News: 1618231751

It does make sense to have analogous terms which are offensive to nobody, though thats quite ‘a tall order’

Oh shit did I just upset someone tall?

No but some red heads would like a word...

And some not so tall persons would like to cut you off at the knees.

I've been aware of "Chinese walls" being used in financial institutions where one part of a company can't (or isn't supposed to) talk to another part due to conflict of interest/insider dealing/etc, which I guess would cover the ethical wall thing. But I've never heard it being used in reference to a firewall.

IBM have their own terms and abbreviations. For example, AMD for them is for "air moving device". There is a joke that all those abbreviations are there for driving the Russians crazy. Quite an old joke, obviously.

And RIF means over 40 and your job has been replaced by a couple of cheap script followers in a 3rd world country.

ps. before you leave can you write the script ?

I don't think anyone's saying the IT firewall used to be called a "Chinese wall". Many organisations need to respect confidentiality and not, for example, let the team working on ClientA's project know what the team for ClientB knows. Seems IBM used to use "Chinese wall" for that.

Is this related to the (what, 2 decades old?) analogy by Prof John Searle about the Chinese Room? He was talking about AI but I can sort of see an analogy to an process / department that does stuff without full knowledge of the relevance of their actions outside the room. Like homomorphic encryption ...?

Seems like it just means "big wall", which is a fair enough analogy, isn't it?

Not sure why it's offensive; effective walls are Chinese = good, yes?

When they came for the Chinese walls, I said nothing, because I'm not Chinese.

When they came for the Damascus steel, I said nothing, because I'm not Damascian.

When they came for the French toast, I opened a café.

"grandfathered" also had to go as they considered it gendered and racist.

Gendered, sure, but racist? Everybody has a couple of grandfathers.

I am a grandfather. What the hell do I call myself now?

(Won't someone think of the grandchildren?)

> I am a grandfather. What the hell do I call myself now?

"Person with descendants having descendants"

>> I am a grandfather. What the hell do I call myself now?

> "Person with descendants having descendants"

Sorry - Descendants discriminates against those adopted or gained from social bonding partnerships. Probably best not mentioning any form of ownership, relationship or descendance as this could imply an unintended hierarchy or age discrimination.

"Person Known to Another Being" is acceptable, possibly.

I wondered the same thing when this last came up. TIL the concept of the 'grandfather clause' has [1]origins in the United States that seem pretty racist :

From late 19th-century legislation and constitutional amendments passed by a number of U.S. Southern states, which created new literacy and property restrictions on voting, but exempted those whose grandfathers had the right to vote before the Civil War. The intent and effect of such rules was to prevent poor and illiterate African American former slaves and their descendants from voting, but without denying poor and illiterate whites the right to vote.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/grandfather_clause

>Everybody has a couple of grandfathers.

Maybe an overestimate in certain US southern states

Manager = Master

Worker = Slave

All makes sense now.

I'll get my coat.

Having been a white hat hacker, I think I find being called "offensive" more offensive than any negative correlation of the existing name. Besides an "offensive security researcher" sounds more like someone trying to do damage than not. Perhaps a "defensive security researcher" would be better.

Also, from what I remember the terms white hat and black hat don't have racial origins at all, they come from the old Hollywood westerns where the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black hats. Both sides were almost always white men.

"Also, from what I remember the terms white hat and black hat don't have racial origins at all, they come from the old Hollywood westerns where the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black hats. "

White == good, black == bad has been a thing for millennia in Western culture.

"offensive security researcher" sounds more like a red team member or a grey hat than a white hat to me. I think it will be more likely to set off alarms when people try to report security issues.

If I were a security researcher, I would be offended if someone called me "offensive."

> Having been a white hat hacker

You make a living hacking hats of white color?... I guess they won't let you anywhere near Ascot on racing days...

Seriously now, I thought exactly the same thing, an "offensive security researcher" is a security researcher who is somehow offensive: Constantly cussing, or running around without pants, or whatever. I'd rather stick with "penetration tester" (even if some people think it's pr0n related).

Also the "gray hats", what are we supposed to call those? "Gray" isn't yet considered offensive (AFAIK), but without the black/white hats on both ends, their name becomes totally incomprehensible.

By and large, I have no problem with evolution of the language to make it less prejudiced (and, hopefully, clearer too). Plug and Socket are much clearer and more sensible than male and female, for example. White box and Black box made no sense anyway since it doesn’t matter what colour it is, I can’t see into it unless it’s transparent. But Ethical Wall? That really does strike me as comedy nonsense of the highest order. What’s ethical about a firewall? Ethics have nothing to do with it.

Except that you can have a cable with a male connector and one end and a female connector at the other that both go into what I would describe as sockets, recessed and chassis mounted ports for a cable.

Also means the dear users who manage to wedge a USB plug into a ethernet socket are just being pro LGBTQI2*

It doesn’t matter if it’s at the end of a cable or attached to a box - a socket is still a socket. It doesn’t stop being a socket just because it’s on the end of an extension lead, if if it’s just a one socket extension lead…

Good luck playing chess or draughts then.

