Sideways Dictionary Explains Complex Technical Jargon Using Analogies
Technical jargon is notoriously difficult to understand, but as more and more security issues dominate the news, more and more weird terminology appears. Sideways is a vocabulary that uses analogies to explain how it works, from decoys to buffer overflow attacks .
Sideways is a project created by the Washington Post and Alphabet. The goal of the lateral approach is to explain technology to the world in a way that is understandable to non-technical people. For example, a DDOS attack is explained as follows :
It’s like a school prank where you post your friend’s house party details all over town, so instead of 20 people 900 come.
Or the encryption is explained like this :
It’s like sending a sealed letter instead of a postcard. Disallowing encryption is like requiring all mail to be sent in the form of postcards, including bank statements, medical letters, and holiday photos. The postman, neighbors and postal service will get to know you pretty well soon.
There is a similar analogy with each term, and everyone can submit a new one. Then people can vote for or against, so that better analogies float to the top. These analogies are not always perfect, but that’s not the point. It’s more about providing a basic level of understanding of terms that readers completely ignore. To that end, Sideways does indeed employ editors who moderate user-submitted definitions to remove completely inaccurate content, which will hopefully help prevent the whole thing from becoming a mess of dumb terms and definitions.
The Sideways Dictionary site is fairly easy to use, but perhaps the most useful is the Chrome extension , which scans articles for terms and makes it easy to find those terms in Sideways as you read. Whether you’re technically human or not, the analogies here are useful to everyone, so it’s worth checking out how it works.