First I've heard of it, but I had the same reaction as Cringley. Maybe it's an age thing. "Imagine v1 of Big Brother's -- or NSA director Keith Alexander's -- most inflamed fever dream: a sensorbot shaped like a Russian nesting doll wearing a Hindi-cow smile. Then terrifyingly name it "Mother" and build it specifically to monitor as many facets of your personal life as it can. Are you schvitzing yet?" http://www.info…
"schvitzing"? There are certain stylistic choices a writer can make that labels him as an instant idiot in my world. I chose not to read that link in full due to the word chosen here.
For future visitors of this place, my expanded rationale:
"schvitzing" automagically reads like "schwitzen" (to sweat) to this German reader. Looking that word up on the net ([1], leads to [2]) results in either German or Yiddish origins and confirms that it is just that, just .. referenced in a weird way.
Not knowing the author and his background I assume that this was chosen for effect - and I despise choices like that. I'm among the least patriotic people you'll meet, but if you're going to make jokes about $SomeEvilScenario and make it sound more .. legit, funny, interesting, believable by adding some sort-of-German-word-or-phrase you are not a writer, you're a fool, an idiot in my world.
That author chose, according to what I can see, a 'German' (or Yiddish, doesn't change my opinion really) phrase to describe something scary. That's low. I wasn't a fan of that source before this article, but I won't visit it ever after.
1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schvitzing 2: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shvitz#English