Re: [PATCH 0/6] doc: replace "alice" and "bob" examples

From: Robert P. J. Day <rpjday@crashcourse.ca>
Date: Jun 15, 2021, 16:46 UTC
Message-ID: <18b53cae-6da9-c970-b994-caee11c5baf9@crashcourse.ca>
In-Reply-To: <cover-0.6-00000000000-20210615T161330Z-avarab@gmail.com>

On Tue, 15 Jun 2021, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> I suggested in [1] that the "alice" and "bob" examples in our
> documentation would be better written without a reference to such
> fictional characters, for reasons that have nothing to do with trying
> to bend over backwards to avoid any reference to people's gender. It
> just makes for better documentation.

  no, it doesn't ... and wikipedia explains it nicely:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob

"In cryptography, Alice and Bob are fictional characters commonly used as placeholders in discussions about cryptographic protocols or systems, and in other science and engineering literature where there are several participants in a thought experiment. The Alice and Bob characters were invented by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman in their 1978 paper "A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-key Cryptosystems".[1] Subsequently, they have become common archetypes in many scientific and engineering fields, such as quantum cryptography, game theory and physics.[2] As the use of Alice and Bob became more widespread, additional characters were added, sometimes each with a particular meaning. These characters do not have to refer to humans; they refer to generic agents which might be different computers or even different programs running on a single computer."

  if you want to make the docs better, have at it, but please don't do
something as meaningless as replacing "bob" and "alice" because you're
feeling politically correct, or woke, or whatever the hell the kids
call it these days.

  jesus ...

rday