Re: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs

Dave Cridland <dave@cridland.net> Thu, 20 September 2018 11:51 UTC

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From: Dave Cridland <dave@cridland.net>
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2018 12:51:18 +0100
Message-ID: <CAKHUCzxL8xgn2D2W9G=Qk=AXzyw4mmcqPii6GKBSiByRyxbq+Q@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs
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Back when I was even more clueless than I am today, and actually ran DNS
servers, we used the terms "primary" and "secondary" as a matter of course.
Secondaries copied the data from primaries.

So far, so good.

Then we added a third nameserver, and of course that must be the tertiary,
used only when *both* the primary and secondary had failed.

When I realised my stupidity, I avoided the terms "primary" and "secondary"
in the workplace, and instead used the terms "master" and "slave", which
were less easily confused - or rather, made me less easily confused by
them. The fact that "master/slave" was well understood within engineering
helped enormously.

But it's possible to remove the word "slave" easily - indeed, when
discussing distributed systems such as clustering, the literature tends to
refer to a "master", but not so much to "slaves".

"Blacklist" and "whitelist" are well-known terms, but they can be avoided
with small effort to provide synonyms which are more easily understood -
"Blocklist" and "Permitlist" are trivial examples here. But if someone says
"There is a whitelist", then I also know the default is to deny. So we'll
need to be a bit more explicit about the default state, perhaps. In other
words, I worry about changing these terms, but the possibility for
confusion is low if we do.

"Man-in-the-middle" I'm clearly too stupid to understand why this might be
offensive, but equally I have no idea what term of art would suffice
instead.

I have no objection to thinking twice before using a term that could
offend, but I have huge objections to replacing existing terms with new
ones that could confuse instead.

But still, I'm a white male living in a country that hasn't had slaves
within its own borders, at least, for over a thousand years, so I freely
admit I may not understand the gravity of the situation.

So I'd like to hear from actual people who are actually made to feel
uncomfortable about these terms, rather than people saying that other
people have heard of some people who might be offended.

Dave.

On Thu, 20 Sep 2018 at 10:26, Niels ten Oever <lists@digitaldissidents.org>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> On the hrpc-list [0] there has been an intense conversation which was
> spurred by the news that the Python community removed Master/Slave
> terminology from its programming language [1].
>
> In the discussion that followed it was remarked that in RFCs terms like
> Master/Slave, blacklist/whitelist, man-in-middle, and other terminology
> that is offensive to some people and groups is quite common.
>
> This is not a discussion that can be resolved in hrpc, but rather should
> be dealt with in the IETF community (because hrpc doesn't make policy
> for terminology in the IETF), which is why I am posting this here.
>
> If people find the discussion worthwhile, we might also be just in time
> to request a BoF on this topic.
>
> Looking forward to discuss.
>
> Best,
>
> Niels
>
>
> [0] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/hrpc/
> [1]
>
> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8x7akv/masterslave-terminology-was-removed-from-python-programming-language
>
>
> --
> Niels ten Oever
> Researcher and PhD Candidate
> Datactive Research Group
> University of Amsterdam
>
> PGP fingerprint    2458 0B70 5C4A FD8A 9488
>                    643A 0ED8 3F3A 468A C8B3
>
>