Month: May 2007

Happy birthday to cool, calm Helvetica

The font Helvetica is celebrating its 50th birthday. The BBC celebrates the font’s staying power as “the butter on the bread.”

The BBC - Helvetica at 50.We live in a world where we are surrounded 24 hours a day by adverts and corporate communications, many in typefaces chosen to subliminally complement the message.

Helvetica’s message is this: you are going to get to your destination on time; your plane will not crash; your money is safe in our vault; we will not break the package; the paperwork has been filled in; everything is going to be OK.

It is sans serif. There are no wiggly bits at the end of the letters. It has smooth, clean lines, and an unobtrusive geometry that almost suggests it was designed not to stand out.

Lars Mueller is a Helvetica devotee. He has published a book, Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface, and recently donated an original set of lead lettering to a Helvetica exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“It has a modern attitude which lines up with the aesthetic premises of the 1950s and 60s. Helvetica is a corporate typeface, but on the other hand it’s the favourite of hairdressers and kebab shops. It is the butter on the bread.”

Hat tip: Crazy Monkey.

Hacked, and possibly hijacked, one ID at a time

More than 22,000 current and former University of Missouri-Columbia students are the potential victims of identity theft after a malicious hack attack last week. How the hackers broke into the server is interesting. As noted in Computerworld, the attack came by way of a web form used to track the status of helpdesk queries.

IT staffers noticed unusual activity that began around 5:30 a.m. CDT last Thursday, then tied a large number of database query errors to the problem on Friday. Logs showed that the attacks ended at 9:34 a.m. Friday. That day, technicians disabled the account used to access the database from one IP address in China and another in Australia. The FBI was alerted on Monday.

“The hacker was able to reach the information by making thousands of queries over a span of hours, allowing the identities to be exposed one at a time,” the university reported.

Thanks to Wired Campus for the Computerworld link.