the spreadsheet, initially shared in 2022, and thought to contain data related to a small number of applicants, had contained hidden data related to more than 18,000 people. 

ICO statement in response to 2022 MoD data breach

Why are people still sending files to each other? I remember having a stand-up argument a decade ago with a project manager who wanted us to email a completed Word template to him every day. He'd then spend hours merging the various documents together. He couldn't get his head around the collaborative document suite the company had purchased a licence for. I tried showing him that we could give specific people write-access to the document and they could edit it live. No more emailing back-and-forth.

It just didn't stick. It wasn't that he was ignorant about what computers could do, but his entire mental model was built around files. Discrete packets of data with a fixed metaphor from the real world.

Collaborative online documents don't have an easy analogue analogue. It is rare to see a dozen people scribbling on the same whiteboard or using the same typewriter keyboard.

Permissions are another things that aren't intuitive. The idea that only specific people can see something doesn't match our expectations of paper. Sure, anyone could grab a pen and deface it, that's why we have one person in charge of the "master copy".

Copy. What a hateful word.

The modern workforce shouldn't be flinging copies to each other. A copy is outdated the moment it is downloaded. A copy has no protection against illicit reading. A copy can never be revoked.

Data shouldn't live in a file on a laptop. It shouldn't be a single file on a network share. Data is a living beast. Data needs to live in a database - not an Excel file. Access should be granted for each according to their needs.

I see the same issue in the WeTransfer kerfuffle. Very Serious People saying it was intolerable that the untrusted 3rd party they were using to share Very Sensitive Information was going to read that information.

At which point you have to throw up your hands and ask why people are sending files to each other in the year of Our Lord 2025?!?!? If you have a sensitive file, use proper access controls. Or at least use a password so the FTP-as-a-service provider can't steal your IP.

And git! Don't get me started on git! The best minds of a generation stuck in a paradigm of downloading files to their local machine, making changes, then emailing git pushing them up to be approved? Madness!

Look, there are some times when you need a local copy. I want my own copy of my insurance documents - but that's not a living doc; it is an agreed artefact. Sure, it's handy to have access when there's no network connection - but that's what background sync is for. OK, you're on Office 365 and I'm on Google - so we'll have to work a little harder to set up access.

But all of this is possible!

We rant and rave about the 💾 icon being a skeuomorph. But the very concept of an individual file is also a skeuomorph! Data are not stored on paper files. There is no such thing as a filesystem directory - it's just a convention to make computing palatable for people born in the 20th century who lived in a world of A4 paper and manilla folders.

Modern computing is still stuck in the past. Our computers are like cars which have been designed to carry a bale of hay to mop up the horse-piss.

Tapes

Long before solid-state drives, we used to record data on long thin strips of magnetic tape. 🖭 📼 I'm sure there's a hipster somewhere who only listens to Kraftwerk on C90 cassettes, and claims that the image quality on Twin Peaks is superior on NTSC VHS tapes - but these have all-but died out now.

If you've ever watched an old episode of the original Star Trek, you'll be familiar with this, the Tape Drive: ✇ I'll bet there's a 3D printed one you can hook up to the GPIO pins of your Raspberry Pi - but tape has bitten the dust. Much like...

Floppy Disks

One is an emoji, the others are mere symbols. 💾 🖫 🖪 🖬 Commonly used as a "save" icon, even though the iMac first killed off the disk drive in 1998.

You get white and black "hard shell" disks - more commonly known as 3½-inch disks. There's also a "soft shell" disk - which could be a 5¼-inch or the even older 8-inch.

CD and DVD

💿 📀

Not quite as obsolete as the magnetic tape - but not far off. 1F4BF is supposed to be a generic "optical disc" but is usually depicted as a CD. Just for fun, there's a separate Optical Disc Icon which is not an emoji: 🖸

I suppose we should be grateful that HD-DVD and LaserDisc didn't make the standard. Which brings us on to...

MiniDisc!

💽 Some people charitably call this a disc-cartridge. But, no, the official name is MINIDISC. For those too young to remember, Sony's MiniDisc was a proprietary, and inconsequential foray into digital music delivery.

If you are that young, you may be blissfully unaware of these two pieces of technology:

Pager and Fax Machines

📟 📠 🖷

The pager was never really a consumer item in the UK - not the way it was in the USA.

The fax machine is sort of a Shibboleth for everything wrong with an organisation. If you want to be scathing, insinuate that their company still relies on fax machines.

Fax also retains the rare distinction of being one of the few Unicode symbols which is represented by a whole word.

℻

We're getting more modern...

Telephones

🕾 🕿 ☏ ☎ To most people, telephones aren't a handset which rest atop of a base with touch-tone buttons. Rotary dial is extinct. For extra archaic points, there's also a telephone perched atop a modem.

🖀

As for that receiver... There's FIVE of them!

