This week, we’re looking at the use of “master/slave” terminology in computer programming and the current state of gig workers in California.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds puts stamp on proposal to use neutral language in kernel code and documentation.

Proposed alternatives for master/slave include:

primary/secondary
main/replica or subordinate
initiator/target
requester/responder
controller/device
host/worker or proxy
leader/follower
director/performer

Proposed alternatives for blacklist/whitelist include:

denylist/allowlist
blocklist/passlist

The Linux team did not recommend any specific terms but asked developers to choose as appropriate.

A Google security researcher withdrew from the Black Hat security conference and asked the community to stop using the ‘black hat’ term.

The information security (infosec) community has angrily reacted today to calls to abandon the use of the ‘black hat’ and ‘white hat’ terms, citing that the two, and especially ‘black hat,’ have nothing to do with racial stereotyping.

Discussions about the topic started late last night after David Kleidermacher, VP of Engineering at Google, and in charge of Android Security and the Google Play Store, withdrew from a scheduled talk he was set to give in August at the Black Hat USA 2020 security conference.

In his withdrawal announcement, Kleidermacher asked the infosec industry to consider replacing terms like black hat, white hat, and man-in-the-middle with neutral alternatives.

While a part of the infosec community agreed with Kledermacher, the vast majority did not, and called it virtue signaling taken to the extreme.

Most security researchers pointed to the fact that the terms had nothing to do with racism or skin color, and had their origins in classic western movies, where the villain usually wore a black hat, while the good guy wore a white hat.

Others pointed to the dualism between black and white as representing evil and good, concepts that have been around since the dawn of civilizations, long before racial divides even existed between humans.

Companies like Twitter, GitHub, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Google, Ansible, and others committed to changing technical language in their products and infrastructure to remove terms like master, slave, blacklist, whitelist, and others.

But these efforts to move away from offensive terms like master, slave, blacklist, whitelist started even before the Black Lives Matter protests.

Companies and open-source projects like Drupal, Python, PostgreSQL, and Redis had removed offensive terms years before, some as early as the late 2000s.

In May 2020, even the UK government’s cyber-security agency, the NCSC, announced it would stop using “whitelist” and “blacklist” due to stigma and racial stereotyping surrounding the two terms.

The trend of cleaning tech language was well underway, but the Black Lives Matter protests gave it a boost and helped it gain mainstream media attention and more backing.

However, the infosec community is not willing to accept change at this moment for terms it doesn’t see as offensive, and chances are the terms are here to stay.

Nerds gonna be big mad

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Inclusive-Terminology