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by lucb1e 1289 days ago
People just speak out for or against things in the chat. Manner of speaking, not an official ballot voting system.

And to be clear, nobody was against being more gender neutral, just in favor of machine in the middle over attacker in the middle.
1 comments
gnull 1289 days ago
I'm not saying this way of gathering people's opinions is completely useless, but it has big flaws. Being against this sort of feminist initiatives can get you labeled all sorts of things in the best case, and cancelled in the worst case.

It's like making a poll in Russia about whether citizens support the invasion of Ukraine or not, when saying you don't like it is a criminal offense that can get you in jail. "I just went out and asked some people on the streets of Moscow whether they support bombing of Ukraine, nobody said no while a couple of them said yes, so they must really like that."

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lucb1e 1289 days ago
This change wasn't an organised discussion but casually came up while writing a report: the writer changed the acronyms template text (for this report) from MITM to AiTM, he let the team know and asked whether the upstream (company-wide) template should be changed also. That sparked alternative suggestions like Machine instead of Attacker and we ended up going with that. It wasn't intended to be formal and vote-like. I'm not sure setting up an anonymous vote (on some third party system to avoid being able to see server logs) is feasible every time something like this comes up.

How would you say we could do better? I'm definitely open for ideas if there are feasible methods. (And if it's not a "feasible" method for this one-off, then it might still be a good thing for more general / organised opinion gathering.)

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