“Imagine trying to bleep open your car one day,” says Graham Steel,
the boss of Cryptosense, a firm that makes automated security-checking
software, “but then you’re told that your car has been locked, and if
you want back in you need to send $200 to some shady Russian e-mail
address.”
This sentence is extracted from The economist. I looked up the dictionary and found that "bleep" can be used as noun or verb. In this sentence, I think "open" is the verb, then "bleep" should be an adverb to modify "open". But there is not such usage in dictionary. Does "bleep" make sense if it is a noun or a verb in this sentence? and how?
The whole paragrah is:
A recent development is “ransomware”, in which malicious programs
encrypt documents and photographs, and a victim must pay to have them
restored. “Imagine trying to bleep open your car one day,” says Graham
Steel, the boss of Cryptosense, a firm that makes automated
security-checking software, “but then you’re told that your car has
been locked, and if you want back in you need to send $200 to some
shady Russian e-mail address.”
Best Answer
At first I thought it might have been an expletive that was deleted.
If the sentence had been
I would have interpreted that as a placeholder for a swear word.
But in context it is clear he is talking about a car remote keyless system. Typically these make a bleeping sound indicating that the door was locked/unlocked successfully.