6 ms·

> man-in-the-middle (MITM) Avoid using gendered terms. Instead use terms like on-path attacker, person-in-the-middle (PITM). This one got me. You can’t just re

> man-in-the-middle (MITM) Avoid using gendered terms. Instead use terms like on-path attacker, person-in-the-middle (PITM). This one got me. You can’t just replace “MITM” with “PITM” and expect anyone to know what you’re talking about. I know what MITM means. I have no idea what PITM means at first glance. I suspect that nobody does. So my main question is, who wrote that? Because I can’t imagine any technical person seriously suggesting that replacement.

domenukk 6y ago
Machine in the Middle or Malice in the Middle are better options imho
polar 6y ago
Pain In The M?
bennyp101 6y ago
Seems that it was a Google VP? https://twitter.com/daveksecure/status/1279194357116006400?lang=en https://twitter.com/daveksecure/status/1279194357116006400?l... But yea, changing terms like that is not very helpful, unless everyone is onboard
- dustinmoris 6y ago
  The funny thing is that his own name is not even gender neutral: "Kleidermacher" means Clothes maker, but it's the male version of it. The female version would be "Kleidermacherin". It's interesting because if he has a wife then his own wife has a male version of the last name. Interestingly in Polish we always had gender versioned names. My name is Gorski, which is the male version for "Man from the mountains", but my mum and sister are "Gorska" which means "Women from the mountain". It was always like this. My grandpa was Gorski and my grandma was Gorska. This does not exist in German, there is no "Kleidermacherin" as a last name. Just wanted to point this out as an interesting thing I noticed.
  - b3tta 6y ago
    Actually "Kleidermacher" is a genderless word in German. Source: I'm German. :D But historically this has been a complicated topic. Basically about a hundred years ago the genus and sexus of words started to get separated. Thanks to that you can say "Katze" to both male and female cats. Historically you had to say "Kater" to a male cat. But of course there were people in the 90s (it started earlier than that) who considered the generic masculinum uninclusive for women, since why is the male genus allowed to be the generic form of the language? Everything had to be gendered explicitly again! Awesome! /s Instead of rolling back the split of genus and sexus of the past decades, they instead opted for just sticking the already existing, but less popular -in suffix to everything and anything. A generic word like "Student" now had it's proper sexus again as "Student und Studentin". But as you might already know that's uninclusive for nonbinary people and thus we're now at a point where we say "Studierende" or "Studentx" or "Student:in" instead, which linguistically really doesn’t make much sense at all anymore. Awesome! /s One step forward, two steps backwards. But again, as explained above, the "Kleidermacher" can be of any genus, because... Genus and sexus are two different things in German.
    - dustinmoris 6y ago
      Is Kleidermacher genderless though or do you mean that the male version has been historically also applied as the genderless term which is kind of the whole problem of the last few years? Macher is male and Macherin is female. Same as Bäcker and Bäckerin, Polizist and Polizistin, Programmierer and Programmiererin. That's why in German people have to say things like "Liebe Bekannte und Bekanntinnen" now.
      - Item_Boring 6y ago
        Kleidermacher is in my understanding the (current) male version which was historically the gender/ sex inclusive word. Interestingly Bäcker (the male term) used to be inclusive too (a long time ago) because the ending -er simply implied that there‘s a person who does something. For Bäcker that means that that’s someone who bakes.
      - 6y ago
- andromeduck 6y ago
  People like that need to learn some American/European language/culture/history. White/light/warm/day = good, Black/dark/cold/night = bad is pretty universal association that only the truly sheltered and privleged could miss.
  - eli 6y ago
    Just because a word is widely understood doesn't make it inoffensive. I'm sure we can all think of many historical examples of words that were once common but are now almost never used because they are understood to be offensive.
  - vmception 6y ago
    > pretty universal association that only the truly sheltered and privileged could miss. uhhhh, is this gaslighting? it is considered privileged to never have introspection on these universal associations
    - jmercouris 6y ago
      No, that's not what gaslighting is. Gaslighting is when you deny an obvious truth. To attempt to convince someone that what they saw or experienced did not happen as they saw or experienced it.
