It’s been 72 hours since three members of Anonymous were arrested in Spain. While certain people are still tapping on their wristwatches, wondering how Spain is still online (save a couple hours of darkness for www.policia.es )/not on fire/tectonically connected to mainland Europe, news editors are scratching their heads trying to not just make sense of their story, but also write it in coherent, acceptable English.You see, that’s the thing about media. You could have this amazing, detailed and graphical story that’s covered in dirt and blood, but you still have to wear a tie while telling it. In 2009, The New York Times Magazine published an article called Against Camel Case, scrutinizing the increasingly tolerated iLanguage. It wasn’t long before sites like Engadget followed suit, essentially stating that their writing style is not to be kicked around by snot-nosed marketing kids raised by the Internet who think abusing typography—like in the case of ASUSTeK—is acceptable outside of one’s own office.It wasn’t a style revolution—BlackBerry was still BlackBerry—they just decided to be more vigilant, or in Engadget’s own words: “Intercapped product and company names should generally be treated as the company treats them, unless it’s egregious and/or looks weird.This rule is subject to many exceptions based on usage and history, and also functions as the ‘this is stupid’ loophole.”So what happens when stories from 1337-speaking territories make the news? Well, no one’s sure about that, and it’s been that way since hacking began in the ‘60s. Phreaking was easy—it was still capitalized and pronounceable. In the story above, BBC reported. “Spain arrests Anonymous suspects,” Anonymous being capitalized, like Microsoft or Tanzania, a namesake widely accepted, not exclusively self-stated by the group. But “anonymous”: that’s a word, using that as a namesake is also abuse of language to begin with, and the careless reader might just miss that and suppose that the three guys arrested in Spain are, well, slightly less known outside their social circles.That’s still easy, however. Consider L0pht, W00w00, UXu, and so on. And it’s not just hackers. Wired had a piece a while back about bands using obscure unicode for names, not just to look cool, but also to get instant underground cred for choosing unpronounceable names (which is totally new, because no one remembers this guy, right?).Then again, none of these bands have ever done anything significant to be arrested for, so the BBC can relax. For now.
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