Comment by toss1

2 years ago

Yes, please change it to 3MM, which also abbreviates to "3 million". My first impression was strongly that 3M had some lock system that was now compromised, not that it was referring to 3 million locks in the wild.

Also perhaps consider expanding the headline character limit above 80, or maybe not count numbers in the total.

How about "Hackers Found a Way to Open Any of 3 Million Hotel Keycard Locks in Seconds" its only 75 characters. Nobody has to guess about abbreviations or whether it's really Latin or mm.

Or just drop all the clickbait crap from the headline - "Hackers", "any", "3 million" and "in seconds" are all just fluff meant to create an emotional response. Change the subject to where the responsibility lies, the locks themselves or the lock manufacturer, and add "major brand" or "widely deployed" if it's necessary to separately indicate notoriety.

Actually, I believe what you want is 3mm, which I believe they use in accounting. Lowercase m in this instance would stand for milli-, as in thousand. So 3mm would be 3 thousand thousand. 3M is technically correct, though confusing in this specific case. Capital M would indicate Mega, as in the progression from kilobit to megabit to gigabit.

  • 3MM is three million, for US accountants and thus engineers writing docs for VPs. 3mm is three millimeters.

  • Gamers just write it as 3kk. (PS: never seen MM used as a "million" even in my two decades on the internet)

  • Interesting, I'd seen it as "MM", as in "Thousand Thousand" in Roman numerals.

    Of course lowercase "mm" is most recognizable as millimeter, so that would be confusing in a different way.

it would take all of about 3 seconds to realize why an unlimited character count would break the site's layout and know that it will never happen.

i do agree that the "don't editorialize" and strict char count are very contradictory, but suggesting that the site changes because of it is also naive at best.

  • It took about 1 second to realize that "80 characters" and "unlimited" aren't the only two options.

    • Exactly; thank you.

      I was definitely NOT thinking of unlimited.

      I was thinking of 80chars, but excluding numerals (123, etc) and number text ("thousand", "million" etc.) and maybe a few other items excluded from the count, with a maximum of 100, or whatever number actually will not break the layout.

      I've found it frustrating trying to fit in 80chars, and e.g., finding that ampersand gets expanded so it actually counts more than "and", so it is not a single-rule 80 chars; perhaps a few more sophisticated rules might help. Just a suggestion.

      2 replies →

mm is milimeters. MM does not exist.