      - vmception 6y ago
        To me, the thing I was replying to is a reinterpretation of privilege and denying a common reality. I know a lot of people that try to address how white/black terminology exacerbates disproportional civil rights abuses by race based on the unrelated good/bad association and would say it is privilege to not notice that or consider reconciling it. Assuming that was intentional, perhaps there is a better word. Assuming it was not intentional, then its just odd.
- 72deluxe 6y ago
  Please don't use "onboard". That would imply that I like boats and I might suffer from naviphobia.....
thu2111 6y ago
It's worse. It was written by technical people, who are immersed in a dysfunctional culture in which they: 1. Believe in the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis even though it was discredited decades ago. 2. Don't realise their beliefs about language creating or eliminating racism/sexism/etc are pseudo-scientific bunkum. 3. Or do know, but don't care, because controlling language feels like power, or worse, refusing to try and control language would mark them as an Enemy of the Ideology and they're afraid. Many of these ideas are not merely dystopian but positively dangerous. For instance, "fat" being a banned word. Fat is considered to be a derogatory term because being obese is extremely unhealthy. Not only do fat people endanger their own health, but they drive up insurance premiums for everyone else. Lots of people work really hard to lose weight because there is such a thing as a healthy weight. The idea that fatness is something fine or even to be celebrated is thus not merely dangerous, but deeply disrespectful to all the people who battled against their weight and made sacrifices of things they enjoyed to bring their weight down to a healthy level. Where I live some stupid clothes chain is currently running the wokest set of ads imaginable: photos and videos of absurdly obese "models" with slogans like "Diversity: here to stay". Those models need to lose weight or else they're gonna have heart problems, not to mention likely difficulty in finding a long term partner. Banning programmers from using the term "fat client" isn't going to change the basic physical reality in the world, just convince some low intelligence progressives that it's OK to ignore their own problems. Really, Googlers should feel ashamed reading this list. It's Animal Farm, it's the USSR, it's King Canute's advisors. You cannot change reality by changing the language.
- busymom0 6y ago
  "Language makes thought possible. When the words disappear, so does our ability to think about the ideas the words represent. When they prevent you from saying the obvious, overtime it becomes impossible to see the obvious.... those who control your words control your mind."
  - thu2111 6y ago
    Huh. This quote appears to come from Tucker Carlson, not who I expected at all. If even the American right believes this stuff, that might explain why it's become so prevalent in Valley culture. What's interesting is, although the idea is attractive and sounds superficially right, it's been investigated heavily in the past and is wrong. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis comes in two flavours: - The "strong" version, that says effectively language controls thought and you cannot think things you cannot express in words. - The "weak" version that says language influences thought. It was realised that the strong version was wrong before World War 2. The weak version is probably also wrong, because viewed through modern eyes a lot of this research is exactly the sort of stuff that's unlikely to replicate. The claims that seem like they might replicate are about trivial and arbitrary differences e.g. Swedish speakers using "a long time" vs Spanish speakers saying "a lot of time". For example: one major problem with Sapir-Whorf research is that a lot of it is based on anthropologist's claims about obscure languages, often the languages of isolated tribes. These are inherently difficult to replicate because often these tribes disappear or their language changes (supposedly) after contact with western civilization. Additionally the field is plagued with bad research that should have immediately raised suspicion, for example, the 1981 claim that Chinese people have difficulty reasoning about counterfactuals because of grammatical differences in their language, which turned out to be simply due to bad translations [1]. Many other studies are very weak conflations of correlation/causation, for example, this field is littered with claims of the form: speakers of languages with feature X go to college more often/are richer/are more or less confrontational. This