Information Camouflage

I came across a term, “information camouflage” that I find incredibly interesting.

Computer Mad Scientist Hillel Wayne has defined the term “information camouflage” like this:

Information camouflage is when piece of information A has a name similar to another, very different, much more popular piece B. This makes searching for A difficult because you always get results for B instead.

It’s almost impossible to look up how elevators in tall buildings prioritize which floors to visit, because there’s an operating system concept called “elevator scheduling”. Searching for “elevator scheduling” gets you many hits, but they’re all about disk drives.

Information Camouflage is related to the problem of only being able to find your search terms for your desired information in “content farms”. I’ve heard this called “SEO Poisoning”.

It’s also related to the problem of only being able to find “beginner’s tutorials”. Looking for anything related to Raspberry Pi single board computers has these problems simultaneously: you find mutually-contradictory beginner’s tutorials in content farms. This is called “beginner’s bubble”, apparently.

Elevators

Hacker convention Defcon22 featured a great talk about elevator hacking and safety. Don’t miss this.