David Soubly

Just the other day two more messages popped into my inbox. Each of them reminded me that if I didn’t get up to speed on their latest “as a Service” offering, I’d somehow be relegated to the dustbin of Internet history.

Oh, really.

I don’t even remember which “as a Service” these hucksters were hawking. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with what “as a Service” means (and woe to you, poor clueless clods), it is defined in Wikipedia (”Dictionary as a Service,” I would imagine) as...

Let’s discuss a number.

500,000.

Numbers by themselves are merely data or at best, rudimentary information. Individual bits of data are rather meaningless (and thus, without much value) until we connect them to other bits of data. Take your social security number. A string of nine digits and two dashes that don’t mean much, unless you — or a criminal — attach your name and other elements to it. It’s then valuable. It’s then information.

There are different connections we can make to this...