
Remove some offensive/archaic terminology from OpenSSL - noble_pleb
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/12089
======
kepler1
You know, the problem with letting people's sudden emotions swing you back and
forth without possibility of reasonable discussion is that some day it will
come to bite you in the ass. That is, in terms of what kind of behavior you're
incentivizing.

In this kind of environment, people who raise even reasonable objections to
questionable changes will be labeled as the enemy by fanatics. Like this guy.
I don't know where he gets such a motivation to destroy or rewrite this corner
of the world because he thinks it's his responsibility to stamp out oppression
in C code. Which is about as far from the social problem as you can get.

The list of words being considered as prejudiced include:

\-- parent/child \-- whitelist/blacklist

Some of this is really ridiculous.

How are we to decide what terms are offensive enough? Vote? There are going to
be objections at some level about any term, by someone out there. Someone
needs to be an authority and say how much self-censoring is reasonable, and
what terms are reasonable to keep.

I object to the term SSL. It is a deep insult to my culture. We should rename
it because of that. Who are you to question my being offended?

Please let this issue not be determined by this guy or this ilk. Or at least,
let this argument settle for a few months and see whether it still makes sense
before getting caught up in the heat of the moment. Sometimes, time tells
whether you were reasonable or not.

~~~
ikeyany
I get keeping 'parent/child', but why is it so ridiculous to change
'blacklist'? It seems reasonable to not want to associate 'black' with
'bad/evil'.

Thinking about how we use the term 'blacklist' doesn't seem like much of a
sacrifice on our part.

If you disagree, I would love to hear your logic.

~~~
tekproxy
We should also change all of these doubleplus ungood words: Black market Black
magic Black Sabbath Black widow Black soul Black sheep Black eye Black mark
Black rider Black out Black box Black book

I was triggered twice just typing this up.

~~~
ikeyany
If someone proposing using a better term than 'blacklist' makes you take an
all-or-nothing reaction, it might be a case where if you have a hammer,
everything you see is a nail.

~~~
tekproxy
Can't you empathise with people who identify as black and have to see phrases
like "black magic" meaning evil while "white magic" is good? Why not start
here? Are we only changing open ssl because it's easy?

~~~
ikeyany
If you don't like using the term, then by all means say 'evil magic'.

------
adrianN
I really don't understand how it helps against racism to purge language from
certain words in contexts where they're not even applied to humans.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Feels good without effort. Meaningful progress takes enormous amounts of time
and tireless efforts, comparatively speaking.

A pull request, many even, isn’t going to fix systemic injustices and
inequalities at societal levels. Slavery continues to exist today in the 21st
century [1]. I’m unsure how some feel this is the case, but the bluntness
seems necessary.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century)
(The International Labour Organization estimates that, by their definitions,
over 40 million people are in some form of slavery today.)

~~~
dwd
Virtue signalling, plain and simple. Makes you look good to your peers without
doing anything of substance.

I don't get why there isn't a sustained campaign to reach out for commitments
from elected representative while they are largely working from home and more
immune from the political pressures that keep them in lockstep maintaining the
status quo. Now is the time to push for change from those who hold the power
of the purse and frame laws.

~~~
apatters
This realization is what motivated me to start participating in charity over
the past few years.

There has never been as much empty virtue signalling by privileged people as
there is today. They declare the deck chairs on the Titanic to be offensive,
remove a few of them, congratulate themselves and call it a day like their
responsibility is absolved. Maybe they go the extra mile and try to get
somebody fired for not speaking the same doublespeak as them.

But fixating on their theater achieves nothing. It just gives them more of the
attention they crave. So I decided instead to donate my time and my money to
good causes and _actually_ help make things better, because this is in short
supply.

The virtue signallers may or may not take note, but it doesn't matter. What
matters is that if they're going to absolve themselves of doing the real work,
someone else has to step up.

~~~
dwd
I avoid simply giving money to a lot of large charities. Fancy offices with
executive level pay while they largely rely on donations and volunteers to do
the real work for free. Kind of a corporation version of virtue signalling.

I'd rather donate food to the local animal refuge than give to them.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Some large charities are very effectively run. Charity water comes to mind. I
think it’s important to not throw out the baby with the bathwater, and that
donating to large nonprofits can be an effective use of resources if you’ve
done your homework.

------
rssmllr
Some other problematic words in this repo:

Parent: to orphans and those who have been in the foster care system

Child: to those who cannot have offspring

Sibling: to only children

Dead: to those who’ve known someone who passed

Disabled: to anyone with a handicap

Fire: to burn victims

Smart: to those with low IQ

Small: to the vertically challenged

I’m very glad to not see the word Zombie because that is very triggering to
French Haitians.

I’d also like to remind people that we need new words for male/female plugs
because those terms are transphobic.

~~~
Ghjklov
Ever notice how the default theme in software is typically a light/white
theme?

This. _clap_ Has. _clap_ Got. _clap_ To. _clap_ Go!

~~~
loopz
I want a nice'n cool black theme! :)

------
Trumpi
Here is one of my favorite sections from 1984. Maybe there is some relevance
to draw from it; maybe not.

    
    
      'You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,' he said almost
      sadly. 'Even when you write it you're still thinking in Oldspeak. I've read
      some of those pieces that you write in "The Times" occasionally. They're
      good enough, but they're translations. In your heart you'd prefer to stick
      to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning.
      You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that
      Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller
      every year?'
    
      Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not
      trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the
      dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:
    
      'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of
      thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible,
      because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that
      can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning
      rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.
      Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we're not far from that point. But the
      process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year
      fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little
      smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing
      thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control.
      But in the end there won't be any need even for that. The Revolution will
      be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc
      is Newspeak,' he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. 'Has it ever
      occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a
      single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation
      as we are having now?'

------
userbinator
People will always find something to be offended about, and it's sad that we
as a society have let this "weaponisation of offence" grow unhindered and some
people have even encouraged it.

I feel sorry for people who do things like this, only because if
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21833377](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21833377)
is any indication, 4chan is about to make his life very _very_ miserable.

"Inclusiveness includes stupidity too."

------
drewcoo
Note it contains this commit with the message "Fix whitespace." That is
hilarious.

[https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/12089/commits/b7d2ec...](https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/12089/commits/b7d2ec51cf2abf6f827c580a5ebea07acc23ee52)

~~~
donmcronald
I don’t get why it’s funny. Isn’t whitespace named because of the screen color
which happened to be white?

Maybe I’m missing something?

------
Josh5
The problem isn't the words that seem to offend some people, it's that people
associate themselves with words that they should not. I would love to live in
a world where people stop saying "I'm black" or "I'm white". Your skin has a
colour, but I bet it's not one of those. Perhaps a light brown? The point is,
no one alive can say they don't share some heratage with one side or another.
If you are so offended by some historical act of slavery in your ancestry,
then perhaps you should also carry out some due diligence and check if there
is any enslavement by the part of your ancestors also? If things like this is
a big deal, why are we ok with dressing up as pirates or murderers? I
personally feel like the problem lies in our inability to accept some
historical events as unchangeable as crap as they are, and focus instead at
how wonderful our differences as a species is in the 21st century. We should
be accepting humanity as the collidescope that it is rather than just "black"
and "white". FFS!

------
wilt
The problem with saying change something if it offends someone is that is open
to abuse. Are you going to remove something that speaks out about a government
killing its own citizens because that government finds it offensive? That
would be stupid.

In the case of master and slave i don't mind the defaults for new projects
being changed but this new trend of going around and demanding everyone update
their projects right now is just silly. You are asking people to put in a huge
ammount of effort and possibly break lots of external things for the sake of
making a few white guys feel like they did something.

~~~
sebazzz
It gives also ammunition to force everyone to change their current repo.

If I don't change my repositories for regardless what reason there is, I risk
myself now being called a racist. And that can have serious consequences
(again though public rage "that company employs racists").

------
raindropm
I remember my time studying Freud's sex theory in literature class and how
there are symbols that signified the sexual desire scatter around the story
we've read, say, the male character took his pen(phallic symbol) and pierce
some hole in the pink clothes(symbolizing female), and you can see this
everywhere in the text if you look for it (though Freud humorously said that
sometimes cigar is just a cigar, not everything has to be about sex)

At the end of the day, I cannot help but think that half of the interpretation
is just what my professor just made up because she really engrossed in Freud's
theory.

That being said, you will see anything you really _want to_ see, if you look
for it hard enough. If you think it's there, it will be there...

------
Mindless2112
Taken to its ultimate end, we will have to have

    
    
      Colors.Black == Colors.White
    

And, courtesy of Douglas Adams:

> _" Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that
> black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.”_

------
KayL
Everywhere is search black & white now. But no one cares about yellow or
other.

[https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/454afd9866300b984306...](https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/454afd9866300b984306c5b565a9d55568a5bc50/test/property_test.c#L90)

Why Yellow is Groan?

As someone living near to or will become a sensor place soon, I'm worried one
day that's a list to remove/replace these words automatically. (or suggested
not to say that)

There's a country you'll get in trouble if you say that 2-digits out of 0-9

------
GuiA
From the diffs:

master -> changed to main/parent (depending on context)

slave -> changed to child

blacklist -> changed to blocklist

black magic -> changed to magic

white space -> changed to whitespace/empty space (depending on context)

[https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/12089/files](https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/12089/files)

~~~
bioinformatics
Wouldn't it be great when the parent node/process needs to kill the child
node/process?

~~~
downerending
So, like abortion?

------
sys_64738
What should tomorrow's Scrum Master be called?

------
juskrey
Social progress leaves the trace by giving old words new meanings, regress -
by hiding old meanings behind new words.

~~~
vore
These are technical terms that are evoking real-life concepts, not the other
way around.

Words can be reappropriated, yes, but only by the group the word affects:
otherwise, you haven't been at the other end of the word and it seems out of
place to dictate how they should feel about it, as an outsider.

