What’s in a name? A rose is a rose by any other name?
Xerox used to be the name of a technology company before it became a generic document-duplication process they helped popularise (“I’ll just take a Xerox of this document using my Ricoh photocopier here”).
Thanks to the media, hackers, who used to make technology go beyond its perceived limits, are now jail-bird material who brutally break into systems to steal, maul and destroy. That is because every dyed-in-the-wool yellow journalist knows that the act of hacking (envision blood, gore and the swinging of an axe) makes so much better headline material than the actual term (which is “cracker” – which sounds like a bisquit).
And when things go stale, I can’t open Windows to freshen and improve things, because I might get a call from Microsoft’s lawyers.
Clearly, I have a problem with names (and tags, and labels, and…). And it is causing me some consternation as I try to achieve something else.
Allow me to explain: