Tails

#1 Updated by Anonymous 2016-09-03 04:40:52

Here is the german Wikipedia page for this: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-Middle-Angriff

Man in the middle is the common term, widely understood. Do we want to change this though to something which might be gender neutral but less obvious, like Janusangriff? Or Machine in the middle?

#2 Updated by cypherpunks 2016-09-04 05:38:11

u wrote:
> Here is the german Wikipedia page for this: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-Middle-Angriff
>
> Man in the middle is the common term, widely understood. Do we want to change this though to something which might be gender neutral but less obvious, like Janusangriff? Or Machine in the middle?

I don’t think we should. If machine in the middle were equally widely used, then it might be acceptable, but as it is, it’d be forcing a transition which would be less obvious than the well established technical meaning for MITM.

#3 Updated by sycamoreone 2016-09-07 02:43:44

We had a small discussion about this ticket at the September monthly meeting, but didn’t reach a conclusion. Some of the points that were raised are:

• “Man-in-the-middle” is the term people and the literature are using and what people will search for. Another term could be mistaken for another kind of attack.
• Google also finds “man in the middle”, when one searches for “machine in the middle” or “attacker in the middle”.
• Everything but “machine in the middle” will lead to abbreviations like AITM or HITM, that can’t be searched for.
• One could write something along the lines of “attacker-in-the-middle (more often called man-in-the-middle, MITM)”. One would need to check each page using the term for understandability.

One can use

git grep --count -E "man.in.the.middle" -- "*.*m*"

to find all occurrences of the term on the Tails webpage.

#7 Updated by sajolida 2016-11-04 12:14:24

I can’t make this a subtask of Feature #11766 so I’ll make it “Related to” again.

#10 Updated by sajolida 2016-11-04 12:15:07

Now I could! \o/

#13 Updated by Anonymous 2018-08-17 15:15:37

Found this comment: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/07/maninthemiddle_1.html#c287672 wiht a possible gender neutral word in english: Middleperson attack.

In German that could be Mittelspersonangriff or Janusangriff (according to https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-Middle-Angriff)

And I’m all for it.