Today my son is at a mask making workshop at the UK Centre
for Carnival Arts. Hopefully he will get an idea of the transformation mask
wearers report when they don a mask. He is planning to make a set for the
family, perhaps for the Christmas dinner, which will be nice.
I made costumes in Trinidad but never wore one. The nearest I’ve gotten was in workshops with the great Peter Minshall. In those theatrical workshops I got the chance to wear his masks and I must say I felt a freedom to be an other from under the disguise.
On the first day of the Trinidad Carnival there is J’Ouvert which starts about 2am on the Monday. It’s dark, you get to cover yourself in mud and party in the streets through the sunrise into the mid-morning. When I did this, I will walk up to friends and not be recognised. That was a new feeling, being a genuine stranger to those I knew.
The word ‘mask’ reminded me of my work where at times information is masked to protect it from unauthorised access. The most prevalent example is that of test data. When an application is built or upgraded, it has to be checked before it is placed into the working environment. The changeover from old to new must appear seamless to the user.
The best way to check an application is by running it with the data that it will process for the business. This creates a problem of confidentiality because the people testing the application will now have access to real data. Imagine a developer having the same view of the company’s salaries as the people working in the Finance department.
The Data Protection Act does not allow this. If a company collects a customer’s information in order to process a transaction, it is expected that the use of that information will be limited to the transaction only.
This is where data masking comes in. There are different software techniques that will take real information and prepare it to be legally processed. This is not the end of the problem though as testers must also put an application through the rigorous testing of unlikely scenarios which will crash a program if certain conditions ever come together, such as, three John Smiths sharing the same post code.
Data masking is analogous to a Carnival headdress in that it can either simply render the original unrecognisable or it can be used to present an entirely new essence for novel effect.
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