Infosec community disagrees with changing 'black hat' term

What about black beans and white rice: https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/moors-and-chri...

I’m not taking a stance on the issue, but this quote from the article illustrates how blacklist vs. whitelist is different than the examples you gave:

> “Others pointed to the dualism between black and white as representing evil and good, concepts that have been around since the dawn of civilizations, long before racial divides even existed between humans.”

The supporters of the current terminology use this to bolster their argument, but I believe it’s also at the core of the argument against the use of terms like blacklist/whitelist. The idea is that the black vs. white = evil vs. good (like, MTG card colors) can “spill over” into dark skin vs. light skin = evil vs. good. This is an interesting article related to this effect: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-bad-is-black-...

Ok fine, I’ll take a weakly-held stance: this seems like a bit of a stretch, and distracts from the more serious ways in which systemic racism manifests itself. On the other hand, I see no need to become outraged—words fall out of favor all the time (go play with the Google n-grams viewer to see for yourself).

Thank you, voice of reason!

I agree with your conclusion (I think we need to be very careful to edit language, lest we forget the lessons of the past) but from the list you gave none of them have a negative connotation - except perhaps black swan, but it's a reference more to rarity. Black hat has an immediate negative connotation.

This is a damn good summary.

> actually achieves nothing

It's worse than nothing. It sucks up oxygen that could be used elsewhere.

Outrage/attention is a finite resource, and the more of it is blown on topics like this, the less is available to spend on things like income inequality, hiring biases, incarceration rates, police brutality, social programs, diversity/representation in media/politics, etc. At this moment in time the Black Lives Matter movement has precious momentum that must not be squandered.

To put it bluntly: distractions like this are actively harmful, and become more harmful the more attention they receive. Focus is crucial.

> This is all very aligned with a general trend of cheap moralization and virtue signalling that actually achieves nothing but makes as much noise as possible and poison every discussion with identity politics

This is not a side-effect of identity politics. This is its main intention.

If you want to help keep rational discourse alive, you need to reject identity politics at its root.

Reject the concept, reject the argument, reject the discussion.

> Someone please explain to me how labeling the word 'black' as offensive represents some kind of social progress.

It isn't (though recognizing that using the term “black” in ways which actually evoke racial stereotypes is), but both hostile provocateurs (deliberately) and people who don't understand the actual issue but want to try to appear supportive because they see social advantage (out of ignorance) act in ways which associate a more general rejection of the word “black” with what people genuinely concerned about social progress are trying to do.

Without commenting on whether or not "black hat" is offensive, you're straw-manning the argument.

The argument isn't that "black" is offensive, but rather that it's connotation with negative things is.

To use your The Office example, it would be as if "bad" hackers were called "Mexican hat" hackers, forbidden lists "Mexican lists", etc.

(Except not, because "Mexican" only means a kind of person, whereas "black" means many things, but that's the argument being made).

And I don't understand the downvote. The Google justice fighter didn't ask to rename "black hat" because of negative connotation? If it is about negative connotation, why is it wrong to examine all phrases, especially the ones like "black market" and "black hand"?

I should elaborate my point slightly.

Even Wikipedia says this: “For many other individuals, communities and countries, "black" is perceived as a derogatory, outdated, reductive or otherwise unrepresentative label, and as a result is neither used nor defined, especially in African countries with little to no history of colonial racial segregation” [1]

So to many (maybe not in US) it already is an offensive term. My thought would be why not move past the term of black people to something more universal with no historical questionability, and not get caught up in “is black <something>” offensive. Instead of having to fight and question a lot of black <something> due to its actual color, embrace a more transcendent new term (much like Indian vs Indigenous Person vs Native American, that movement)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people

Edit for minor typo

There isn’t and it is indeed comes from westerns, tho this predates what most people would consider the classical / spaghetti western era and has its origins in early black and white and silent films.

I think it is worthwhile to examine why westerns chose to use the symbolism of black and white hats.

I thought it came from the six thinking hats

http://www.debonogroup.com/six_thinking_hats.php#:~:text=The....

