[ZpJuUuNaQ5]

>I'm dumbfounded they chose the name of the infamous NSA mass surveillance program revealed by Snowden in 2013. And even more so that there is just one other comment among 320 pointing this out

I just think it's silly to obsess over words like that. There are many words that take on different meanings in different contexts and can be associated with different events, ideas, products, time periods, etc. Would you feel better if they named it "Polyhedron"?

[jll29]

What the OP was talking about is the negative connotation that goes with the word; it's certainly a poor choice from a marketing point of view.

You may say it's "silly to obsess", but it's like naming a product "Auschwitz" and saying "it's just a city name" -- it ignores the power of what Geffrey N. Leech called "associative meaning" in his taxonomy of "Seven Types of Meaning" (Semantics, 2nd. ed. 1989): speaking that city's name evokes images of piles of corpses of gassed undernourished human beings, walls of gas chambers with fingernail scratches and lamp shades made of human skin.

[ZpJuUuNaQ5]

Well, I don't know anything about marketing and you might have a point, but the severity of impact of these two words is clearly very different, so it doesn't look like a good comparison to me. It would raise quite a few eyebrows and more if, for example, someone released a Linux distro named "Auschwitz OS", meanwhile, even in the software world, there are multiple products that incorporate the word prism in various ways[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. I don't believe that an average user encountering the word "prism" immediately starts thinking about NSA surveillance program.

[1] https://www.prisma.io/

[2] https://prism-pipeline.com/

[3] https://prismppm.com/

[4] https://prismlibrary.com/

[5] https://3dprism.eu/en/

[6] https://www.graphpad.com/features

[7] https://www.prismsoftware.com/

[8] https://prismlive.com/en_us/

[9] https://github.com/Project-Prism/Prism-OS

[946789987649]

Do a lot of people know that Prism is the name of the program? I certainly didn't and consider myself fairly switched on in general

[andrewinardeer]

We had a local child day care provider call themselves ISIS. That was blast.

[FrustratedMonky]

I think point is that on the sliding scale of words that are no longer allowed to use, "Prism" does not reach the level of "Auschwitz".

Most people don't even remember Snowden at this point.

[black_puppydog]

I have to say I had the same reaction. Sure, "prism" shows up in many contexts. But here it shows up in the context of a company and product that is already constantly in the news for its lackluster regard for other people's expectation of privacy, copyright, and generally trying to "collect it all" as it were, and that, as GP mentioned, in an international context that doesn't put these efforts in the best light.

They're of course free to choose this name. I'm just also surprised they would do so.

[mc32]

Plus there are lots of “legacy” products with the name prism in them. I also don’t think the public makes the connection. It’s mainly people who care to be aware of government overreach who think it’s a bad word association.

[jimbokun]

But the contexts are closely related.

Large scale technology projects that people are suspicious and anxious about. There are a lot of people anxious that AI will be used for mass surveillance by governments. So you pick a name of another project that was used for mass surveillance by government.

[bergheim]

Sure. Like Goebbels. Because they gobble things up.

Altso, nazism. But different context, years ago, so whatever I guess?

Hell, let's just call it Hitler. Different context!

Given what they do it is an insidious name. Words matter.

[fortyseven]

Comparing words with unique widespread notoriety with a simple, everyday one. Try again.

[ZpJuUuNaQ5]

So you have to resort to the most extreme examples in order to make it a problem? Do you also think of Hitler when you encounter a word "vegetarian"?

[mayhemducks]

You do realize that obsessing over words like that is a pretty major part of what programming and computer science is right? Linguistics is highly intertwined with computer science.