Seriously, stay out if politics are involved as a pentester, or even as an MSP.
We had a legal matter with a county commissioner requesting the MSP use an external harddrive to transfer documents for which the commissioner had no right to access.
I really wish people naturally had the habit to spell out their initialisms or acronyms the first time they use it in a post (if it is not used in previous posts), and then use that shorthand for the rest of the post.
I would even request that this be done even for something as obvious as DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles). Making this common practice removes the guess work of whether an initialism is sufficiently obvious enough to the average reader. For some media forms, I do not have the luxury to comment or ask the original poster to explain what an initialism stands for.
Trying to find out what an initialism stands for is even harder when you try to search for it on Google and many other versions of it exists in different contexts.
> I would even request that this be done even for something as obvious as DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles)
Literally a day or three ago I saw someone in a HN thread asking what "DMV" means, so yes, I strongly second that request. HN has an international userbase.
This was drilled into me from a very early age but I do have a habit of not being consistent with it. I often take for granted that there's those who don't have English as a first language and may not know the most common acronyms and initialism of WTF, AFK and otherwise. I'd have put MSP in that category and assumed it was more common.
Acronyms are more than just language specific. I live in England and many of my non-IT friends wouldn't know what AFK means. My mum wouldn't even know what WTF means. And I knew the former two (though it took me a second to remember AFK because it's not one I use personally) but hadn't heard of MSP before.
Sometimes it's not even just a case people not coming across acronyms before but rather those acronyms could be short for terms that aren't even used in other English-speaking countries (never mind non-English speaking). The DMV is a great example because in the UK they're called the DVLA.
It gets worse still because even people working in different industries in the same country might have come across different meanings for the same acronyms. For example I once worked with an ex-military officer who would get confused every time we'd talk about ISO (in terms of burning a Debian CD image) because he'd been used to the term used in a different context (I forget exactly what it meant to him but I think it was something to do with temporary buildings -- maybe someone else on here might know?)
So it should never be taken for granted that a "common" acronym is universally understood.
> And how can you and the parent comment bang on about it in this context and not think to spell it out?
>
> Pretty amusing!
The conversation wasn't about any context in relation to AFK (away from keyboard) but rather about the trouble with using acronyms. Not knowing what that acronym means doesn't alter the readability of the comment (in fact ironically it actually helps hammer home the point I was making).
This is also why I didn't spell out DVLA (UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency) despite introducing a new acronym to the conversation; and why I did explain which "ISO" I was referring to because the context there did matter to explain my point.
We had a legal matter with a county commissioner requesting the MSP use an external harddrive to transfer documents for which the commissioner had no right to access.
This happened in broad daylight.