You're still giving the idea too much credit, I think. Black is just a color. The attitude that all black-colored things are intrinsically associated with black people is itself bizarre and problematic.

> the previously used terms for primary and secondary hard drives are an obvious example.

You mean master and slave? Was that hard?

Don’t be afraid of words. Be afraid of those who wants to silence the words.

So humans are being humans.

It’s vanity to think we’re encountering some yet unknown human experience here.

It’s new to us individually, but the historical record is littered with exactly your account of “what’s happening.” Administrative state wraps itself around the rubes brainstems to moderate agency.

Obviously it’s fine when it comes to real harm to others. The problem is when a successful person believes that success for them is guaranteed. As much of mainstream America, it’s ridiculous billionaire class has come to believe.

We’ve given them a monopoly on capital, fools. Capital = options. We have none. We’re stupid and must simply enter into debt agreements to exist as a member of an elitists flock.

Or at least that’s the sound forms they might have used when the church owned everything.

Just because the central authority doesn’t “legally” own things doesn’t mean we haven’t ended up right back in the same spot of being controlled by a spiteful hierarchy of self-aggrandizing but otherwise normal men. Less literally violent spot, of course, but still destructive of innate biological rhythms.

People used to go about their day building shit. Now they need to coddle grandpas agreements. Pretty ironic for a country with a founding principle of “fuck gramps and his bullshit agreements.”

Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, the dead should not rule the living. But here we are being guilted into servicing their debts, their opinion on hierarchy, their old demands for wars over what really could have been mental illness back in the day. Somehow if it’s on paper it’s a force of reality, like gravity itself!

Slow your horses. I happen to agree, and feel that this isn't the most impactful/helpful place to affect change.

But we all agree that symbols have meanings. Confederate emblems on state flags have meaning. The fact that you feel this case isn't worthwhile is fine, and you're entitled to your view and sharing it. But that doesn't magically change the concept of symbols into some plot of Kim Jong Il totalitarianistic mythology. You disagree with the changing of that symbol as an effective method for improving things. That's fine.

Instead of just the symbolic, are you just as fired up about addressing the structural issues of discrimination that people of color in your field experience? Is the extent of your ire just the terminology change? Because many people feel they don't have the luxury of that being the largest issues they are facing in tech. That's just one small pebble of many issues out there. Are you helping out in those efforts? Are you only willing to get upset about a name change but none of the other issues present in our field?

Whether the term "black hat" perpetuates racial prejudices or not (I'm unconvinced), I think this kind of comment has the potential to take the whole thread down the wrong path. It asserts (without evidence) that no working-class Black people care about this¹, then argues that the author is "no doubt nevertheless wrong", and then quotes a work of fiction without any explanation of why the analogy is apt. Why is it that every time there's a discussion about language like this people try to shut it down with hyperbolic comparisons to totalitarianism rather than actually engaging? We can have these kinds of discussions while also pushing companies to put their money where their mouth is.

¹ Could it be instead that when working-class Black people complain about this they don't get national press?

You got it precisely backwards. using "black" to mean both "African" and "evil", instead of using a separate word for the idea of evil, is a perfect example of Newspeak.

The design of Newspeak is to force unintended meanings into words. Please get a copy of 1984 and read the appendix on Newspeak.

My herring is deeply offended.

I think it's an inevitable consequence of the well-intentioned demands that everyone should take action. If you're a conscientious big company VP, with a strong belief that you should take action but no actual power to reform the police, doing something performative but splashy is the obvious choice.

Hey, please don't engage in hate speech against tin foil.

I'm looking at things from across the pond and then some, but I think it's some kind of a reaction -> counter-reaction -> counter-counter-reaction thing.

I don't think it's meant to discredit BLM although it might end up doing that.

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Some people genuinely feel outsiders in a field, or might not see it as a real possibility because it feels foreign. Some parts of language and culture might actually maintain that, although (generally speaking) not due to malice by other people. Other parts just are, and don't actually do much of anything.