sort of thing is ripe for all the classic ills of social science research, like P-hacking. Outside of academia the most famous example of belief in strong Sapir-Whorf is surely communism and their insistence on calling each other "comrade". This ubiquitous term didn't make them behave in comradely ways as assassinations, executions and widespread corruption were all common in Soviet societies. It's probably not a surprise that the left has difficulty letting go of Sapir-Whorf. This is partly because it's easy to mix up cause and effect with language control. Being in a position to severely punish people for something trivial, like use of a previously acceptable phrase, indicates to all observers that you have total power, that you can do whatever you like regardless of how unreasonable or extreme it is. Those observers may incorrectly conclude that language control is the actual source of those people's power, when in reality, it is the public punishment for arbitrary and harmless acts of disobedience that is the real source of power. Language is just a highly visible way to achieve that. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001002778490012X?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001002...
fanf2 6y ago
It’s a bad term because it’s ambiguous. It’s better to talk about passive interception attacks or active interception attacks.
ksajadi 6y ago
As a man I just realised I should have been offended by this given that it implies that the bad person in the middle is a man.
yosamino 6y ago
I am mainly onboard in renaming things in order to be a bit more inclusive, even though I recognize the firction that this causes. But this is a GREATLY missed opportunity of renaming Man-In-The-Middle to Mallory-In-The-Middle Mallory was the villain who invented MITM-attacks and it is a unisex name. I am really disapointed...
- rullelito 6y ago
  Names can become gendered, so this is not future proof.
  - stevehawk 6y ago
    What word or symbol really is future proof?
    - xook 6y ago
      The biohazard symbol comes to mind as it is meant to be "memorable but meaningless"[0] as a symbol. I imagine it will be in use a century from now, if not longer, since it was created specifically to convey a hazardous condition. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20110716160837/http://www.hms.harvard.edu/orsp/coms/BiosafetyResources/History-of-Biohazard-Symbol.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20110716160837/http://www.hms.ha...
ftarlao 6y ago
Man has also the meaning of "human being", gender neutral, why is the concept of context dead? I imagine a quite useless manager who has fun in being offended, and trying to put a guilt on the other people shoulders. IMHO
- sangnoir 6y ago
  "Girl" used to be gender-neutral too. How a language is used evolves.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > "Girl" used to be gender-neutral too. Yeah, its interesting how “girl” went from meaning child to meaning female child while “boy” went from meaning “male servant” (which is the origin of its use for “employee" in several compounds that are less outdated, like “pool boy”, and which is also the origin of its use as a racial slur) to meaning “male child”.
  - ftarlao 6y ago
    Language evolves, yes, but lot of people (the majority I suppose) still use and understand "man" in the neutral meaning too; there is a set of people that has "evolved" and tries to impose their evolution with dishonest speaking practices (shame, economic pressure, cancel culture..). This is not language evolution, it is the same as the fascists in Italy in the 19twenties that have pushed/banned the use of specific words in the Italian language (was it evolution? I think you agree it is not). So I don't buy this one, "language evolution" supporters in this case have the same behaviour of religious fundamentalists, they have lot of uncontestable axioms, like a religion, and this is not good. Not good at all.
    - sangnoir 6y ago
      How are economic pressure and "cancel culture"[1] dishonest? Moralizing your opinion and perceiving people who don't share your opinion as dishonest is fighting a culture war - not a way to find common ground or a comfortable coexistence. 1. "Cancel culture" a new shibboleth of an old non-violent tactic that already had a name: boycotts. A set of people who utilize boycotts is ξ
Volundr 6y ago
You should always define your acronyms on first use anyway. Sure most of your audience will know MITM means Man-In-The-Middle but the ones who don't will be completely lost.
mc32 6y ago
PITM sounds like “pain in the minge” which isn’t a good connotation.
tobbob 6y ago
It's not about helping technical people do their jobs better, it's about being a social justice warrior.

