re: whitelisting vs 'added to an allow-list'

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so the memo went out we can no longer refer to the IT terms blacklisting and whitelisting.

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Our CTO and I had a similar conversation. It's super awkward to say "allow list". "Blocklist" is less awkward, but yeah... it's a weird thing to insist on.

Like when people started saying that you shouldn't refer to old drive configurations as "Master" and "Slave".

That said, "whitelist" and "blacklist" make sense in the terms of physics (white light is allowing ALL of the visible light spectrum through, black would be allowing none). The original term had nothing to do with race either; it was used in the 1600s by an English playwright.

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The English dramatist Philip Massinger used the phrase "black list" in his 1639 tragedy The Unnatural Combat.[2]

After the restoration of the English monarchy brought Charles II of England to the throne in 1660, a list of regicides named those to be punished for the execution of his father.[3] The state papers of Charles II say "If any innocent soul be found in this black list, let him not be offended at me, but consider whether some mistaken principle or interest may not have misled him to vote".[4] In a 1676 history of the events leading up to the Restoration, James Heath (a supporter of Charles II) alleged that Parliament had passed an Act requiring the sale of estates, "And into this black list the Earl of Derby was now put, and other unfortunate Royalists".[5]

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It's silly. Apparently the terms weren't seen this way until a paper in 2018.

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its been lots of fun revising hundreds of documents on sharepoint to change the terms.

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Shame Sharepoint doesn't have a simple "find all and replace" function like you can do for simple Word docs.