Phishing != cracking passwords

I just read a news article (in German) about the username/password lists with Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail users.

I was a bit disappointed to read that the passwords were referred to as having been "cracked" ("gaben ... bekannt, dass Passwörter von Privatkonten geknackt und im Internet veröffentlicht worden seien" = "... announced that passwords of individual accounts were cracked and published on the Internet") when in fact it appears that the passwords were obtained through phishing ("Hotmail, Yahoo und Gmail erklärten übereinstimmend, dass die Zugriffe auf die persönlichen Daten nicht durch Lücken in den Sicherheitsprogrammen, sondern durch Phishing zustande gekommen seien. Dabei werden Nutzer etwa mit betrügerischen E-Mails zur Preisgabe geheimer Daten gebracht." = Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail explained unanimously that the accesses to personal data was gained not through holes in the security programmes but through phishing. This means that users are asked to divulge secret data, for example, through fraudulent emails.).

I'd say that "cracking" is applicable if an encrypted password is deciphered, a hash reversed, or a password brute-forced by attempting to log into a given account again and again with different passwords until the correct one is determined. But if a password is phished, i.e. divulged in plain text by a user, I wouldn't call that "cracked".

Semantics, perhaps, but I was a bit annoyed at the use of that word in that context, and I'd call that poor journalism.

(Especially that I don't think that anybody would say that the usernames were "cracked", even though those were also obtained in the same way as the passwords -- and in some cases, a username can be nearly as secret as a password.)

Amyism: how to express doing two things simultaneously / And: messing with Amy's head

For doing two things simultaneously, Amy used to borrow an expression from German into her English: she'd say, for example, "I want to watch television by eating" (= while eating), based apparently on German "Ich möchte beim Essen Fernsehen gucken" (I want by/at-the eating television to-watch). I'd usually repeat the sentence using "while", making it into a question ("Oh, you want to watch television while you eat?"), but without further comment.

However, recently she started using the correct English structure... and transferring it into German! The other day, I heard "Ich möchte Fernsehen gucken weil ich esse", which is grammatical German but means something else ("I want to watch television because I eat")—but in this instance, she clearly wasn't using "weil" with its German meaning but as a loanword for English "while"!.

Fun stuff.

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Unrelatedly, Amy was up for quite a while last night.

When Stella went upstairs at about 9:30 to tell her to get to bed already, she thought she'd play with Amy's mind a bit first: when she came up, she said, "Good morning! Time to get up!"

Amy looked a bit shocked and said, "Oh... I've been playing here the whole time." Apparently, she had believed Stella and figured she must have played the whole night through without noticing. (Stella figured her sense of time wouldn't be developed enough to tell the difference between an hour and eight... or to know how long nights are supposed to be in the first place.)

Stella then went on with, "We're going to the doctor's soon; do you want to get dressed already or do you want to catch some sleep first?", to which Amy replied that she wanted to get dressed—at which point Stella told her she had just been kidding, and told her to go to bed.