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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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
