SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Microsoft's adoption of the Google-developed Chromium browser engine for Edge has resulted in a proposal to cleanse the open-source code of "potentially offensive terms."
Issue 981129 in the Chromium bug log lists a suggestion by Microsoft to “cleanup of potentially offensive terms in codebase” aims to rid the software blueprints of language such as whitelist (change to allowlist), blacklist (change to blocklist), “offensive terms using ‘wtf’ as protocol messages,” and other infelicities.
This bug report was raised by a Microsoft contributor, who stated: “We are just sharing a subset of what PoliCheck scanned for us,” Policheck being “a machine-learned model that another team manages that does context based scanning on hundreds of file formats.”
Googler Rick Byers, a Chromium engineer, gave the issue a cautious welcome, saying: "This sounds like a good strategy to me, thanks for doing this! We certainly have never intended for anything in the codebase to be potentially offensive, but I'm also not aware of anyone making an effort to find them all." He added:
I don't expect Chrome teams to necessarily make these bugs a priority (we haven't seen this pose a problem for us in practice as far as I know), but if cleaning this up is valuable for Microsoft (or any another Chromium contributor) then we should have no trouble getting the necessary code reviews (at least in the platform code). And yeah there are folks who look for GoodFirstBug and may want to pick up some easy commits.
Although changing comments or variable names in the source code is generally invisible to the user, this kind of revision can be problematic if it wrecks things like names in preferences and policies.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday September 05 2019, @07:51AM (8 children)
From TFA, Microsoft apparently ran a tool called "Policheck" over the Chromium code base. It's pretty obvious from the name just what Policheck does: enforce political correctness.
Allow me to digress: There is a mutation in sheep, relatively rare, whereby a lamb of white parentage may have black wool. This black lamb stands out visually, and you can't mix their wool in with the rest. From this backgroun comes the reference "being the black sheep of the family". Is that now racist, just because people with dark skin are also referred to as "black"?
Everyone knows what a blacklist and a whitelist is. The origins are, in fact, the same - that black sheep is undesired, and so are all the websites on the blacklist. Changing language because some snowflake might potentially be offended? This offends me.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @08:36AM (3 children)
We have to cancel season 7 of The Blacklist [wikipedia.org].
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @09:07AM
Cancel season one of Bradley12, "The Racist American View from Switzerland". Reviews sucked, anyway.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @09:16AM (1 child)
It has been renamed to "The Blocklost" in case some niggers were offended
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @10:36PM
They're only allowed to refer to each other as niggers, you insensitive clod.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @11:26AM
You're a white male well past middle age, your sense of offense doesn't count. Get over it.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @11:40AM
Jawohl, mein herr. I am sure that "blacklist" came from "black sheep" - the connection is so obvious! It would have nothing to do with finding things objectionable, suspicious, or in need of punishment [macmillandictionaryblog.com] from the 18th century. And would have nothing to do with a biblical mistranslation [phrases.org.uk] either. Could they all be lumped together in 16th century usage? Certainly could be, but if you have evidence for that you might share it. Until then I'll assume you are making up what you think the etymology should be.
But it really has nothing to do with etymology but what people today are viewing such terms as. There are many words that had innocent origins but today are considered racial epithets. Blacklist isn't there, but nor does how the word was historically used mean anything with what today is and tomorrow should become.
The terms "allow" and "deny" are more descriptive and accurate to what the lists are actually supposed to do. Why not use them?
It would have nothing to do with your being judgmental enough to decide anyone who disagrees with your convenience would be a snowflake, either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @04:27PM (1 child)
You don't have a right to not be offended.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday September 05 2019, @07:14PM
Wait, you say it is a legal requirement to be offended about something? No wonder that people are offended that much these days: They just don't want to risk breaking that law. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.