It sounded like the side-plot from a Thomas Pynchon novel or, at least, a cheap paperback Pan-Pacific spy thriller: A scrambled piece of first-century BC Latin text run through Google Translate seemed to be cryptically carrying messages about “China’s Internet,” “NATO,” and “the Company,” the latter being a common code word for the CIA.

Was it a secret code intelligence agencies were using to send messages in plain sight? A glitch? A hoax? Or worse, another viral marketing campaign? The computer security researchers who happened across the Lorem Ipsum Google Translate mystery, weren’t sure. And before they figured it out, the hidden messages suddenly stopped.

Lorem Ipsum is placeholder text used in templates, mock-ups of web-pages, and typesetting in general. It’s typically made up of a section from Roman philosopher Cicero’s tract on good and evil De finibus bonorum at malorum, with Latin words added and removed so that its meaning becomes jibberish. It made the news recently showing up on buggy Affordable Care Act webpages.

But even more recently, just a couple months ago, a cyber-security researcher who wants to be identified only as “Kraeh3n” was proofreading a document for a colleague that featured some normal Lorem Ipsum filler text when she noticed something peculiar. Google Translate was auto-detecting the Latin and translating “lorem ipsum” into the English word “China.” More.

See: Motherboard

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