Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

This is why geeks should be required to run things past an English major before talking to normal human beings.

If we call a thing "jailbreaking", we're going to be battling negative perceptions forever. We're trying to explain to people who really don't care that they should take time out of their day to help legalize something called "jailbreaking". The RIAA, MPAA and ESA would struggle to dream up a more dubious name if they were embarking on a spin campaign to criminalise it outright.

Why couldn't we have called it "derestricting" or "liberating" or something? Why couldn't we have chosen a positive, all-American sort of name? I know, I know, these are our devices and we're having our freedoms taken from us, so we're totally like POWs, not criminals. We're the good kind of escaped prisoner. Now explain that to my mother in a few short words while Bill O'Reilly accuses you of supporting Al-Qaeda.

For a bunch of geniuses, we do some really dumb things.

Yep. Same thing with "hacking" and "hackathons". Whenever I tell non-techies I'm going to a hackathon they think I'm going to break into someone's network, or something.

We can blame Hollywood and the media for perverting the word hacker, but jailbreaking and the negative connotations it can provoke is our own fault.

Honestly, I think Apple has done a great job of bringing the idea of jailbreaking into the popular lexicon. If you have a good grasp of iOS, you know what jailbreaking is and why Apple shouldn't have the right to stop you.

And honestly, I don't think we could find a better name if we tried. Everyone likes a good jailbreak, especially when the inmate has done nothing wrong.

I'm not sure it's as bad as you think. The cell phone industry and the carriers are the ones who built the jail, and the inmate is you. It is probably worth making sure that nuance is communicated, but it's a powerful image. If you're not a criminal, why are you in jail?

The problem is that, to the uninformed, that information is not obvious from the term.

A friend of mine started working at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View. He was working on a web app with his brother, who was actually in another country.

Shortly thereafter, he gets a very worried call from his brother, saying "We've been hacked!" He saw a lot of traffic in the logs from an IP connected with the word "Hacker" and got a bit panicked.

I'm a Hacker Dojo member, and I can relate. I check into the Dojo on Facebook and I always have a few people who think I'm doing nefarious things like "hacking" people's Facebook account. I've been pretty good about educating people about what hacker's actually do, or at least this hacker so the questions have gone down to a minimum as it seems they're bored with the reality.

If you're not a criminal, why are you in jail?

But why would you think like that? If, outside of any smartphone connection, someone said they'd "jailbroken" I would think "they were in jail", not "I wonder if they deserved to be there".

If you call yourself a jailbreaker you a describing yourself as an escaped criminal to many people.

  If you're not a criminal, why are you in jail?

And it works in the exact reverse. They think: "I'm not in jail, why are you? Probably because you are a criminal."

> It is probably worth making sure that nuance is communicated

We live in an entirely nuance-free culture. We have an electoral campaign where candidates are being attacked for speaking basic French. Where an electorally significant percentage of the population believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 and that Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim.

When the US government is unable to successfully impart basic factual knowledge, basing a political campaign on anything with the slightest element of ambiguity or nuance is madness.

Good point. I suggest "unlocking". It's a common term when it comes to switching networks "Oh my contract is up, I want to move to another phone network, but my phone that I paid for is locked!"

Situations like that (moving phone networks) are commonly understood, and you can easily explain how locking is designed not to protect you, but to try to force you to buy a new phone.

Since you can already separately unlock and jailbreak phones, that would make matters very confusing.

> "Oh my contract is up, I want to move to another phone network, but my phone that I paid for is locked!"

Except jailbreaking != sim unlocking.

The rhetorical shift needs to be greater, conjuring up different images than cages and locks. People put locks on things they own, they don't necessarily want to support people who can bypass them. I think things need to go in the direction of "completion" or "empowering"--bad choices themselves but grafting onto that connotation allows you to change the way the argument is structured as well. You are giving yourself a more complete access to your device by jailbreaking, rather than rebelling against an authority.

To some extent, geeks' choice of terminology is a deliberate statement of rebellion against the manipulation of language often seen in politics. In that context, the goal of using names and terms like "jailbreaking," "hacker," "pois0n," etc. is to deflate the knee-jerk emotional reaction people have to the trigger words used by the media.

Well, it doesn't work. These 'people' that they are trying to convince still have the same knee-jerk emotional reactions to the words, only now to our disadvantage.

As the parent says: for a bunch of smart guys, we keep doing stupid things. Stubbornly, with the excuse that it 'should work'. It doesn't. It's preaching to the quire.

The saying is "preaching to the choir"[0]. :)

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[0] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/choir#Noun

Ah, thanks. For the longest time I used 'maby' instead of 'maybe' in Usenet posts, before someone pointed out it was wrong.

The saying is also "preaching to the quire"[0]. :)

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[0]http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quire#Noun_2

> before talking to normal human beings

This scared me and makes me feel as if we believe 'normal human beings' are party members from 1984.

> The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure for ever? Like an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Collateral damage. Extraordinary rendition. Enhanced interrogation techniques. Surge. Undocumented workers. Obamacare. Death panels. Mis-speaking. Freedom fries.

We've actively regressed since McCarthy. The modern political vocabulary is dominated by doublespeak and thought-terminating cliche[1]. Most of the fundamental battle lines in American politics have long since been distilled into meaningless soundbite slogans, devoid of any real semantics.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_Reform_and_the_Psycholo...

I think there has been a lot of regression on the side of us progressives who are so afraid of being rhetoricians that we actively scuttle our own causes with poor choices of language. There are very few politicians on the left trying to best these trends with wit and brevity.

"rooting" would be the better word, as used for android phones.

Rooting is devoid of any positive connotations, and sounds like a root canal or some sort of nefarious "root/rumaging around"

I would have bet on an association with vegetal roots, or more like rooting for something, but yes, it might be overly optimistic expectations.

The hackers that came up with the name way back when weren't corporate PR hacks, that's why.

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