📞 🕻 🕽 ✆ 🕼

An emoji receiver, two regular receivers in different direction, a symbol to say there's a phone nearby and, of course, a receiver with a page coming out of it. Back to bloody fax machines!

Finally, not quite obsolete yet, but there is a"clamshell" style flip-phone:

🖁

As a special bonus for making is this far through my digital spelunking, here's the symbol for "telephone recorder"

⌕

No... I don't know either...

Nothing is lost forever

Unicode is a repository for human communications. Some of the letters, languages, and scripts are going to die out. We still have Roman Numerals -Ⅷ - despite that empire crumbling hundreds of years ago.

The Kharosthi script vanished in the 6th century. 𐩔 𐩕 𐩖 𐩗 𐩘

But it is still there, in countless books, inscribed on coins, hewn into the living rock. And now preserved in Unicode.

Our toys and fads and emoji will fade away. This is not a cause for sadness, but rather joy. Joy that someone in millennia hence will be able to feel slightly closer to their ancestors by understanding our primitive pictorial language.

I was wandering along the beach one day, when I noticed some clever chap had drawn some arrows in the sand. Can you guess where they led?

The more astute of you will have realised that these are not human drawn arrows. They are, of course, footprints left by birds.

A bird's foot is a "backwards" arrow. The apex points to the bird's rear.

It is conceivable that had birds evolved greater intelligence and developed a writing system then their → would be the equivalent of our ←.

All this talk of birds leads, naturally, to Aliens!

In the 1970s, the USA launched a pair of space probes - Pioneer 10 and 11 - which contained "a message from mankind". An anodised metal plate designed by Carl Sagan.

Much has been written about whether the message is appropriate. Not just because of the nudity(!) - but whether the abstract design could ever be successfully deciphered by an alien mind.

At the bottom of the plaque is a diagram which, to our human eyes, shows where the spacecraft has come from.

A contemporary complaint from an art historian ran:

The trajectory, it will be noticed, is endowed with a directional arrowhead; it seems to have escaped the designers that this is a conventional symbol unknown to a race that never had the equivalent of bows and arrows.

"The image and the eye" - Ernst Hans Gombrich

Suppose that the plaque is picked up by a race of super-intelligent birds - how will they interpret that message?

To them, an arrow points towards its stem. In this case, the Pioneer craft is on a journey to Earth. Perhaps they will have noticed that our toes are not like theirs - if they even recognise the squiggles as belonging to creatures - but there is nothing fundamental about us which indicates the chirality of our arrows.

Behind the human figures is another arrow. From the Birds' perspective that is also pointing towards the map to our sun. Is the message on the probe "if lost, please return to..."?

Semantic Imagery

When you choose an icon - you're inadvertently assuming that everyone has a similar cultural background.

If you are an alien - or perhaps a teenager - many of these symbols are meaningless.

You may already be familiar with skeuomorphism Let's take a few interesting examples.

Post

📯

For people in two-dozen countries, the Postal Horn is the symbol of the national post office. It makes perfect sense to hide messages behind this icon, right?

Of course, if you are in Japan, you'd probable expect the symbol to be:

〶

Do those symbols mean anything to you?

Settings

🔧 ⚙️

When was the last time you used a spanner to adjust something? On your computer - never! In the physical world, spanners are used mostly for repairing or installing something. What does that have to do with setting your program's preferences?

And cogs? Computers don't have them! I struggle to think of anything I own which has a user replaceable cog which will adjust its function.

Save

💾 🖫 🖬 🖪

The save icon is, even on the most modern interfaces, an image of an antiquated medium. Do you have a floppy disk reader on your computer? Would your website even fit in 1.44MB?

What is the message that you're conveying with this icon?

Health

⚕️

What does a snake twisted around a rod have to do with health? What does this icon say to people without a a detailed knowledge of Greek mythology?

Email

📧 📨 ✉️

Does email come in an envelope? How many envelopes do you get which are white squares with elongated lips? Is the metaphor still relevant?

Telephone

📞 ☎️️ Ask someone under the age of 25 to draw a picture of a telephone. Here's a hint, they're not going to draw either of those two icons!

A few years ago most people would have drawn something like:

Today, telephones are black rectangles.

Search

🔍 🔎

Unless you are a 19th Century detective, I find it hard to believe that you've ever examined the world with a magnifying glass. How has this become the default search icon?

Please Wait

⌛ ⏳

Tell me honestly - when was the last time you used an hourglass?

Perhaps you boil an egg with the precision only sand tumbling to its doom can provide, I certainly don't. It is interesting that most major Operating Systems have rejected this in favour of a more abstract animation.

Responsible Icon Choice

Under some circumstances, it may be sensible to localise an icon based on cultural differences. For example, these could all be substituted depending on the user's demographic:

🏣 🏤 📮 📩

Icons introduce ambiguity. Please remember your cultural biases when you pick a symbol - lest you confuse any of your users who are birds.

🐦🦆🦃🐤🐓🐥🦅🦉🐧🐔🐣🕊️