Also, O'Brien is the agent in 1984.
And Bloom is the protagonist of Ulysses.
It's also Bloomsday today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday
Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction)
by anthuswilliams on Sunday June 16, 2013 @03:10PM
(#5889500)
I have not read Ulysses, so the story had me thinking about Bloom filters, data structures for which the likelihood of false positives increase as the dataset grows larger. I guess there is a certain kind of poetry in the coincidence.
Re:Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction)
by Houshalter on Sunday June 16, 2013 @01:24AM
(#5887550)
Ya I was thinking about the scary irony of being interviewed by a man named O'Brien. But since I assumed it was real, I thought it was just a coincidence. And in hindsight, a lot of details of the story don't make sense, but that it could be fiction just didn't cross my mind.
To be even more clear it appears to draw inspiration from various works of political fiction. Notably the "love" for authority figures towards the end smacks of Winston's transformation in '1984'.