Access (pronounced ak-ses)
(1) The ability, right, or permission to approach, enter,
speak with, or use; admittance.
(2) A way or means of approach.
(3) The state or quality of being approachable.
(4) In Christian theology, the path to God through Jesus
Christ our Lord & Savior.
(5) An attack or onset, as of a disease or symptom (the
access in the sense of the vector of transmission or infection).
(6) Admission to sexual intercourse (now rare even in
technical use but still used in zoology) and usually in the legal phrase “non
access”.
(7) A sudden, strong burst of emotion; an outburst or paroxysm
(and sometimes confused with excess) (now rare, even poetically).
(8) In Scots English, complicity or assent.
(9) In pre-modern international relations, an increase (of
territory) by addition; accession (archaic).
(10) To make contact with or gain access to; be able to
reach, approach, enter etc.
(11) In computing, (of a program or system component) to
retrieve (data) for use by another program or application or for transfer from
one part of the system to another.
(12) In computing, as “access level”, an expression of
the point on a security layer afforded to a user, process or device.
(13) In family law in many jurisdictions, the right of the
non-custodial parent to visit their child or have the child spend time with
them.
(14) In broadcasting and related activities, (of
programming, scheduling etc), the extent of the availability of the content.
1275–1325: From the Middle English accesse, from the Old French acces
or directly from the Latin accessus (a
coming to, an approach; way of approach, entrance), the construct being acce(d-)
(a variant stem (a noun use) of accēdere
(to accede; to approach)) + -ss- +-(t)us
(the suffix of verb action). Derived
forms (preaccess, nonaccess, reaccess unaccessed, deaccess et al) are created
as required, especially in computing and are sometimes hyphenated. Access is a noun & verb, accessibility
& accessor are nouns, accessed & accessing are verbs, accessible &
accessless are adjectives and accessively is an adverb; the noun plural is
accesses.
The use in computing appears to date
(in the sense of “gain access to, be able to use”) from 1962 although in the
days when mainframes sat in rooms behind locked doors, the word access in its
more traditional sense would frequently have been used. The use in English meaning “an entrance”
emerged in the early seventeenth century, directly from the Latin while the
notion of the “habit or power of getting into the presence of (someone or
something)” was in use by at least the late fourteenth. The adjective accessible (affording access,
capable of being approached or reached) was from the early fifteenth century
and was from the Old French accessible (and directly from Late Latin accessibilis, a verbal adjective from the
Latin accessus). The meaning “easy to reach” was a neutral
form from the 1640s while when used of art, music or literature in the sense of
“able readily to be understood” it could be positive or a kind of “back-handed
compliment” by those who liked to disparage popular culture and preferred works
more obscure or difficult, understood only by an elite.
Access Hollywood began in 1996 as a weekday show focused on entertainment (it was known as Access only between 2017-2019). A survivor in a crowded market, Access Hollywood has appeared through many distribution channels over the last 25 years (a period of much media churn as well as M&A (mergers & acquisitions) in the industry, it’s most associated with the NBC network and it is currently contracted to produce episodes for 2024 & 2025.
Common
uses of “access” tied to a moderator includes “access code” (usually numeric or
alpha-numeric strings used for doors, computers etc), “access control”
(security systems for various purposes), “access day” (in educational and other
institution a kind of “open day” when areas usually restricted can be entered),
“access journalism” (a critique of journalism affords the which affords the
rich and powerful greater access rather than prioritizing journalistic
objectivity or integrity), “access method” (in computing the means used to
provide connectivity between devices or systems (and sometimes used generally
of doors gateways etc (each of these an “access point”))), , usually a software
or hardware component of a mainframe, to access data on an external storage
device, “access modifier” (in coding (object-oriented programming (OOP)), an “access
specifier” (a keyword applied to a variable, method etc, used to indicates
which other parts of the program are permitted access)), “access node”, “access
time” & “access date” (in security logs and audit trails, entries recording
details of a user’s or device’s access to something), “access token” (an object
that describes the security context of a process or thread, such as the user's
identity and privileges which can be related to an related to an “access
violation” (an access not in accord with the granted rights); the special use
of “access violation” being a “segmentation fault” (and error in software which occurs when a
program attempts to access a memory location that is not permitted), “direct
access” (any form of access by an unrestricted path which in computing is a (rarely
used) synonym of “random access” (the ability to access any element of a
sequence in real time, without having to seek through preceding elements)), “remote
access” (what used to be called telecommuting, the various means by which
computing resources can be accessed without some form of close or direct (classically
hard-wired) connections), “read-only access” (in computing a privilege level
which permits a user to view a resource but not modify or delete), “public
access” (used generally of any place where the public are permitted and as “public
access broadcasting (PAB)”, a special use dating from the pre-internet era when
broadcasting was limited to those who paid governments licence fees for “bandwidth
spectrum”, PAB a means whereby local, non-profit community groups could broadcast
(although usually with low-powered transmitters and thus in a sense “narrowcasting”)
and “non-access” (a term from eighteenth century common law which described the
“impossibility of access for sexual
intercourse”, the significance being in cases such as where a husband had
been at sea or in some other place for such a time that he couldn’t have fathered
the baby his wife had delivered, the court would hold the child to be “a
bastard” (illegitimate).
