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Programming

Rust Programming Language To Use 'Allowlist' in Place of 'Whitelist' (github.com) 249

Posted by EditorDavid from the changes-in-the-language dept.
"Other terms are more inclusive and precise," reads a merged Pull request for the Rust programming language titled "Avoid 'whitelist'."

"This doesn't look like it affects any 'user visible' flags or anything like that," core developer Niko Matsakis had pointed out in a comment on the pull request, asking "It's purely internal...?"

The pull request has since been merged.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Rust Programming Language To Use 'Allowlist' in Place of 'Whitelist' More

Rust Programming Language To Use 'Allowlist' in Place of 'Whitelist'

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  • Ouch. (Score:3, Funny)

    by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Sunday July 12, 2020 @12:27AM (#60288166)
    It's a bad day for racists.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Chas ( 5144 )

      Nah. Not really.

      Bad day for the English language, replaced with NewSpeak.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 )
        So you think "white" more precisely describes something that should be allowed in than "allow"?

        • Re:Ouch. (Score:4, Informative)

          by Dog-Cow ( 21281 ) on Sunday July 12, 2020 @02:34AM (#60288424)

          It really doesn't fucking matter. The term whitelist is understood by literally every single English speaker who has ever needed to know of such lists. There is nothing racist in the term. Changing it to avoid hurting the feelings of White leftists is just bowing to tyranny.

          • Exactly. Whitelists are lists that only white people can join. How is that even racist?

          • The term whitelist is understood by literally every single English speaker who has ever needed to know of such lists.

            The term "allowlist", on the other hand, is not only understandable by every single English speaker who has need of them, but is also parsable by every single non-English speaker who has need of them, without needing any additional explanation.

        • So what do we call a greylist in this brave new world of yours, Tomakin?

      • Language evolves. Listen to people who aren't like you. What the everloving fuck do you care if some words are changed? It's hardly 1984.

        Fuck my karma, I've been (stupidly) reading /. comments about this, and use of gender pronouns, and fuck me, I forgot how closed-minded the tech community can be, at least on here.

        • Because it exactly IS 1984. Except thankfully most of saw Orwell's 1984 as the warning he intended it as, not as a manual like the far left.

          Controlling thought through the control of language is double plus ungood in my book. At least until they burn my book.

          • If you believe that WhiteList is more precise language than AllowList, you're probably not a good fit (culturally) for Rust. You can start your own language/repo though and spec for old-timey terminology, and I for one, sincerely hope you do that. Make Computer Science Great Again!

            • I think everyone already knew EXACTLY what "whitelist" meant and the SJW Rust guys felt bad about having been so blatantly racist in the first place and are only just now catching up to corporate America who was on this virtue signal charade 6+ weeks ago.

              Rust is not pure enough for me. If they weren't racists they wouldn't have used such micro aggressive terms of humiliation and oppression in the first place. It's too late now. There is no way they can Do Better. They should freeze the whole project un

              • So stop being a crybaby and go start something else if you feel that strongly. As someone who uses Rust, this doesn't affect me even slightly.
                • I'm being serious. You can go back to before that commit, fork it, and rename it "RacistRust". I'm willing to walk you through it (I'm assuming you won't be able to figure it out).

    • Re:Ouch. (Score:5, Informative)

      by lsllll ( 830002 ) on Sunday July 12, 2020 @12:31AM (#60288176)
      Blacklist has nothing to do with the black race, like many other words with black don't have anything to do with race at all. I has all to do with keeping a list of your enemies. See origins on blacklisting [wikipedia.org].

    • Re:Ouch. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Sunday July 12, 2020 @02:49AM (#60288454) Journal
      Have you ever heard anyone use whitelist/blacklist in a racist context?

    • It's a bad day for racists.

      /Agreed

    • "It's a bad day for racists."

      Or a bad day for James Spader, I guess it will be the last season then for 'The Blacklist".

    • Re: Ouch. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AddisonEzekiel ( 921181 ) on Sunday July 12, 2020 @03:32PM (#60290530)
      Why was this flame bait? Full disclosure : we decided we'll before BLM to move to allow/block. It was a minor change, and no one made a deal of it. This for us was a can't hurt, might help case. All that said, the tenets that black lives in the US have had a much harder go, pre and post slavery, shouldn't be in dispute.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday July 12, 2020 @12:38AM (#60288190)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Jarwulf ( 530523 )
      No if you actually read their platform BLM wants all sorts of weird things like 'disrupting' the nuclear family, transgender pronouns,and a bunch of other stuff that have no direct link to saving black lives and probably would do the opposite. They also redirect money to Democratic political warchests. You could call it a scam if the vast majority of the people donating actually cared where their money went and didn't just want to virtue signal.

      • I think the money redirection thing was false, though the rest of that is correct, and how they want communism. I find the disrupting the nuclear family a bit disturbing though, because a huge cause of problems for the upbringing of black people is that they're mostly being raised in single parent households. Single parent households are much more likely to result in kids that grow up less successful. That is almost entirely due to many black males abdicating their responsibilities as a parent. Anybody who

        • There IS a cultural problem among black males that is in want of correction.

