• SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It comes from the act of voting using a black or white ball. Black was a no vote, white was yes. It goes back to ancient Greece.

    • finestnothing@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Where did you find that that is the origin of blacklist and whitelist? The first use of the term blacklist came from a 1630’s play called “The Unnatural Combat” where the people who executed the king were put on a so called “black list” to say that they were suspicious and would be punished, it later came to mean (through use in other plays and texts) people who were to be excluded or had wronged the person, which is why computing blacklisting uses it (i.e. this ip is suspicious or not to be trusted, so add it to the blacklist and don’t let it access anything). Whitelist came around in the 1840’s as an explicit opposite of the term blacklist