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union person
@junlper.beer

someone accidently stumbled on an insanely ominious cdc government page, it’s a massive list of random words that looks like this. anyone know whats going on here? ftp.cdc.gov/pub/health_S...

161 reposts1.2K likes

Retro Des
@retrodes.net

That was just a little IT humor. This is a DICTIONARY FILE, used to prevent the use of insecure passwords. Any time a user changes their password, it is checked against that list and if a match is found the new password is rejected as insecure.

Esc
@escmike.bsky.social

Put it in comic sans and it seems a whole lot less threatening. Looks like a big dictionary of “random” big words. Nearly all are composed with suffixes or prefixes or compound words. Also stubs of 2 letter and 3 letter combos. Could be the grist for a spell checker or something like that.

Esc
@escmike.bsky.social

Whatever it is, don’t fall into the QAnon trap of thinking they’re significant code words. Definitely words that the CDC uses in its documents spit out on the end of some processing.

SPOOKYsnout
@snoutmaster.bsky.social

Remembering how in MKULTRA, MK was a code prefix. I.e, MKULTRA, MKNAOMI, meant Technical Services was responsible. Just a hunch, it could be similar here. I.e, YE lists a number of words under it and the projects would be "YEARSENICAL, YEWINCER", and so on.

Cusros
@sucros.bsky.social

I would wager it's a list of words to avoid on releases intended for the public, to avoid them being opaque or accidentally politically unpalatable.

pdsc
@gucc.us

the URL makes it seem pretty innocuous: “.ftp.cdc.gov/pub/health_Statistics/nchs/Software/mmds/2009/spell/mmds_spell.txt” MMDS is the “mortality medical database system”, and the /spell/ url makes me think that this is a “source of truth” form misspelled medical terms… possibly just spellchecking

MelanieAK 🇺🇦🐕🐾
@melanieak.bsky.social

I'm guessing that each republican had to sum up their dreams from the night before in a single word, with extra points given for more syllables. Points off if they spelled the word wrong, so checking with a dictionary was recommended (and where most got their words since they're not that smart).

Haunted Ho ̶u̶s̶e̶
@basculelock.bsky.social

BLACKTOPPED GASBAGS UNEQUALS WARTIEST VALVULOTOMY TRINODAL HEADWAITERS (12/12 word right here!) RESHAPE REWEAVES INAPPRECIABLY SEMANTICALLY CHOLINE (where my cholines at?) GANGLIGLIA QUEENLIER (you know it!!!!!) Read words, get excited for more words!!

mf format
@spasmbot.com

filename: mmds_spell.txt "mmds" is Mortality Medical Data System. used by the CDC for processing death certificates. "spell.txt" it's a dictionary file for a spell checker.

🏮Zakuga Art🏮
@zakugamignon.bsky.social

Hey, IT guy here, it’s a text file stored on their online server, the file is named mmds.txt and it’s used usually as a call to another script that references this txt, and it’s likely one of many. Wrote tons of these when I was an IT

It's Tony
@bluesooth.bsky.social

This could be used as a password generator. They could be generating random numbers and finding the nth line on the list. Do that four or five times and you have a long password. Good idea? Absolutely not: hackers use dictionaries to work out the encryption.

Dan Lew
@danlew42.bsky.social

The fact that it's called "mmds_spell.txt" makes me suspect that it's for a spellchecker. The added words at the bottom that aren't all caps are probably words the user wanted not to have red squiggles underneath it.