, lawyers for the 17-year-old argue that the police violated the Constitution when they got a judge to order Google to check its vast database of internet searches for users who typed in the address of a home before it was set ablaze on Aug. 5, 2020.
I agree it's unlikely anyone will ever care but you've got to admit it's insane and surprising that a dictionary app in 2022 looks up the results online using a gopher-era plaintext protocol rather than just bundling the dictionary.
Indeed, such levels of paranoia cannot be healthy. If you're worried that somebody might find out that you looked up a word in a dictionary, imagine what they could find if they started snooping into your trash.
Why doesn't the author tell people to just got to https://dict.org in a browser, which is the default backend for the apps? SSL, POST queries, minimal and fast web output. Only javascript on the site is an old useless widget from a decade ago that bounced you to the internet strike of 2012. Works well even in elinks / links in a terminal if that's your thing, could probably whip up a cURL alias in minutes.
Furthermore, the last three, excepting ahdictionary.com, issue HTTPS requests per-keystroke -- needed for auto-complete.
Note however one tripping hazard with dict.org: Unencrypted port 80 i.e. "http://dict.org" is functional, does not redirect to "https://dict.org", and Firefox responds to a bare "dict.org" in its search box by first trying "http://dict.org". FF presents the dict.org home page upon getting the port 80 success response.
A bit off-topic, but I feel like Wiktionary is a hidden champion on the internet. Some time ago I noticed that I use Wiktionary more often than Wikipedia these days. I am not an expert in the space, but I get the impression that it's content (especially the multi-language aspect) outperforms any other dictionary in existence. It's an absolute treasure, without many of the problems and conflicts an encyclopedia cannot really circumnavigate.
In my usage, Collins dictionary is the best for explaining and giving background to English words. Wiktionary can't compete with that. I use it with an ad blocker and read all their articles for a given word.
IME their articles are written with learners in mind, too. I would probably count as a proficient English user that is still learning new words (well, who does not).
Wiktionary is great. I use it many times every day - for languages I'm learning, but also for learning more about my mother tongue. I've never been able to figure out the mediawiki API but had success just scraping/parsing wiktionary HTML files. For individual languages there are normally standard templates which structure in a nice machine-readable way (much of this can I think in principle be accessed directly with an API but it's in my experience hard to discover how to do any given task with the API vs having the html right there in front of your nose begging out to be parsed).
I've generally found that things like the part of speech type is inconsistent, so the wiktionary files require a lot of work to extract the information from them if you want to use the data for natural language processing tasks.
I've also found that things like thesaurus/synonym information is incomplete.
The annoying thing about Wiktionary (for this purpose) is that it's explicitly not machine readable, so the entries can only really be handled as free-form HTML. Parsing the Wikicode, despite heavy use of standard templates, would be very hard to do robustly.
Once upon a time i had a project to do that. and it was miserable (but also it was when i was first learning to program... so i did a lot of stupid things)
It's an entirely local database with decent etymology and
provisions for synonyms, homonyms, semantic relations
and so on.
> $ /usr/bin/wn hacker -over
Overview of noun hacker
The noun hacker has 4 senses (first 1 from tagged texts)
1. (1) hacker -- (someone who plays golf poorly)
2. hacker, cyber-terrorist, cyberpunk -- (a programmer who breaks
into computer systems
S: (n) hacker (someone who plays golf poorly)
S: (n) hacker (a programmer for whom computing is its own reward; may enjoy the challenge of breaking into other computers but does no harm) "true hackers subscribe to a code of ethics and look down upon crackers"
S: (n) hack, drudge, hacker (one who works hard at boring tasks)
One of the quality-of-life things I really miss about MacOS when using KDE is the dictionary quality, and in particular the ability of Apple to include random technical words (aplanatic?), recognise foreign words being used out of context (I like Dansk øllen) and silently correct things like German obscure capitalisation rules.
Unfortunately, aspell / hunspell just aren't in the same ballpark – and not just because of the lack of words. I think the dictionaries are much smaller and it's harder to set up this kind of weird, but very useful, behaviour.
I also really like how easily available it is; in any app (except games), just put the cursor over any word and press harder than normal on the trackpad and a bubble with good definitions appears over the word. I don't think any system comes close in terms of dictionary ergonomics, for whatever that's worth.
There is also a difference between a dictionary used for spell checking and a dictionary for definitions: smaller (within reason) is better for the former, while larger is better for the latter.
(It is better to add an uncommon word to the user dictionary than it is to have a large number of uncommon words in the system dictionary since it is better to alert the user to a potentially misused word than to leave a misspelled word in place. Of course, this doesn't help in every case - as is evident with the common auto-correct snafus.)
> "So, why is this a problem for dictionary lookups?", you might ask. Some knowledge is forbidden knowledge, depending on your local authorities. For example, it is inadvisable to look up information about "abortion" from within some U.S. states, "war crime" in Russia, or "democracy" and "human rights" in China.
Ill-advisable to look up linguistic information? Has there been a single precedent that would justify such claim?
There obviously aren't any official statements from each state and whistle blowers are easily silenced if the media is controlled like it is in China for example.
Statements by other nations would have to be taken with a fuckton of salt as that could just be propaganda too.
I don't think it will be possible to be certain about this, ever.
MacOS is the only OS that ships with a dictionary. Because Apple pays the dictionary publisher for the rights to it. Who’ll flip the bill for the Linux dictionary?
No, stop using them without installing the daemon and desired dictionaries. Your distro should provide them as first-class packages, Debian has for as long as I can remember.
It's fantastic having instantaneous `dict` queries at the CLI, regardless of my connectivity status. The enhanced privacy is just a bonus over this already very real benefit.
>For example, it is inadvisable to look up information about abortion from within some U.S. states, war crime in Russia, or democracy and human rights in China.
Not sure about Russia or China, but it is not illegal to look at the definition or spelling of abortion in the US.
It's true, but protocol is not very relevant. Because, you know, while Goolag Translate uses SSL/TLS, it still collects your queries. Being logged in makes things even worse. So, the only solution is to have an offline dictionary.*
* that does not send out "usage statistics", and, if it's paper book, make sure to not to leave fingerprints or indication of usage :)
This seems to be an exaggeration. I live in Russia and just the word itself, "war crime", when taken alone out of conext, is safe and not punished for. Maybe I'm reading an article about American war crimes in Vietnam, who knows. I would never think it's dangerous to say this word. Unless it's a public statement, it's pretty safe. I don't know about China, but I doubt it's a huge problem in the US as well.