And this (in addition to the "this is the RIGHT way and if you do it the old way you're implicitly EVIL" self-righteousness) is why I have a problem with all the pseudo-DEI language changes: They hinder communication. Instead of one universally accepted term, you now come across at least half a dozen "better" alternatives for everything, and each time have to figure out what they mean, and whether they're just a more politically correct term for something existing, or imply some kind of actual difference.
We're talking about cryptographic shorthand here for which it seems perfectly fine. You might as well complain that not all message senders are called Alice.
I can't believe they changed this too. It's like context doesn't matter, as though "Man" wasn't used in a gender-neutral way in the term "Man-In-The-Middle".
People are free to choose to say PITM instead of MITM if they feel the original term is offensive, but it shouldn't be forced onto everyone (e.g. GitHub issues nagging maintainers to change MITM to PITM in order to be more "inclusive").
I think it makes sense, since it's an assumption that the attacker is a male. In security it should be a focus to be as precise as possible and not to introduce assumptions which might cloud your ability to judge other details.
> The term man (from Proto-Germanic *mann- "person") and words derived from it can designate any or even all of the human race regardless of their sex or age. In traditional usage, man (without an article) itself refers to the species or to humanity (mankind) as a whole.
Of course, the meaning of words change over time. But also, the meaning of words in a compound expression can be different from the meaning of the word on its own.
(See also how a pickpocket is not a type of pocked, nor is a cutthroat a kind of throat.)
The purpose of these forced changes is an American understanding of DEI, pretending it's not about that feels like a lie, and being told a transparent lie feels insulting to me because it suggests the person telling the lie considers me dumb enough to not see through it.
But the disc is inoffensive. Changing this wouldn't fix anything because we haven't found a clearer / clearly better icon for save afaik, so we stick we what we have.
But words shape the images we form in our minds. The issue with man-limited phrases is that we imagine men, specifically. That's also how words work and we know this through studies.
So we ought to fix this. But I'm sure OP already know why people seek to get rid of these unwanted gendering in idioms. That's not new anymore.
It's mildly annoying because we are used to the old term but that's very temporary, for the time of the transition. But I'm sure OP instantly understood the meaning of Person in the Middle the first time you saw it, so I have troubles understanding why someone would oppose such an evolution. Surely it's not about clarity.
We never fixed anything by refusing change and staying in the past.
Guys, I know you hate change, but if these terms were all so innocuous and innocent, why the hate against this small change?
I’m from Holland and we have this weird thing called Sinterklaas where we dress up as black people and basically make fun of them.
However, don’t tell them this because they will tear you a new one. How dare you touch these sacred traditions.
I feel the same way about master/slave and gendered bullshit. It’s not the end of the world and let’s not make it bigger than it is, but sometimes you at least just have to admit things are fishy.
Agreed entirely. The substitution in the article didn’t cause much inconvenience to the readers, even if it was new to them (it was new to me). But people sure seem to have an appetite for complaining about it rather than the substance of the article.
Because it's not "this one small change", it's friction added everywhere where you're trying to communicate, while also implicitly (and sometime explicitly) being called evil for using well-established language.
It's also not 1-2 terms, people come up with new, increasigly far-fetched reason to ban new terms every year.
I'm trying to submit a patch, but instead I have to deal with a linter telling me that "blacklist" is evil, so I'm now supposed to either refactor the existing software or tell some vendor to please change their URLs.
I'm trying to understand something, but I now first have to guess what a term is supposed to mean, because each keyword with a well-established meaning has now been replaced with half a dozen of new terms.
I'm trying to push a git repo to Github and things break because different parts got updated to the politically-correct "main" instead of "master" at different times.
It's a no-win situation, either you just silently take it and put up with it - but that makes the problem worse, because people come up with more bullshit, or you push back. Either way you're stuck dealing with this, as you call it yourself, bullshit.
We have got: master/slave, blacklist/whitelist, master and now person-in-the-middle.
I’m sure we’ll find a few others.
You’re telling me these few changes and new terminology are too confusing?
It’s not like we are rethinking all of language. It’s a couple of terms and minor tweaks in ways of thought.
The amount of pushback is IMO disproportional to the minor inconvenience caused by learning a thing or two.
Remember that a lot of jargon that I cannot even repeat here used to be common vernacular not so long ago. My parents (and even I) for example were brought up with timeless children’s songs such as “nikkers dansen de troelala” en “hanky panky shanghai”. I’ll leave those for Google.
Broadly, my objection is that these linguistic changes have had no positive impact on anything meaningful, and instead act as a corporate smoke screen for real issues.
For context to the above comment: "things are fishy" is a translation of a Dutch phrase "het klopt niet", which was thrown around during the pandemic, farmer's protests, a short lived qanon phase and other conspiracy thinking waves. It's an empty statement and feels tacked onto the above comment without explaining what exactly is fishy.
The push against making the Sinterklaas character of Zwarte Piet less of a racist stereotype is another culture war, provoked by shady organizations. Remember that there's foreign powers in whose interest it is to get people really upset over issues like this; they don't care who "wins", as long as people get upset over it and feel threatened by a boogieman.
Dutch people demand to know what is fishy about making a black face, dressing up in colonial clothes and acting childish. They think this is “empty talk”. There is a long, long list of these kinds of “cultural” behaviors. Especially the rural area is particularly backwards.
I don’t know what to say. Meet some people outside your bubble. It certainly helped me.
Anyway, the Dutch and their deep-rooted racism are only superficially related to this issue.
My main point was to say that there exists the possibility that you may be wrong about holding on to outdated norms and changing things might be a good idea. Sinterklaas is just a particularly obvious one, but as you show, a lot of people still have some way to go.
Not to be pedantic, but the comment you're replying to didn't mention iconography; "save" is still the word used, but when you think about it, it's a weird word to use for the act of storing something. "Save this file from being lost in case my computer shuts down" kinda thing.
I haven’t seen a floppy disk in weeks. And the noise it makes when I’m saving the drill protocol on which our monthly invoicing depends (+/- hundreds of thousands of euros) gives me cold sweats…
> The hypothesis has long been controversial, and many different, often contradictory variations have existed throughout its history.[2] The strong hypothesis of linguistic relativity, now referred to as linguistic determinism, is that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and restrict cognitive categories. This was claimed by some of the early linguists before World War II;[3] but, it is generally agreed to be false by modern linguists.[4] Nevertheless, research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting a weaker version of linguistic relativity:[4][3] that a language's structures influence a speaker's perceptions, without strictly limiting or obstructing them.
So there is empirical evidence that it has a non-zero impact on the way people view the world.
What's wrong with Person-In-The-Middle? If we can include more people and make the topic more accessible and move a little stone off of the patriarchy mountain, seems like an easy win to me. Assuming you believe that systemic privileges exist and that they are bad and should be changed.
