SV: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs

[Anne-Marie Eklund-Löwinder <[e-mail]>]

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: [phone]
https://www.iis.se

Visitors: Hammarby Kaj 10D
Mail: Box 92073, 120 07 Stockholm



> -----Ursprungligt meddelande-----
> Från: ietf <[e-mail]> För Dave Cridland
> Skickat: den 20 september 2018 13:51
> Till: [e-mail]
> Kopia: [e-mail] Discussion <[e-mail]>
> 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 <[e-mail]
> <mailto:[e-mail]> > 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
> 
>