At least they got it written down in black and whi....... Oh bugger.

Language itself can not be "prejudiced". The problem is people using language in certain ways that demonstrate their prejudice. This is clearly shown by some words being perceived as legitimately usable by certain people but not by others.

There is a great danger that language will be progressively purged of useful words and meanings because some influential people assume that users of those words are automatically "demonstrating prejudice", whereas in most cases the user is entirely innocent of any such intent. Indeed we should ask whether the self appointed language police are themselves demonstrating prejudice.

Language can be, and often is, prejudiced.

The language we speak at least partly defines how we view things, even down to things you wouldn't have thought would be affected, like colour vision.

However, increasingly it seems that language is having prejuidice imposed on it by people who want to use this as a means of exerting power over others by deeming existing forms of language as "unacceptable" and by extension labelling anyone using that language as "unacceptable" as well.

> language will be progressively purged of useful words and meanings because some influential people assume that users of those words are automatically "demonstrating prejudice"

No, language will be purged because it's way easier to ban the name of a problem than fix the problem itself. If you can't name a problem , it officially disappears: You can't possibly be accused of XYZ discrimination if there officially is no XYZ (gender, skin color, age, whatever)...

Not to mention some people are desperately looking for something to be offended about, because it validates them, gives them a meaning in life. They will always find something new to be offended about (like this post for instance...).

No, language will be purged because it's way easier to ban the name of a problem than fix the problem itself. If you can't name a problem , it officially disappears

Doubleplus good duckspeak.

Indeed we should ask whether the self appointed language police are themselves demonstrating prejudice.

And to put the icing on the cake, those wokes just about never belong to the group that is supposed to be a victim of that prejudice. The worst protestors against "black" somehow always are melanin deficient.

Here we go again.

Some things are ok (allow, deny convey the same meaning generally as whitelist and blacklist and have been in use for many years) but a lot of this is utter madness.

So when will the chess associations get involved? " White moves first..."

I have noted elsewhere that the term master / slave in the context of electronics (including device drivers) has a very specific meaning that is not particularly well conveyed by any other 'suggestion' I have seen. In this context it is utilitarian and has no 'racial / socio-economic' connotations at all.

Are the old westerns going to get colourised so that the good guys (in white hats) and the bad guys (in black hats) get some other colour? Can't do blue hats (offensive to smurfs, surely) and can't do red hat (IBM will fling a sueball).

Dear woke idiots: Get a life.

Are the old westerns going to get colourised so that the good guys (in white hats) and the bad guys (in black hats) get some other colour?

I was going to suggest copying pool and making them stripes and spots but someone would complain it discriminated against people with acne.

>master / slave in the context of electronics (including device drivers) has a very specific meaning

Commissar / prole - then nobody is offended

Yes, heaven forbid that we should make some small adjustments in how we use language, at no cost to ourselves, to avoid perpetuating outdated attitudes.

Yours,

A Woke Idiot

A firewall is for filtering data going in or out of a network. I remember the term "Chinese wall" being used in news stories related to IBM, but it referred to the wall between the people who read the BIOS listing to figure out what it did and the people who were writing a BIOS to do the same thing on your PC clone, so that's probably what the term "ethical wall" is for.

Firewall isn't even the right name for a firewall.

A firewall is between you and the engine in case of a fire.

It stops all fire - it doesn't let approved fire in and all fire out

There's another word that has been hijacked by taking one of the many contextual meanings and suggesting it means only that .

One can find discriminating diners; is that offensive to crappy food (or more to the point the people who put it together).

Then there are the discriminating opera lovers (who may find Puccini somewhat gauche - another word that can have some people in a rage),

I am not suggesting that illegal discrimination (choosing something based on a view of a particular person's for whatever reason) should be the norm; what I would like is for these people (who seem to have far too much time on their hands) to understand the nuance of language.

When I choose a software tool I discriminate based on features and price, and that is as it should be.

My employer has banned the word 'Native', it must be replaced with 'Default'.

Posted in my...err.... default language.

Would it still be your "native" language if you were an immigrant who learned another language at birth?

In emacs when deleting a chunk of text*, one gets the perversely rewarding result '240** characters killed'

* The last time I used it, anyway,

** Your number may vary.

Whether used as a firewall or in the financial world sense of completely separating parts of the business, it is used in the sense of a "really big and hopefully impossible wall to pass". Donald Trump's wet dream, basically. It is quite obvious it came from the Great Wall of China, not because Chinese people themselves are a wall or some type of obstacle in this sense.

I would imagine that the Chinese people are rightly proud of the Great Wall of China, which was an engineering marvel when built and still is even when measured against modern technology. Are any Chinese people offended by the "Chinese wall" reference as used by IBM or investment banks?

I guess their remit was to eliminate anything that represents a particular race, nationality, sexual orientation etc. and not worry about letting the people running this effort make any value judgments about whether something should or should not be offensive to those referenced by the a particular word/phrase. I'm struggling to think of a positive phrase (think "German engineering") that might be used in software and wondering if it would have been eliminated as well.