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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, Funny) by pkrasimirov on Thursday September 05 2019, @08:07AM (12 children)
Wait until they hear about the master-slave architecture or (God forbid) daemons. And if I mention parent-child class inheritance... wait, someone is at the door...
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @08:17AM (5 children)
Yeah, you're joking but it's already been memed into reality:
Python joins movement to dump 'offensive' master, slave terms
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/11/python_purges_master_and_slave_in_political_pogrom/ [theregister.co.uk]
(Score: 5, Funny) by pkrasimirov on Thursday September 05 2019, @08:22AM (2 children)
> seeking to change "master" and "slave" in Python documentation and code to terms like "parent," "worker," or something similarly anodyne.
So they mean the parents are now the masters and the poor children are the workers? I am immediately and anodynely offended by that! And I am even more offended because they used a word (anodyne) that I don't know so it surely must be seriously offensive, even if only to my ignorance.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Thursday September 05 2019, @05:26PM
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday September 05 2019, @09:59PM
Nintendo is way ahead of them, using "main" and "sub" in at least the Vs. System and the Nintendo DS. This pair of terms has the advantage that it shares initials with the "master" and "slave" terminology used in SPI and other standards, allowing reuse of abbreviations even after the woke crowd have done their thing.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @12:56PM (1 child)
I thought instead of "slave", we now call them "enslaved persons", since they are still people, not things, enslavement being just a condition which has been imposed on them.
Are processes not people? Well then, I say we call a "slave" an "enslaved process."
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Thursday September 05 2019, @06:49PM
No, no! The correct term is "a person experiencing enslavement."
We can't go around defining people by their situation! They are first a PERSON. It's why we have started using terms like "a person experiencing homelessness," or "people experiencing chemical addiction."
Now, isn't that better?
I am a crackpot
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @10:15AM (1 child)
A daemon who can't have a meaningful personal conversation is not a real daemon.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @07:47PM
Strangely apropos, since Alan Turing was put on a blacklist for being a poofta.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @11:06AM
I still remember in college when one of my CompSci profs gave me extra credit for naming a subroutine "filicide", because it cleaned up any remaining child processes before exiting.
(Score: 3, Informative) by stretch611 on Thursday September 05 2019, @04:02PM
Actually, it has happened already...
From https://www.seattlepi.com/national/article/Master-slave-named-most-politically-incorrect-1161133.php [seattlepi.com]
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @05:39PM (1 child)
You can't use the terms 'male' and 'female', 'plug' or 'jack' for connectors any more either.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday September 05 2019, @08:26PM
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=male+female&i=electronics [amazon.com]
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=male+female+spade+connectors&i=electronics [amazon.com]
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