You should not need to know about Old Westerns to participate in security. This sounds like great terminology to replace with explicit terms.

Good news: you don't need to know about Old Westerns. You just need to know that white hat is good and black hat is bad.

Oh. What's red hat then?

Seriously though, if learning the meaning of two (three if you throw in grey hat) terms is too difficult, never mind the rest of the requisite knowledge to meaningfully participate, you may want to consider an alternate area of study.

> You just need to know that white hat is good and black hat is bad.

Yeah, anything that boils down to "you don't need to know about X, you just need to know that white X is good and black X is bad" is not a great look for technical terminology in the current context.

It's like saying you should not need to know about ancient Greece history to participate in marathon running. And the truth is, you don't. You can easily learn the present meaning of a word without fully understanding its etymology.

There are countless words and idioms that will make no sense when you're not familiar with them. You could consider these annoying, or you could consider these the interesting parts of a language.

I for one very much like words with interesting history.

Or you need to know the greek alphabet to deploy on AWS lambda. Or the history of lambda calculus.

Fair, but marathon doesn't have the additional association of "white = good, black = bad" which is, to say the least, somewhat insensitive given current events.

I'm aware that I'm moving the goalposts a little bit, or at least making them more explicit. Sorry? Just trying to why my admittedly subjective stylistic sense is going "Eh, this one is better off replaced by explicit terms".

I mean,one of the core competencies in (certain types of) security is bringing yourself up to speed on obscure technical systems you never heard of before. Familiarizing yourself with unfamiliar terminology is step 1.

If you can't figure out how to google white hat, how are you going to figure out what the FHBTYU (made up acronym) is in your tech stack?

Personally i find the explicit terms really cringy and seem to have been co-opted a bit by marketers. "Ethical hacker" has very different canotations than white-hat, to me.