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posted by martyb on Thursday September 05 2019, @07:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the blacklisting-"blacklist" dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 06 2019, @12:23AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 06 2019, @12:23AM (#890308)

    It was Eisenhower's wife, Mamie. She wore pink dresses all the time. Originally, she was somewhat mocked for that choice, but then she became First Lady. Naturally, that meant that all the women wanted to copy America's Royal Family de jure. And just like that, pink was the girl's color. And because all the manufacturers already had a ton of blue dye, naturally they claimed blue was the color for boys and came up with all sorts of ad hoc reasons why.

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