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 --
