Hancock: AT&T’s Language to Spy On You
Wired recently covered “Hancock”, a new programming language developed by AT&T used to spy on telephone customers and “graph” the results. Alot of people are up in arms over this, decrying the end of privacy… but I, at least, think they’re misguided, if not totally wrong.
“Language”?
I think that the use of the word “language” here is not the write way to describe Hancock. If you look at the code sample provided on Wired’s post, it should look familiar. It appears to be a very close cousin of C, with some procedural and syntax changes. At what point does a language change from and “adaptation of” to a new language? The obvious point in C vs. C++ is OOP… Should this be called a “security oriented C adaptation”? Or “C, using different libraries”?
In this case, however, it would appear that “different libraries” is an understatement, and “new language” is an overstatement.
This is completely unrelated.
Uses
AT&T developed this language with security monitoring and “community of interest” goals in mind, but when you read about how it works, and the end results… does anything else come to mind?
This language has huge potential. Looking for groupings of habits, traits, and connections between items (in this case, “people”) is a programmatical way to describe what Hancock does. Now imagine what search engines do. Or Facebook with their “social graph”. Or statistics’ processing.
If Hancock were to become more widely used, complicated things like searching for data and returning the most relevant results would become very easy… and, in the case of Google, perfect an already near-perfect system.
Maturation
Hancock is more than just an added library or two to a pre-existing language (kind of like C++), or a modification of one (Ruby)…. I believe it is a “maturation” of the language. As I mentioned before, it has many similarities to C, but makes some things much quicker, more efficient, and simpler than C. C++ was supposed to do that for C, but the end result was a more complicated language.
Iteration and data sorting is a huge part of any “real” language (LOLCODE does not count). Take another look at the sample provided by Wired, and then meditate on the code.
i can has SHUT YOUR MOUTH
Evil? Maybe.
Yes, maybe Hancock is currently being used for “evil” deeds like sorting through very private data to find “terrorists” for the American government. But take a step back from your emotions…
Elvis made “devil music” in his time… what’s he considered now? I’m pretty sure he can’t compete with Slayer…
