Don’t Know What a Honeypot Is?
Try This Analogy on for Size
TECHNOLOGY USES A LOT of jargon. If you follow the news, you’ve probably come across terms like encryption, zero day, or airgap. Perhaps you’ve even looked them up, only to find Wikipedia entries and Quora threads as befuddling as the terms themselves. An easier solution might be to hover over a phrase like “two factor authentication” in a story and get an analogy that explains that it is a security measure a bit “like a child safety lid” and that “a child may be able to press the lid down and twist it, but won’t know that you have to do both at the same time.”
Sideways Dictionary does exactly that. The browser extension, developed by Google’s online safety division Jigsaw and The Washington Post, aims to help laypeople understand online threats and the precautions they can take against them. It starts with basic fluency; you can’t protect yourself against a phishing attack if you don’t know what it is.
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