          But that's racist, so instead they want to port the cultural problem they see to every other culture: EQUALITY!
          Honestly though, the "nuclear family" is already a failure case. People used to have actual families - in the hundreds or thousands strong - which helped and supported one another, doing things like chipping in to help their second cousin build a home when they were about to get married. That was abolished because it was at odds with the government: you can't reliably tax inter-family trade (God

          • The "nuclear family" was created to make people more dependent upon and therefore more under the control of the government,

            Got any citations for the premeditated design and creation of the nuclear family and these reasons? As opposed to it just being an unattended consequence of our environment?

            • It was a meme pushed from about the 1950's and 1960's through the 70's/80's: the working man with a family living in suburbia as the American dream, the thing to look up to and strive for. The thing is, that didn't exist decades prior to it, people even in densely populated areas often lived in communities of hundreds+ of their relatives. The sociological environment has been finely controlled by intelligence agencies since around the same time (e.g. all those mkultra experiments which were shown to have

          • Re:all of this stuff is...good..but misses the mar (Score:4, Interesting)

            by CrimsonAvenger ( 580665 ) on Sunday July 12, 2020 @07:52AM (#60289102)

            People used to have actual families - in the hundreds or thousands strong - which helped and supported one another, doing things like chipping in to help their second cousin build a home when they were about to get married. That was abolished because it was at odds with the government

            Umm, no.

            That was abolished by the automobile. What you're describing is an effect of lack of easy transport away from where you were born (unless you were wealthy, of course). Once the car came along, and someone born in Kansas could trivially move to California, the "actual families" began to disappear....

            So, you want "actual families" (AKA "extended families") to become a major part of life, you can start by eliminating the auto, the airplane, the train eventually. Go back to the technology of the late 18th century, and it'll happen automagically.

      • No, it isn't true BLM money goes to DNC. It actually goes into the pockets of the 3 founders who are pocketing 83% of donations after their parent orgs filter off transaction fees.

        Only 6% going into BLM organizing.

        So, yes, please, donate all the money you want to those 3 women, over 95% of it gets pocketed and does absolutely nothing to push their raw Marxist agenda.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kaenneth ( 82978 )

      OK, But what else can a syrup company do?

    • Malcom X predicted that when black people complained, after a lot of work, rich white people would finally able to get symbolic victories. And that those were a diversion from their demands that they be given an equal shake at the American Dream, and not to be bought off by symbolism. Because symbolism doesn't cost rich people anything.

    • So far no presidential candidate wants to do that

      It's more of a city government issue than a national issue, wouldn't you say?

    • Because changing the statues and flags is easy. Breaking the police unions is *hard*, and would expose the hypocrisy of not also wanting to break other public employee unions. When I was young I used to think, "I'm glad I'm not Black because I'd have to think about race all the time". As I grew up, I realized that we all have to think about race. These days I find myself thinking, "I'm glad I'm not Black, because most of the organizations that claim to be advocates for Blacks really suck".

    • Don't the BLM also advocate for stronger affirmative action and more black people in higher paying jobs and leadership positions? During the peak of the riots I watched a video that was supposed to be a BLM spokesperson and instead of talking about police reform which I am full on board with they talked about how affirmative action needed to be greatly increased and every company needed to have a minimum quota of black people working there which I wasn't expecting at all. It was all about money rather than

  • "Black Hat" hackers are now the good guys and "White Hat" are now the bad guys.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 )

      No, I think they just won't have anymore colored hats. Especially the images of wizard hats that it conjures up, because they're similar to kkk hats. Gandalf will have to settle for a do-rag in any future movies. Though on wikipedia, the only pictures of do-rags show black people wearing them, so that might be cultural appropriation, so Gandalf may have to settle for either a kippah or a turban instead as nobody cares if you culturally appropriate Jews or Asians right now as they're currently getting booted

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MS ( 18681 )

      There's more than black and white. RedHat will also change its name to... maybe Tomato-Hat?

  • blacklist and whitelist comes from light (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ClueHammer ( 6261830 ) on Sunday July 12, 2020 @01:15AM (#60288278)
    White is all all colours of light, ie all allowed. Black is all light blocked. ie not allowed. IT HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH RACE. But if your banning black and white terminology then you also better ban "Black lives matter" because it intrinsically implies that non black lives don't matter. The correct statement should be that "All lives matter"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's just trying to reduce the number of times black=bad and white=good. Instances where there is no positive/negative connotation are fine.

    • Re:blacklist and whitelist comes from light (Score:4, Insightful)

      by idji ( 984038 ) on Sunday July 12, 2020 @05:47AM (#60288808)
      Do we now have to get rid of "black box radiation" and "carbon black" and "titanium white"? I abhor slavery and know that people are treated atrociously purely because of their ethnicity and it is right to fight for equality, but this is ridiculous. There are countries with black or white in their names. Maybe Nigeria, Niger, Sudan should be renamed as they mean "Black", What about "Belarus" meaning "White Russia". Montenegro means "Black Mountain".
      Your "etymology" of blacklist or whitelist is not correct at all. The phrase existed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting#Origins_of_the_term) before Isaac Newton was born. It is more likely from phrases like "black day", "dark days", "black times". "Bleak" means "white" in a negative sense. These phrases ultimately come from the dichotomy of light=warmth=see=good, dark=cold=blind=bad, and they have nothing to do with skin color. Should the Koreans get rid of the black in Yan & Yang?
      Why do Americans talk about "black" and "white" as skin colors - almost no-one has these colors (except some Sudanese and Bouganviillians, and the occasional random European) - so this is a false dichotomy as well.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      White is all all colours of light, ie all allowed. Black is all light blocked. ie not allowed. IT HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH RACE.

