About two weeks ago, our friend Andrew Paterson made a stunning discovery:

“I stumbled across this blog which itself is quite remarkable example of p2p data sharing. Under the strapline ‘Mysterious world of ancient legends’ it is really a mystery who is behind this blog, who set it up etc. Postings are Russian language translations, mostly from P2P Foundation blog. The speed and volume of translations suggests it is an automated bot/script doing the translation labour”

Andrew also discovered that we are not the first to benefit from such impromptu and mysterious services.

Here’s what JC Bronsted wrote:

“a week or so after creating Jenny’s web page (more below), I decided to do a google search for “jcbronsted” to see if her page showed up on the results. (It does not, but does for “j c bronsted”, at least at the time I did that search.) What did show up was a site in the cyrillic alphabet (turned out to be Russian). I was confused and went to that site, trying to determine why my name had appeared there. After translating the blurb, I figured out that someone had translated a portion of my ‘Distributed Peer-to-peer viruses…’ article into Russian!! Turns out this web site had collected a series of articles about Peer-to-peer technology or maybe viruses or AIs or something and offered little blurbs culled from each. I assume it was done automatically with a web crawler, as that particular entry has appeared in other similar autogenerated lists. But this one actually translated my essay! Very odd.”

Any additional info on these Russian mysteries would be much appreciated!

Of course, we’re not complaining, though I’m curious as to the quality of such automatic translation.