Re: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Sep 20, 2018 at 12:51:18PM +0100, Dave Cridland wrote:
> 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.

I use master/replica or primary/replica (in case anyone takes offense at
"master" even in a context in which "slave" does not appear).

> "Blacklist" and "whitelist" are well-known terms, but they can be avoided
> with small effort to provide synonyms which are more easily understood -

Do these terms have racial etymologies, or is a racial tinge being
inferred where there has been none?

Consider that English is my third language.  Why would I know the answer
to this question?  A brief search seems to indicate that their origins
are not racial, but perhaps I'm wrong.  E.g.,

http://garysaid.com/are-the-terms-whitelist-and-blacklist-racist/

Note that using other colors could still give rise to objections.

> "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.

Blacklisting is a bad idea in most cases anyways.  A whitelist in a
world without a blacklist shouldn't have racial tinge imputed, right?

> "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.

In crypto literature it is often Mallory who gets in the middle, so she
gets misgendered when called an MITM.  But WITM wouldn't do either,
would it?

Nico
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