to the same internet filters that regularly censor Scunthorpe.
think of the children!
'intercepting intermediary' or 'intercemediary' works for me.
Lloyd Wood
Lloyd Wood
lloyd.wood@xxxxxxxxxxx
On Thursday, September 20, 2018, 10:09 pm, Anne-Marie Eklund-Löwinder <anne-marie.eklund-lowinder@xxxxxx> wrote:
Hi all,
Some time ago we had a standardisation committee in Sweden, running a project defining the terminology in Swedish for the information security area. They came up with
Janus-attack rather than man in the middle-attack (the latter sounds weird in Swedish).
Janus was a two faced God from ancient Roman religion/myth. He was the God of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and ending.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus
It didn't take off unfortunately, I consider it quite clever.
That said, I can't really see how the term "Man-in-the-middle" can be offensive.
Kind regards,
Anne-Marie Eklund Löwinder
Chief Information Security Officer
IIS (The Internet Infrastructure Foundation)
Phone: +46 734 315 310
https://www.iis.se
Visitors: Hammarby Kaj 10D
Mail: Box 92073, 120 07 Stockholm
> -----Ursprungligt meddelande-----
> Från: ietf <ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx> För Dave Cridland
> Skickat: den 20 september 2018 13:51
> Till: lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Kopia: ietf@xxxxxxxx Discussion <ietf@xxxxxxxx>
> Ämne: Re: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs
>
> Back when I was even more clueless than I am today, and actually ran DNS
> servers, we used the terms "primary" and "secondary" as a matter of course.
> Secondaries copied the data from primaries.
>
> So far, so good.
>
> Then we added a third nameserver, and of course that must be the tertiary,
> used only when *both* the primary and secondary had failed.
>
> When I realised my stupidity, I avoided the terms "primary" and "secondary"
> in the workplace, and instead used the terms "master" and "slave", which
> were less easily confused - or rather, made me less easily confused by them.
> The fact that "master/slave" was well understood within engineering helped
> enormously.
>
> But it's possible to remove the word "slave" easily - indeed, when discussing
> distributed systems such as clustering, the literature tends to refer to a
> "master", but not so much to "slaves".
>
> "Blacklist" and "whitelist" are well-known terms, but they can be avoided
> with small effort to provide synonyms which are more easily understood -
> "Blocklist" and "Permitlist" are trivial examples here. But if someone says
> "There is a whitelist", then I also know the default is to deny. So we'll need to
> be a bit more explicit about the default state, perhaps. In other words, I
> worry about changing these terms, but the possibility for confusion is low if
> we do.
>
> "Man-in-the-middle" I'm clearly too stupid to understand why this might be
> offensive, but equally I have no idea what term of art would suffice instead.
>
> I have no objection to thinking twice before using a term that could offend,
> but I have huge objections to replacing existing terms with new ones that
> could confuse instead.
>
> But still, I'm a white male living in a country that hasn't had slaves within its
> own borders, at least, for over a thousand years, so I freely admit I may not
> understand the gravity of the situation.
>
> So I'd like to hear from actual people who are actually made to feel
> uncomfortable about these terms, rather than people saying that other
> people have heard of some people who might be offended.
>
> Dave.
>
> On Thu, 20 Sep 2018 at 10:26, Niels ten Oever <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> <mailto:lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > wrote:
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> On the hrpc-list [0] there has been an intense conversation
> which was
> spurred by the news that the Python community removed
> Master/Slave
> terminology from its programming language [1].
>
> In the discussion that followed it was remarked that in RFCs
> terms like
> Master/Slave, blacklist/whitelist, man-in-middle, and other
> terminology
> that is offensive to some people and groups is quite common.
>
> This is not a discussion that can be resolved in hrpc, but rather
> should
> be dealt with in the IETF community (because hrpc doesn't
> make policy
> for terminology in the IETF), which is why I am posting this
> here.
>
> If people find the discussion worthwhile, we might also be just
> in time
> to request a BoF on this topic.
>
> Looking forward to discuss.
>
> Best,
>
> Niels
>
>
> [0] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/hrpc/
> [1]
> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8x7akv/mastersl
> ave-terminology-was-removed-from-python-programming-language
>
>
> --
> Niels ten Oever
> Researcher and PhD Candidate
> Datactive Research Group
> University of Amsterdam
>
> PGP fingerprint 2458 0B70 5C4A FD8A 9488
> 643A 0ED8 3F3A 468A C8B3
>
>
