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Comment by yodon | Hacker News Reader

I can't tell. Is this in part a veiled (or not so veiled) criticism of the RSA authors for introducing a female name into the literature, in an explicitly equal manner (the "A" and "B" characters communicate as equals), at a time when most business and technical writing defaulted to "he" for all characters? If so, as someone who saw the chauvinistic era in which the first of the cited papers was written, I would encourage these modern authors to one day recognize that expanding rights and expanding acceptance in society is a long slow process. The fact that you can see more you think those who came before you should have done does not mean those things you want today would have been possible then, or possible today without the incremental progress delivered by earlier agents of change.

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I think it is just overthinking.

Alice and Bob are a couple, and like most couples, there is a woman and a man. The names are short, memorable, and start with A and B. It is natural to choose a couple, as couples often have private conversations. Charlie, probably from the NATO/ICAO alphabet. Eve, like eavesdropper. Malory, like malicious. Trent, like trust.

If there is something special about Alice, I will be more tempted to think about the most famous Alice, the one in Wonderland. Besides the nice story, Lewis Carrol, author of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", real name Charles Dodgson was also a mathematician, and he dabbed in cryptography.

From the article: “In the history of cryptology, women tend to be either systematically excluded or reduced to objects. The absence of women is both a reflection of the bias of society and historians, and a gap in the employment of women in computing fields.”

What are you are seeing in the article that suggests a “criticism” of the introduction of Alice?

What part of it seems like a criticism to you?

I don't know about GP's view, but to me this does seem like a criticism:

"Women have a long history of being depicted as technical objects in computing... gendered assumptions about the characters of Alice and Bob have been read into their fictional lives. Images of Alice, Bob, and Eve depict the three as in love triangles, with Alice and Eve alternately portrayed as disrupting one another’s blissful domestic life with Bob. Visual depictions of Alice, Bob, Eve, and others used in university classrooms and elsewhere have replicated and reified the gendered assumptions read onto Alice and Bob and their cryptographic family, making it clear that Bob is the subject of communications with others, who serve as objects, and are often secondary players to his experience of information exchange. Thus, while Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman used the names “Alice” and “Bob” for a sender and receiver as a writing tool, others have adapted Alice and Bob, in predictable, culturally-specific ways that have important consequences for subsequent, gendered experiences of cryptology."

Does it seem like a criticism of Rivest, Shamir and Adleman using the name Alice? Or of others projecting gendered assumptions onto Alice?

The previous paragraph criticized Ivan Sutherland for so much as drawing a girl's face with sketchpad, so in context this does seem to be critical of RSA.

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