From their white paper:
> "Our monitoring system is called Bro (an Orwellian reminder that monitoring comes hand in hand with the potential for privacy violations)"
So Big Brother = Bro
How ironic that the thought police choose to flag a 1984 inspired tool :)
Re:The Bro Network Security Monitor
by kirubakaran on Saturday May 10, 2014 @09:35PM
(#7727386)
Quite fitting, really.
It doesn't even make sense because the modern usage is almost exclusively a pejorative term that is only used for some subset of white men. If you look through urban dictionary or YouTube, you'd be have to scroll a pretty long time to see any other usage. Saying that women are discriminated against because they can't be called bros is like saying white people are discrimated against because they can't be called racial slurs for African Americans.
Their email archive goes back to 1998. Presumably the name wasn't a troll 15 years ago?
It is a reference to ``1984" and Big Brother. Their naming choice was mentioned in the original paper about it from 1999: http://www.icir.org/vern/papers/bro-CN99.html
It's just a mess. The tech looks interesting though, but it's really hard to take them seriously because of the name they chose.
Edit: Why is this getting downvoted? I pointed out my reaction to the title. I had never heard of it before so had no connection to their writings from 15 years ago. P.S. I didn't flag it.