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zipliner | 6 months ago
What do the lists do? They allow or deny access, right? Seems allow/deny are fitting descriptive terms for them then. White/black are much more ambiguous prefix terms and and also come with much more semantic baggage. All in all an easy, clarifying change.
JumpCrisscross|6 months ago
In part. A whitelisted party is always allowed access. If you are whitelisted to enter my home, you always have access. This is different from conditionally having access, or having access for a pre-set period of time.
Same for a blacklist. An IP on a blacklist clearly communicates that it should not be casually overridden in a way a ‘deny-access list’ does not.
> White/black are much more ambiguous prefix terms and and also come with much more semantic baggage
That baggage includes the broadly-understood meaning of the word. When someone says to whitelist an IP address, it’s unambiguous. If someone says to add an IP address to an allow access list, that’s longer and less clear. Inventing a personal language can be an effective way to think through a problem. But it isn’t a way to communicate.
Black and white are colours. (Practically.) I am sympathetic to where folks arguing for this come from. But we aren’t going to solve racism by literally removing black and white from our language.
ziplinerss|6 months ago
Irrelevant since the terms allowlist/denylist do not presuppose conditionallity or pre-set time limits.
> If someone says to add an IP address to an allow access list, that’s longer
Allowlist/denylist (9 + 8 chars) is shorter than whitelist/blacklist (9 + 9 chars).
> Inventing a personal language
Sounds like you think the proposal was to invent a whole new language (or one per person)? I would be against that too. But it is really only about updating a technical industry term pair to a more descriptive and less semantically loaded pair. Win-win.
> we aren’t going to solve racism by literally removing black and white from our language.
Changing to allowlist/denylist would not remove the terms black/white from language. There is good reason for making the change that do not involve any claim that doing so would solve racism.