Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.
This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.
This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.
I’m not angry, I’m just confused TBH. It was never difficult to understand that a whitelist was good and a blacklist was bad. You whitelist good things, aka things you want, and you blacklist bad things, aka things you don’t want. How is that confusing or difficult to understand?
Secondly, it’s weird for you to jump to accusing someone of being angry and racist because they disagree with your stance. I can think it’s weird and possibly virtue signalling that they’d change it from whitelist/blacklist to allowlist/blocklist. Like, how many people actually got upset about whitelist/blacklist?
It’s like if I started getting mad at car people for shortening “transmission” to “trans” or “tr*nny”. They’re clearly talking about a car, not a person, so why do I care?
How was white and black descriptive?
I remember making a Minecraft server in 2009 and not understanding what whitelist and blacklist meant.
Allow/Block makes sense. White/Black doesn’t.
You’re fucking with me now, right? Had you never heard someone tell you that life isn’t black-or-white? Had you never seen a switch use a black/white, opaque/clear, or smooth/textured to indicate on/off? The only way I could see blacklist/whitelist being confusing is if you’re uncertain about the context that it’s being used in, but allowlist/blocklist is going to be confusing in that regard too. What’s being allowed? What’s being blocked?
Whatever you’re putting in the allow list is being allowed.
Usernames, IPs, etc.
Whatever you’re putting in the block list is being… blocked.
English is easy. Fuck off.