[conspire] anyone notice the activity on the postfix mailing list?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting alexkleider (alexkleider at protonmail.com):

> Assuming you are referring to the following: "I refuse to use
> “whitelist”/“blacklist” or “master”/“slave” terminology for
> computers." ... it seems to me this is not a problem worth worrying
> about.  Best spend your energies lobbying against police brutality,
> racial injustice, ...  and leave this sort of thing well enough alone.

Deirdre informed me of this short thread, and says she's in the middle
of composing her own thoughts on this matter.  I look forward to seeing
what she has to say.

To answer Ruben's question, no, I didn't notice some petty dust-up on
the public postfix-users mailing list.  I'm completely unclear on why I
ought to care, and spend time out of a busy life, and I have a strong,
justifiable suspicion that Ruben is seeking to waste my time, and the
best response is 'No, Ruben, I didn't, and you've cited no reason why I
should.  Please take your stupid culture war fixations, and fsck off.'

I actually resent parts of my limited lifespan getting stolen for taking
silly positions about ideological posturing, and that this is best
assumed to be time-wasting idiocy and ignored.

A brief note about DNSBLs, which I notice that Postfix primary author
Weise Venama mentioned in passing:  When the concept was originally
created under the leadership of Paul Vixie -- who founded Mail Abuse
Prevention System aka MAPS -- the acronym DNSBL was understood to stand
for Dynamic Name System Blackhole List.  A number of lawsuits hit MAPS
and other early DNSBLs from businesses of highly questionable ethics.
As those lawsuits continued, the principals of DNSBLs worried quite a
bit that judges might be mislead by the term 'blacklist' into thinking
that the DNSBL operators were personally making the decision that all
mail would henceforth be refused from some IP address they deemed to be
a spamhaus IP or for some other reason.  (In case you don't know, a
DNSBL offers to all paries someone's view about the reputability of
various IPs known to originate SMTP mail.  Any banning-or-not decision
remains fully in the hands of local SMTP server operators.  The DNSBL
database merely offers an opinion.)

A consensus arose that, partly to make such misunderstandings by judges
less likely, the 'B' in 'DNSBL' ought to be reconstrued to mean
'blocklist' rather than 'blacklist'.  That is my understanding; that it
was strictly a matter of legal tactics and had nothing to do with any
imagined racial slur.



> Besides, can anyone think of better terms to apply for the respective
> usages?  Remember we are talking about processes, not humans here!
> I'd be curious to know the origin of the term "blacklist" and a
> related term "blackballing".  

'Blackball' is from a pre-industrial hack to provide for secret
balloting.  Voters were provided with both black and white balls.  Under
a cloth cover, each voter is permitted to put a ball into the ballot
box.  The balls being of the same size and weight mean that nobody could
tell from the sound of your ball-insertion which way you were voting,
and persons tallying the votes could not tell which voter dropped a
black ball and which dropped a white one.  (The sound sufficed to ensure
that each voter didn't drop multiple balls, however.)

Is the convention of black = no and white = yes and the related
implication of black = evil and white = good (as seen in 'black hat',
etc.) tinged with and supportive of ethnic bigotry?  Maybe, sure.  A
little.  But the whole language - and all languages - is marbled with
those.  Every time I say 'goodbye', I'm voicing a contracted form of
'God be with ye', but it doesn't noticably push me towards theism.
English is pretty much a patchwork of conceptual biases, small and
large.  And anyone with even half a brain has figured this out by around
age 8, and tries to be aware of it and not be pushed around overmuch by
mere words.

The visual shorthand of black hats vs. white hats in Westerns
(telegraphing who's the villain and who's the hero) originated in the
1903 short film _The Great Train Robbery_, which was a whole twelve
minutes long and qualifed as both the first American action film and
the first inarguable Western film.

See it here!  Boo at the bad guys!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxqg21tfqCg