Some people then want to change that feeling of outsideness, some more than others. Some of the people who personally feel the most strongly about it are the people coming from the backgrounds that aren't traditionally associated with tech. They're often also from ethnic minorities, or women.

Some of those people feel extremely strongly about it.

It gets tied to their other experiences with being at a disadvantage, or of blatant racism.

Others (partially rightly) then want to support it. But some of those people who have experienced disadvantage are really, really angry, and want to attack everything that reminds them of the injustice they've experienced. And because some honestly unrelated things become mentally tied to that, they also become microaggressions, or something. (Microaggressions are probably a real thing, but if you start wanting to catch all of them, you'll also end up catching a lot of false positives. Specificity and sensitivity and all that.)

Then there are people who actually either feel subconsciously threatened by others competing for the same positions, status and authority, or who are actually racists and feel other ethnic groups shouldn't get the same things they have. Those two groups of people aren't the same, although they probably intertwine. And it's actually quite human to feel the former in various degrees. Maybe even the latter, considering how common it is in the world, but it's easier to see that as nefarious.

And then there are people who just don't like unnecessary change. And those who just don't like the feeling of someone else pushing a way of speaking, thinking or acting on them without really good reason. (I think a lot of HN readers fall into that latter category, as do many classical liberals. I certainly do.)

A lot of people just fall into one social group and context out of the above, because humans are herd animals and having a group is massively important to the vast majority of us.

All of that somehow leads to an unholy mess. Actual racists want to push their agenda and attack those whom they see as their political enemies; opposing any agenda that purports to be antiracist seems to play into the hands of racists; some people get caught in the middle because they don't want to support the racists but also don't like the idea that the language they're used to using needs to change, especially if it doesn't seem like a big thing; some of those not-a-big-things appear to be big things to other people, but who can tell who's really right; others get caught in the middle because they're a bit insecure of their own position and are thus disincentivized of advancing other people's positions, yet don't want to associate with the blatant racists either.

Some get caught in the middle because they want things to make sense to them, and "we all need to get behind this because someone somewhere has the emotional need for that" doesn't cut it. Because there are 7 billion emotional needs, and that's if you only count humans.

So the requirement of hypersensitivity (and even blatantly creating problems) makes many people who aren't even racist uncomfortable; the actual racists use this to their advantage, and overreaction by antiracists provides ample attack surface; and in the eyes of those who feel very strongly about antiracism opposing any of their views (including about microaggressions) become something to oppose. Meanwhile, some of the people in the middle actually have mildly racist views, or feel threatened, or just want to maintain more of a status quo because they're, by personality, somewhat conservative people who don't like rapid change. Or they dislike being pushed into something, or out of something (such as use of language). But because some of the people in the middle are actually supportive of mild racism, or uncomfortable of facing the reality of it, attacking the middle also becomes a valid argument.

And because people don't like feeling like being attacked, some of the people in that middle then gravitate towards the right-wing end. Because the racists aren't attacking them; it seems like the strong antiracists are.

You then end up with two polar opposites that reinforce themselves, and each other. And with some people caught in the middle who, for better or for worse reasons, don't really want to side with either.

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Sorry if I got carried away. But I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

I honestly don't think the people pushing for language policing in a hypersensitive manner are trying to discredit BLM, and I'm not really sure most of them are necessarily "virtue-signaling" either. Some of them are, but most of them are probably just reacting to something that they either personally find offensive (even though their actual enemy is the real racists, not (most of) those in the middle) or to something their in-group opposes.

It's just a complex social dynamic, not a conspiracy.

The submitted title was "Is the title of the Black Hat conf offensive? Google sec. researcher withdraws", which broke the HN guidelines.

Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It is because of the actor really. Conceptually their strategy is "if they give an inch take a mile and keep on taking" while using every bit to beat them with it over every little petty issue. The way to shut them down is to tell them to take a hike from the start to deny any leverage. Reconsider if they have anything worthy of consideration.

Part of effecfive communication is not looking like a bad actor with an approach.