Terms in this list should be considered for replacement. Terms included in this list have one or all of the following:
Blast radius refers to the extent to which a particular vulnerability affects a software project.
Recommended to replace.
The term blast radius comes from warcraft. It refers to the extent of damage caused by an explosion. Many people, including but not limited to those who have served in the military or lived in war zones, could experience triggered reactions or otherwise take offense.
Additionally, blast radius is not universally known within the IT community, and there is a high risk of it being mistranslated. Both of the recommended replacement terms are clear and unambiguous.
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An evangelist is someone who advocates for a particular technology, process, or individual product.
Recommended to replace.
Evangelist has a strongly religious connotation and might therefore cause offense. It is the English rendering of the Greek word euangelistas, which in the Christian New Testament refers to someone who spreads the faith.
It is inappropriate to apply the word to someone who prefers not to be associated with the Christian faith. Conversely, the term can also cause offense to those who object to its being used in a secular (non-religious) context.
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An artificial intelligence (AI) application generates information that has no basis in fact.
Recommended to replace when possible.
Hallucinations – perceptions that are not based in reality – are often associated with mental illness or drug use. Using the term in a technology context, in either its noun or verb form, can be seen as insensitive to people who experience those conditions.
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A man-hour is a unit that describes the average amount of work done in an hour.
Recommended to replace.
Gendered language that can perpetuate bias and stereotypes. Can cause one to wonder if the relation between time and work done differs by gender.
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Consider replacement
When an attacker secretly intercepts and relays communications between two systems or people who believe that they are communicating directly with each other. Gendered language that can perpetuate bias and stereotypes. Implies that women do not have the skills to perpetrate this type of hacking.
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None
Replace
The word segregation carries strong context in regard to civil rights movements in the US and South Africa, segregation in the US South, and racist history. Though the word appears etymologically neutral at first, Etymonline notes that the term has strong moral contexts prior to US segregation, and after US segregation is almost exclusively associated with the segregation of Black people from White people, an extremely racist context.
This meets one of the INI’s evaluation framework’s first-order concerns : the term is loaded, problematic, or politically charged outside of technology contexts, even if the language is itself etymologically neutral. As such, we recommend replacing it to remove the distracting, racist, and negative connotations of the word.
While the word is in use in security contexts and in GDPR and data protection contexts, it does not appear to be codified into any laws, policies, or other difficult to change or heavily embedded frameworks. Moreover, the replacement terms recommended—“segmentation” and “separation”—are both equally descriptive and in common use in technology, so we recommend replacing as you see the term.
We acknowledge that switching from “segregation” to “segmentation” or “separation” loses a small amount of nuance: specifically, “segregation” implies “separation” based on a policy or human-defined ruleset. If this is an issue in the context in which you use the word, we recommend using descriptive words along with the replacement, such as “policy-based segmentation.”
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