domenukk 6y ago

Machine in the Middle or Malice in the Middle are better options imho

polar 6y ago

Pain In The M?

bennyp101 6y ago

Seems that it was a Google VP? https://twitter.com/daveksecure/status/1279194357116006400?lang=en https://twitter.com/daveksecure/status/1279194357116006400?l... But yea, changing terms like that is not very helpful, unless everyone is onboard

dustinmoris 6y ago
The funny thing is that his own name is not even gender neutral: "Kleidermacher" means Clothes maker, but it's the male version of it. The female version would be "Kleidermacherin". It's interesting because if he has a wife then his own wife has a male version of the last name. Interestingly in Polish we always had gender versioned names. My name is Gorski, which is the male version for "Man from the mountains", but my mum and sister are "Gorska" which means "Women from the mountain". It was always like this. My grandpa was Gorski and my grandma was Gorska. This does not exist in German, there is no "Kleidermacherin" as a last name. Just wanted to point this out as an interesting thing I noticed.
- b3tta 6y ago
  Actually "Kleidermacher" is a genderless word in German. Source: I'm German. :D But historically this has been a complicated topic. Basically about a hundred years ago the genus and sexus of words started to get separated. Thanks to that you can say "Katze" to both male and female cats. Historically you had to say "Kater" to a male cat. But of course there were people in the 90s (it started earlier than that) who considered the generic masculinum uninclusive for women, since why is the male genus allowed to be the generic form of the language? Everything had to be gendered explicitly again! Awesome! /s Instead of rolling back the split of genus and sexus of the past decades, they instead opted for just sticking the already existing, but less popular -in suffix to everything and anything. A generic word like "Student" now had it's proper sexus again as "Student und Studentin". But as you might already know that's uninclusive for nonbinary people and thus we're now at a point where we say "Studierende" or "Studentx" or "Student:in" instead, which linguistically really doesn’t make much sense at all anymore. Awesome! /s One step forward, two steps backwards. But again, as explained above, the "Kleidermacher" can be of any genus, because... Genus and sexus are two different things in German.
  - dustinmoris 6y ago
    Is Kleidermacher genderless though or do you mean that the male version has been historically also applied as the genderless term which is kind of the whole problem of the last few years? Macher is male and Macherin is female. Same as Bäcker and Bäckerin, Polizist and Polizistin, Programmierer and Programmiererin. That's why in German people have to say things like "Liebe Bekannte und Bekanntinnen" now.
    - Item_Boring 6y ago
      Kleidermacher is in my understanding the (current) male version which was historically the gender/ sex inclusive word. Interestingly Bäcker (the male term) used to be inclusive too (a long time ago) because the ending -er simply implied that there‘s a person who does something. For Bäcker that means that that’s someone who bakes.
    - 6y ago
andromeduck 6y ago
People like that need to learn some American/European language/culture/history. White/light/warm/day = good, Black/dark/cold/night = bad is pretty universal association that only the truly sheltered and privleged could miss.
- eli 6y ago
  Just because a word is widely understood doesn't make it inoffensive. I'm sure we can all think of many historical examples of words that were once common but are now almost never used because they are understood to be offensive.
- vmception 6y ago
  > pretty universal association that only the truly sheltered and privileged could miss. uhhhh, is this gaslighting? it is considered privileged to never have introspection on these universal associations
  - jmercouris 6y ago
    No, that's not what gaslighting is. Gaslighting is when you deny an obvious truth. To attempt to convince someone that what they saw or experienced did not happen as they saw or experienced it.
    - vmception 6y ago
      To me, the thing I was replying to is a reinterpretation of privilege and denying a common reality. I know a lot of people that try to address how white/black terminology exacerbates disproportional civil rights abuses by race based on the unrelated good/bad association and would say it is privilege to not notice that or consider reconciling it. Assuming that was intentional, perhaps there is a better word. Assuming it was not intentional, then its just odd.
72deluxe 6y ago
Please don't use "onboard". That would imply that I like boats and I might suffer from naviphobia.....

thu2111 6y ago

It's worse. It was written by technical people, who are immersed in a dysfunctional culture in which they: 1. Believe in the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis even though it was discredited decades ago. 2. Don't realise their beliefs about language creating or eliminating racism/sexism/etc are pseudo-scientific bunkum. 3. Or do know, but don't care, because controlling language feels like power, or worse, refusing to try and control language would mark them as an Enemy of the Ideology and they're afraid. Many of these ideas are not merely dystopian but positively dangerous. For instance, "fat" being a banned word. Fat is considered to be a derogatory term because being obese is extremely unhealthy. Not only do fat people endanger their own health, but they drive up insurance premiums for everyone else. Lots of people work really hard to lose weight because there is such a thing as a healthy weight. The idea that fatness is something fine or even to be celebrated is thus not merely dangerous, but deeply disrespectful to all the people who battled against their weight and made sacrifices of things they enjoyed to bring their weight down to a healthy level. Where I live some stupid clothes chain is currently running the wokest set of ads imaginable: photos and videos of absurdly obese "models" with slogans like "Diversity: here to stay". Those models need to lose weight or else they're gonna have heart problems, not to mention likely difficulty in finding a long term partner. Banning programmers from using the term "fat client" isn't going to change the basic physical reality in the world, just convince some low intelligence progressives that it's OK to ignore their own problems. Really, Googlers should feel ashamed reading this list. It's Animal Farm, it's the USSR, it's King Canute's advisors. You cannot change reality by changing the language.

