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Comment by mgalka | Hacker News Reader

Other than the anachronistic name (thought "cyber" wend out in the 90's), I'm extremely impressed to see such an awesome tool come out of the public sector. Kudos to GCHQ!

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> thought "cyber" wend out in the 90's

A year ago someone in my research group claimed that they were 'getting into cyber'. I looked around the room and almost every other member of the group looked confused and a little concerned.

Apparently 'cyber' has become a byword for 'cyber security'. I hope that this does not last.

> Apparently 'cyber' has become a byword for 'cyber security'. I hope that this does not last.

I wouldn't get your hopes up, from the people who brought you forensic (i.e. legal) as a byword for science.

The security group at work now fancies themselves as "Cyber Command".

We immediately began mocking them with a buzz lightyear graphic.

They might be interested in this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Cyber_Command

Back in the late 90's on AOL, "cyber" was short for "cybersex."

Nah, "Cyber Security" is becoming the defacto term for referring to what I would have called IT Security in the past (some interesting reading on the topic here http://cyber.uk/cyber/)

The other day someone was telling me they used to run a website called CyberHomes. All I could think of was how weird that would sound today.

> "cyber" wend out in the 90's

I take it you have no exposure to the public sector? Referring to "Cyber" as "IT/Info/Computer/Network Security" will immediately identify you as an outsider in man public sector positions.

And vice versa outside of government!

According to Google Trends, "cyber" overall slowly going out of use, but "cyber security" has a reverse trend. At the same time, Cyber Monday is winning it all.

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=cyber%20sec...

EDIT: I've managed to get rid of this pesky Cyber Monday out of the graph!

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=cyber%20-mo...

The word is usually used in the context of war. See:

https://cyberbelli.com/2012/05/26/cyberspace-is-a-domain-of-...

http://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article...

http://www.academia.edu/1753317/A_Theory_of_War_in_the_Cyber...

Google trends is not good for this kind of analysis. Google trends is based on the number of searches for a particular term relative to all other searches. So you see the same trend when you look at other tech topics like Linux, programming, SSH, computer science, etc. It's not that these things are necessarily becoming less popular, just that tech oriented people were over represented on the early internet, and thus Google search. As more non tech people started googling stuff, tech topics fell in their relative importance.

Re-read the comment you replied to, cyber security is trending in the opposite direction of Cyber (or SSH). That would seem to invalidate your thesis; Cyber security is gaining popularity relative to other topics.

Edit: there's also an interesting spike in Google trends for "cyber" every November. National Cyber Security Awareness Month is in October.

There were two assertions made in tener's comment. The first was that the term "cyber" was going out of use, the second was that the term "cyber security" was increasing. My comment was referring to the first assertion.

'Cyber' usage has recently become de rigueur by people in positions of authority. see http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/trumps...

It would be better if we knew they weren't using it for evil.

How to update it for this decade: Replace Cyber with Data !

Data Sex?

This is the best part of this site, I completely forgot what this article was about and I'm 60 comments deep about the history and trends of the word "cyber". There needs to be a site dedicated to these entertaining comment threads / bravo

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