{"id":50798,"date":"2020-01-29T08:48:52","date_gmt":"2020-01-29T13:48:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=50798"},"modified":"2020-01-29T08:48:55","modified_gmt":"2020-01-29T13:48:55","slug":"tech-giants-rely-on-big-lies-and-we-fall-for-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=50798","title":{"rendered":"Tech Giants Rely on Big Lies \u2014 and We Fall for Them"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Tech Giants Rely on Big Lies \u2014 and We Fall for Them<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

From \u2018the cloud\u2019 to \u2018free\u2019 services, we\u2019ve been conned by tech babble.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"CloudFileTransfer.jpg\"\/
Just stop it with \u2018the cloud.\u2019 Illustration by Christopher Cheung.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Remember when we spent our days \u201csurfing\u201d the \u201cinformation superhighway?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 1990s dotcom bubble, when some tech companies spent as much as 90 per cent<\/a> of their budgets on advertising, brought a flood of hype-driven technobabble designed to lure venture capitalists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Twenty years later, some tech giants have revenues greater than the GDPs of small countries<\/a> and have the power to influence election outcomes<\/a> in major ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The need to cut through the hype churned out by the tech giants\u2019 marketing departments has become even more acute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here are three techno-utopic terms we should ban in the 2020s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. There is no \u2018cloud\u2019 <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe cloud,\u201d we should have learned by now, simply means \u201csomeone else\u2019s computer\u201d (and not necessarily someone trustworthy).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The term is brilliant branding. Selling people on \u201ccloud storage\u201d is a lot easier than convincing them to hand over all their data to a corporation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the idea makes sense. With the advent of wide access to high-speed connectivity, it\u2019s efficient \u2014 and cheaper \u2014 to shift storage and processing from individual devices to central sites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there is no safe, secure cloud. Security breaches have exposed millions of users\u2019 accounts \u2014 on Dropbox<\/a>, Amazon<\/a>, Google<\/a> and others. Companies have handed files over to authorities, sometimes without a fuss or a word. And Edward Snowden has revealed practically limitless government spying<\/a> on data moving through the internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where data ends up, how it gets there, and the laws and security processes that govern both are pretty darned important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The clouds, where the gods live, have always been humanity\u2019s favourite storage place for all that is out of reach of questioning and understanding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tech Giants Rely on Big Lies \u2014 and We Fall for Them From \u2018the cloud\u2019 to \u2018free\u2019 services, we\u2019ve been conned by tech babble. Remember when we spent our days \u201csurfing\u201d the \u201cinformation superhighway?\u201d  The 1990s dotcom bubble, when some tech companies spent as much as 90 per cent of their budgets on advertising, brought a flood […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9336,24021,652,21547,786,23884],"class_list":["post-50798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-big-tech","tag-bryan-carney","tag-privacy","tag-tech","tag-technology","tag-thetyee-ca"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50798"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50799,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50798\/revisions\/50799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}