Retired with the coming of Office XP in 2001 after complaints the paperclip variously was “intrusive”, “annoying”, “condescending” or “masonic” (some were more graphic about what Microsoft should do with their Clippy), Clippy staged an unexpected comeback in a sticker-pack bundled with Teams, (Microsoft's collaboration application). Being less obtrusive than in its original incarnation, this time there have been few complaints. Microsoft didn't have much luck with trying to make people's desktops "more accessible", the BOB user environment of the mid-1990s lasting not even a year.
A relational
database, Microsoft Access was introduced in 1992 and in many markets it was
offered at price which was at the time remarkably low (Aus$179 in Australia)
and it found a niche, one real attraction being the increasingly tight
integration with other applications in the MS-Office suite, notably the Excel
spreadsheet, used usually as a front-end to display, sort and manipulate data
held in Access tables. Produced after
Microsoft’s Omega database project proved abortive, after the company acquired
FoxPro, the official position was Access would be aimed at the home and SMB
(small & medium business) market while FoxPro would be for large corporates
running databases which were at scale yet not requiring big machines like
mainframes. The attraction of FoxPro was
the extent of compatibility with and ease of conversion from records stored in
the xBASE format although the need to maintain the dual-lines didn’t last long
into the twenty-first century, the final release of a FoxPro patch made in
2007.
Who has access to the resources of the state?
The disturbing number of women killed by men (usually
their present or estranged “intimate partner” (ie husband or boyfriend)) in
Australia has in recent years risen to the extent that some activists thought
it necessary to establish Counting Dead Women Australia (31 women killed by violence
between 1 January-26 May 2024 (ie more than one a week)) to track the body count. While intimate partner violence by women
against men does happen the numbers are tiny and tend to be in self-defense or
as a “pre-emptive strike”. That phenomenon
of male violence and sexual predation is of course something ancient and
something summed up by US anthropologist Robert Ardrey (1908–1980) in his African
Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and nature of Man
(1961): “But
we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers
besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and
missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments?”
In evolutionary terms, man rose to dominate all the Earth’s
other beasts in a remarkably short time and one of the things organized society
had to do to make civilization possible was repress those most basic instincts
of men. In that there has obviously been
much success but repression is not eradication and Ardrey further explored the
implications of evolutionarily determined instinct among humans toward
territoriality in The Territorial
Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations
(1966). As man owns his land and can do
with it what he will, so too he owns his woman, a view in some way reflected in
the theology and law of a number of “civilized nations” as late as the twentieth
century.
The repression of our worst instincts is a social
construct but where that fails it must be enforced by the organs of the state,
the institution which reserves for itself an exclusivity of right to the
exercise of public violence, using lethal force if need be. It’s that social contract which has made
civilized life possible and it should be to the state women can appeal for
protection if threatened. In Australia,
on paper, that’s exactly how things appear to be so the problem is not inherently
“structural” (despite many critics having such fondness of the word they apply
it anyway) but operational and the question to be asked is” who has access to
the resources of the state? Who gets
protection and who does not?
What is striking in Australia is the frequency with which
it’s revealed, as the murder of another woman dutifully is reported, that she
or her family, often on multiple occasions, approached the police asking from
protection, only to be turned away, told there was nothing which could be done
because her circumstances didn’t comply with the required criteria which would
produce a response. The bureaucratic
nature of such things was illustrated in the matter of a recent killing of a woman
and her daughter by a man the police had three times been warned presented an “imminent
threat” to his estranged wife. The
police were aware of the tension between the two because, at her request, a
month earlier officers had attended the family home so she could in safety remove
her possessions and move out. Lawfully,
the man had in possession more than a dozen registered guns including two
handguns. Subsequently, while hunting
for her, he went to the house of her friend, a woman who had offered shelter,
demanding to see his wife. Realizing she
wasn’t there, in circumstances not yet understood, he killed the woman and her
teenage daughter before using one of the two guns he was carrying to take his
own life. The bureaucratic quirk is that
because, technically, the murderer and the victims were unknown to each other,
the police do not treat this as a case of “domestic violence”. The killer’s daughter was interviewed in the
aftermath, say “My
mother and I made it clear that our lives were at risk – we were repeatedly
ignored, repeatedly failed. These
failures have cost the lives of two incredible women. I did everything I could to protect my mother
— when my father couldn't find us he murdered her best friend and her best
friend's daughter.” In
commenting on the case, the commissioner of police said that although officers
had submitted a family violence incident report after the women made contact,
they were not able to issue a restraining order because “The circumstances would not have met the
threshold of a 72-hour police order.” He added the police will conduct “…a thorough
investigation into the incident.”
It’s quite a contrast between a heavily armed
anti-terrorism squad raiding the home of the producer of a YouTube channel who
had made accusations of misconduct against a politician with the women turned
away by police, soon to be murdered by those from whom they were seeking
protection. It might have been expected
that if Mr Barilaro did contact police about the matter, he might have been
told there were civil remedies he could pursue but instead, an anti-terrorism unit
was deployed, apparently on the basis of a brief, non violent, interaction
between producer and politician in a public place. Mr Barilaro denied explicitly asking for the
raid to take place but that really is the point, his position meant he was granted
access to the resources of the state without having to ask, the police “working towards
the deputy premier”.
Regarding the rising death toll of unfortunate women, one
has to have some sympathy for the police who are in the difficult position of
being expected to “do something” without it being clear exactly what. The recent spike in the death toll has
produced well-attended protest marches and reassuring statements from
politicians but nothing suggests there’s any interest from them in providing
the funding to support the services (safe housing and such) activists have
identified as being what’s needed to reduce the death toll. The Counting Dead Woman page is likely to
have to continue counting.
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