      It also has nothing to do with light. If you're going to claim a high ground based on etymology then at least have a clue about it's history. No one had a clue how light worked back then. In the 1600 "black" was an adjective meaning "disgraced" and a blacklist was nothing more than a list of unwelcome people.

      Blacklist is a word with history, whitelist is not. Whitelist is adopted based on white being the opposite colour of black.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by theCoder ( 23772 )

      I do agree that the BLM phrase can sound like "Only Black Lives Matter," which I do not think most of the people who support BLM really mean. Personally, I would have preferred the phrase "Black Lives Also Matter." That would implicitly say that (a) yes everyone else's lives also matter and (b) point out how some people devalue black lives and that should stop.

      Plus, it would allow for the acronym to be "BLAM" which just sounds cooler :)

  • they should change a name since they promote ageism.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday July 12, 2020 @01:48AM (#60288330)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Hey buddy, but if you treat all people equally or in a colorblind way that is now the new racism. Silence = violence. You are loudly and fully on board with the anti-racist agenda or you are a racist. There is no middle ground.

      Welcome to the racist side of the tracks, friend. How's it feel to be a racist?

      (Hah, yes, I just did slip that in there)

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • 1) I am 1. I have always been 1. I already waste too much time here amusing myself. The idea of having multiple accounts is appalling. My views are very reality based. I know that pisses a bunch of people off but I can almost always provide a link for any serious statement I make. Those link providing posts are the posts that very quickly get down modded to -1, troll, btw. Think about that for a bit. And by quickly I mean in under 5 minutes. A lot of people here believe they are really smart and v

  • Black = bad comes from fear of darkness and has nothing to do with racism. White people also feared the darkness long before they even saw a black person. Changing this to fight racism is silly. What's next? That we should say pure coffee instead of black coffee?
  • I can read code and I'm offended. By "whitelist". By "blacklist". By comments. More importantly, by anything at all represented by anything in the Unicode character sets: comments and instructions alike.

    Since I'm offended, this blight on our common culture should be immediately repaired -- by removing ALL characters from ALL sets in ALL languages. If not, well then, you're offending me; aren't we literally changing the world to remove all offensive things from everywhere?

    And don't even get me starte

    • It's not really perfect, and as far as I know there's only a perl module for it, but if you're offended by characters then Acme::Bleach [metacpan.org] removes them from your source code.

      Now if you're offended by unprintable characters too then I'm afraid I cannot help you.

  • Didn't we have a post on this already a couple of weeks ago?

    I'm fine with the change. I think it's stupid but it doesn't matter.

  • Lots of organizations use the term "Redbook" for a technical specification. That might offend Native Americans.

    I have a better proposal. We should just ban the use of all colors entirely.

  • White and yellow page in phone books! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Way Smarter Than You ( 6157664 ) on Sunday July 12, 2020 @04:46AM (#60288676)

    For decades we have had White Pages and Yellow Pages in our phone books, government and corporate celebrations of White and Asian culture but never a single Black Page!!!

    What! The! Fuck!

    How come no one saw this clear evidence of systemic oppression of Black people before? Clearly the oligarchs have been trying to make Blacks feel bad about telephones and communications to keep them from organizing to overthrow the White and Yellow bourgeois!!

  • Why not Green list yellow list and red list? (Score:3)

    by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Sunday July 12, 2020 @05:01AM (#60288692)

    You know, like in the trafic lights.

    Green list = Allow
    Red list = do not allow
    Yellow list = Aloow but observe and log.

    Here in venezuela where I live, our indigenous population in tan, not red, and the asians who live here are not offended by a yellow light.

    Are red and yelow lists (and/or red and yellow trafic lights) a problem in the USoA?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by theCoder ( 23772 )

      Red list is offensive to Native Americans.
      Yellow list is offensive to Asian Americans.
      Green list is offensive to Martian Americans.

      I jest, but I can kind of understand the white/black list thing. There are a number of ways that our culture associates white with good and black with bad. It does seem like that could affect people who describe themselves as "black" or "white." I don't know how much changing the names of things in the Linux kernel will help. I'd much rather the kernel be changed because peo

  • Cultural encroachment (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Misagon ( 1135 ) on Sunday July 12, 2020 @07:53AM (#60289108)

    Those who want to exchange and displace terminology is doing so because the words have weird connotations in their culture because their culture is fouled up.
    It is wrong to impose your own dysfunctional culture upon the rest of the world.

    Technical jargon has long-standing, well-defined meaning. When you replace jargon with newspeak, you risk just fuddlings things up and making things more difficult, increasing the mental load for people who are trying to get some real work done.

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