busymom0 6y ago
"Language makes thought possible. When the words disappear, so does our ability to think about the ideas the words represent. When they prevent you from saying the obvious, overtime it becomes impossible to see the obvious.... those who control your words control your mind."
- thu2111 6y ago
  Huh. This quote appears to come from Tucker Carlson, not who I expected at all. If even the American right believes this stuff, that might explain why it's become so prevalent in Valley culture. What's interesting is, although the idea is attractive and sounds superficially right, it's been investigated heavily in the past and is wrong. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis comes in two flavours: - The "strong" version, that says effectively language controls thought and you cannot think things you cannot express in words. - The "weak" version that says language influences thought. It was realised that the strong version was wrong before World War 2. The weak version is probably also wrong, because viewed through modern eyes a lot of this research is exactly the sort of stuff that's unlikely to replicate. The claims that seem like they might replicate are about trivial and arbitrary differences e.g. Swedish speakers using "a long time" vs Spanish speakers saying "a lot of time". For example: one major problem with Sapir-Whorf research is that a lot of it is based on anthropologist's claims about obscure languages, often the languages of isolated tribes. These are inherently difficult to replicate because often these tribes disappear or their language changes (supposedly) after contact with western civilization. Additionally the field is plagued with bad research that should have immediately raised suspicion, for example, the 1981 claim that Chinese people have difficulty reasoning about counterfactuals because of grammatical differences in their language, which turned out to be simply due to bad translations [1]. Many other studies are very weak conflations of correlation/causation, for example, this field is littered with claims of the form: speakers of languages with feature X go to college more often/are richer/are more or less confrontational. This sort of thing is ripe for all the classic ills of social science research, like P-hacking. Outside of academia the most famous example of belief in strong Sapir-Whorf is surely communism and their insistence on calling each other "comrade". This ubiquitous term didn't make them behave in comradely ways as assassinations, executions and widespread corruption were all common in Soviet societies. It's probably not a surprise that the left has difficulty letting go of Sapir-Whorf. This is partly because it's easy to mix up cause and effect with language control. Being in a position to severely punish people for something trivial, like use of a previously acceptable phrase, indicates to all observers that you have total power, that you can do whatever you like regardless of how unreasonable or extreme it is. Those observers may incorrectly conclude that language control is the actual source of those people's power, when in reality, it is the public punishment for arbitrary and harmless acts of disobedience that is the real source of power. Language is just a highly visible way to achieve that. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001002778490012X?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001002...

fanf2 6y ago

It’s a bad term because it’s ambiguous. It’s better to talk about passive interception attacks or active interception attacks.

ksajadi 6y ago

As a man I just realised I should have been offended by this given that it implies that the bad person in the middle is a man.

yosamino 6y ago

I am mainly onboard in renaming things in order to be a bit more inclusive, even though I recognize the firction that this causes. But this is a GREATLY missed opportunity of renaming Man-In-The-Middle to Mallory-In-The-Middle Mallory was the villain who invented MITM-attacks and it is a unisex name. I am really disapointed...

rullelito 6y ago
Names can become gendered, so this is not future proof.
- stevehawk 6y ago
  What word or symbol really is future proof?
  - xook 6y ago
    The biohazard symbol comes to mind as it is meant to be "memorable but meaningless"[0] as a symbol. I imagine it will be in use a century from now, if not longer, since it was created specifically to convey a hazardous condition. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20110716160837/http://www.hms.harvard.edu/orsp/coms/BiosafetyResources/History-of-Biohazard-Symbol.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20110716160837/http://www.hms.ha...

ftarlao 6y ago

Man has also the meaning of "human being", gender neutral, why is the concept of context dead? I imagine a quite useless manager who has fun in being offended, and trying to put a guilt on the other people shoulders. IMHO

sangnoir 6y ago
"Girl" used to be gender-neutral too. How a language is used evolves.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > "Girl" used to be gender-neutral too. Yeah, its interesting how “girl” went from meaning child to meaning female child while “boy” went from meaning “male servant” (which is the origin of its use for “employee" in several compounds that are less outdated, like “pool boy”, and which is also the origin of its use as a racial slur) to meaning “male child”.
- ftarlao 6y ago
  Language evolves, yes, but lot of people (the majority I suppose) still use and understand "man" in the neutral meaning too; there is a set of people that has "evolved" and tries to impose their evolution with dishonest speaking practices (shame, economic pressure, cancel culture..). This is not language evolution, it is the same as the fascists in Italy in the 19twenties that have pushed/banned the use of specific words in the Italian language (was it evolution? I think you agree it is not). So I don't buy this one, "language evolution" supporters in this case have the same behaviour of religious fundamentalists, they have lot of uncontestable axioms, like a religion, and this is not good. Not good at all.
  - sangnoir 6y ago
    How are economic pressure and "cancel culture"[1] dishonest? Moralizing your opinion and perceiving people who don't share your opinion as dishonest is fighting a culture war - not a way to find common ground or a comfortable coexistence. 1. "Cancel culture" a new shibboleth of an old non-violent tactic that already had a name: boycotts. A set of people who utilize boycotts is ξ

Volundr 6y ago

You should always define your acronyms on first use anyway. Sure most of your audience will know MITM means Man-In-The-Middle but the ones who don't will be completely lost.

mc32 6y ago

PITM sounds like “pain in the minge” which isn’t a good connotation.

tobbob 6y ago

It's not about helping technical people do their jobs better, it's about being a social justice warrior.