If you are an individual with some level of computer expertise who accidentally stumbled onto a “Hot Tech” article on the internet any time in the last few decades or so, you probably Alt-F4ed out of there screaming after the first paragraph. No matter how insightful a journalist’s commentary, or how fascinating a new product is, it’s hard to take the article seriously when it is peppered with buzzwords and the associated inane chatter which suggests the writer is just regurgitating phrases initially conceived by someone only slightly more knowledgeable on the topic. So get ready for a wild ride, as we look at some of the current most popular buzzwords, and investigate just why they are as stupid as they sound.
When it comes to buzzwords, the hottest one these days is “The Cloud.” To be fair, cloud computing is a legitimate service that normal users are being confronted with it more and more as many software packages migrate to online models. But the cloud is not a new idea, and certainly not one that has yet, nor is ever likely to, drastically revolutionize computing as we know it. Cloud computing, in its technical form, would be more accurately called “up in the clouds computing;” essentially, the computation that you need to be done is not performed on your device, but on some other device. This second device could be located anywhere, be of any type, and be run by any person. So long as you can send your commands and get a response, that second device is of no concern to you.
Cloud computing may sound like a revolution, but it’s been around since just about the start of computers themselves. In the 1970s, when computers were massive and expensive, academics and corporate workers accessed the university or company computer from a terminal, which was essentially a keyboard connected via very long wires to the computer, having no computing ability itself. The advantage of the terminal was that several people from several locations could use the computer at once, making the fullest use out of a very expensive piece of machinery. Today, everyone is familiar with cloud computing thanks to services such as Gmail, Facebook, and Google Search; you click buttons and hyperlinks, and the server sends you back a personalized webpage with your information and results.
The use of the phrase “cloud computing,” however, has exploded to the point where it’s treated as a modern miracle. For instance, today we have cloud storage in the form of Dropbox and Google Drive. But both of these are really just more refined versions of emailing an attachment to yourself and then opening it on another computer—useful, but hardly game-changing. And there seems to be this general delusion that cloud computing can do things that the computer you already own can’t. At least that’s the impression I got from a site advertising for a “Cloud Connected Summit.” The summit, it boasted, would allow you as a business owner to “Leveraging the Cloud to Fulfill the Promise of the Internet of Things: Network, Analyze, Capitalize.” A few years ago, we called that renting access to a server from someone in the server-renting business to do your extensive computing operations.
The overuse of the word “cloud” has prompted such annoyance from some people that they made a browser extension to fight it; Cloud-to-Butt replaces all instances of the word “cloud” on a webpage with the word “butt,” and allegedly makes articles about online services just barely pleasant enough to read. It also has an annoying tendency of replacing “cloud” on other sites—such as weather forecasts or information entry-fields—but the extension’s users seem to find that a worthwhile sacrifice.
One of the major issues which has been raised regarding cloud computing and cloud storage is the issue of security, since when you are using a cloud service you necessarily forfeit control over your information and commands to some unknown entity. Even if you trust the service to keep your data private, can you also trust them to keep it safe from hackers? That question will be left unanswered in this article, because it is better used as a segway to our next buzzword, “Hackers.”
Every day there are front-page headlines about how hackers breached some secure service or took down an important website. Most recently, a group of hackers infamously gained access to the iCloud accounts of celebrities, leaking nudes and other personal photographs. These “hackers” are a perfect example of the overuse and disfigurement of the word; they didn’t identify some exploit or issue with the way iCloud operates on a technical level, but rather reset the accounts’ passwords by answering security questions with the biographies from the celebrities Wikipedia pages. Is this an ingenious method? Absolutely. But to consider both this “hacking” and exploits such as heartbleed to be hacking requires adopting a definition so broad that almost any malicious activity by which someone gets access to information they should not have via a computer is hacking. Including those thousands of spam emails we all get trying to send us our free iPads if we would just give them our damn credit card numbers please.
The abuse of the word “hacker” came to a triumphant crescendo when Lizard Squad, a group of bored individuals who want “to experience the raw thrill of anarchy” was labeled as a “hacking group” by some gaming-news outlets. Their major claim to fame is tweeting a bomb threat to ground the plane of Sony’s President, John Smedley. According to news site Vocativ, the group also “hack into both PlayStation Network and XBox Live, shutting down the networks for hours at a time.” Their hacking method of choice? The DDoS attack, the hacking equivalent to a superspy stopping an important letter from reaching its destination by burning down the local post office. Once again, it’s a malicious group which operates exclusively electronically, but once again, the hackers need almost no specialized computer expertise to perform their actions.
Some people will argue that words change, and that what I call “buzzwords” and “the unrighteous slaughter of the English language” is really just natural forces of linguistics taking their course. Now I have no issue with that statement in general, and a look back at some 1000 CE English manuscripts is proof enough. But that doesn’t mean that this is a desired trend, or that we should just let everything slide. Language is only useful to the extent that it can express useful, intelligent ideas. Commandeering words and defining them so they can be appended anywhere to evoke strong feelings but convey no useful information is an outrageous and aggravating action. I’m all for evolving language to suit our ever-advancing technical innovations, but I don’t think we need to tend towards a language where we have a bunch of useless, impressive-sounding appendages that once stood for important and nuanced ideas.
As all the articles about the new Christmas gadgets begin to flood in, happy reading.
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