Did Obama make "Blackberry" the new "phone"?
It was bound to happen. The nation's first Web 2.0 president (Al Gore and Howard Dean didn't count), elected with such high expectations, was fated to encounter System Errors.If Obama doesn't act now, people will say "blackberry" when they mean "phone." And by the time the tech hysteria has abated, ice will once again cover the Earth.
First there was Timothy Geithner who, as Obama's nominee for Secretary of the Treasury, hit bumps in the confirmation process when mistakes were found on his income taxes. The problem? Geithner said he didn't understand Intuit's TurboTax software. (Geithner was confirmed, but to have let Health And Human Services nominee Tom Daschle and "Chief Performance Officer" designate Nancy Killefer dodge the tax bullet, too, would have been like repeating the same joke at a party.)
Then there was the proposed delay in recovering the nation's precious analog spectrum. Didn't you have plans for your share of the spectrum? I did.
But now Obama is in danger of shepherding into the language a term that can only help Research in Motion.
Candidate Obama was rarely scene without his Blackberry smartphone during his 17-month campaign, but the Blackberry's encryption limitations concerned the Secret Service and NSA, who at first gently requested he give up the phone so 14-year-old Malaysian hackers couldn't read his e-mail.
"They're going to pry it out of my hands," Obama actually said to CNBC, which seemed about as cavalier as Bush's "Bring it on" remark.
But the Secret Service and National Security Agency have found a way to allow a first smartphone to live in the White House. The issue is that it can't possibly be a Blackberry.
The Blackberry does not support the type of security that would be required for the president's top secret correspondence. While it runs its own operating system, the Blackberry is only capable of handling For Official Use Only (FOUO) data, nothing classified, and only uses Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) encryption, which is easily hackable (though I couldn't do it).
So Mr. Obama will probably use the clunky but secure Sectera Edge from General Dynamics, currently in use by the military and paranoiacs worldwide, and certified by the NSA.Unfortunately, "Blackberry" has been bandied about so much in the media that the word is in danger of becoming synonymous with "smartphone" and "phone" the way generic flying discs are all brand-name Friebees, colas are "Cokes," and performing WWW searches has become googling, with a small "g."
It is up to the Big G himself to not refer to his Sectera Edge as his "blackberry," if for no other reason that that's a couple of short hops to "nucular."
Labels: blackberry, general dynamics, language, obama, RIM, smartphone
1 Comments:
My blackberry is a red Sanyo flip phone. There. Am I helping?
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