But I don't agree that there is a percentage threshold for sexism, or that there's a litmus test to determine when a group is (whatever)ist.
Again, if politics was dominated (90%) by women, how could it be "sexist" (and I'm not talking about sexist against males)?
I guess what I'm saying is that offense is in the eye of the beholder.
And that is the core problem.
There will ALWAYS be someone who is "sensitive" enough to be offended by SOMETHING. Why should that person be the determining factor for discussions?
The way I'm describing it, you're right: a few bad apples can definitely spoil my subjective perception of the whole bunch.
And because we are talking about the sexist behaviour of males, that is socially acceptable.
But if you were talking about your perceptions of the criminal behaviour of black men based upon your observation of one incident regarding one black man... that would NOT be socially acceptable. You would be ostracized for your "racism".
Even though, in both cases we are discussing your perceptions about a group based upon observed behaviour of a tiny segment of that group.
And THAT is why I will always prefer statistics over perceptions/opinions.
That people from the FOSS movement were making sexist remarks and didn't apologize, and then the FOSS movement - defined subjectively as people who seem to care about FOSS stuff enough to comment on this issue - also don't seem to acknowledge the sexism that was/is occurring.
No. In the identified instances, the behaviour was clearly identified as sexist.
The difference is the opinion on whether the behaviour of those people contaminate me.
Like I keep saying. Read this forum at -1. You'll see all kinds of offensive comments. You'll also see that they're mod'ed down. Now just because I post on these forums does NOT mean that I share the opinions of the people who posted those comments. Nor am I responsible for their existence.
Except these weren't simply comments on the Internet, they were leaders on the FOSS community making public statements.
And I'm going to bet that you were not personally present when any of those comments were made.
And, as I said in another comment, simply because people are jerks doesn't mean that we shouldn't call them out on their bullshit when it happens.
Read the comments. No one is saying that those comments were NOT sexist. Almost everyone is saying that they WERE sexist.
So that part of your complaint is invalidated. The sexist nature of those comments has been acknowledged.
The point being that those comments are extremely rare.
Which is why those same comments are brought up again and again and again.
When the other 9,999 don't acknowledge or reject the sexism of the 1.
And again, read the comments. Those FEW instances have been identified as sexist by most people on this forum.
You can continue to focus on them or you can move on. But your complaint that they have not been acknowledged as sexist is invalid.
I'm not going to argue with the idea that only 0.1% of comments in the FOSS movement are sexist, because you're probably right: the vast majority of interaction and discussion in the FOSS is not sexist.
So far, so good.
What I think you're overlooking, however, is that there isn't a threshold for sexism. Sexism is an issue of perception, not of percentages.
No. I cannot agree with that. Perceptions can be wrong. Perceptions are OFTEN wrong.
For example, simply because we have female politicians doesn't mean that politics isn't also a sexist field.
And if 90% of the politicians were female, would it still be a "sexist field"?
It seems that you have the two items backwards. A field where the "vast majority" is not sexist is not the same as a "sexist field" where there are a few females.
But it also tells me that members of the FOSS movement will be reluctant to apologize for their mistakes, and that can become a deal-breaker.
Follow that with...
I don't shun or reject friends, family, coworkers, whomever, simply because they carelessly said something hurtful or offensive. But if they A) don't acknowledge what they said is problematic and B) refuse to apologize, I eventually will decide to remove myself from situations where I have to interact with them.
Who is "them" in this case?
I post on/. and I have been called all kinds of names for my opinions. So? That's life on the Internet. You can avoid it or you can recognize that there will always be idiots in the world.
If 9,999 people on a FOSS project are not sexist... but 1 person is... how does that 1 person contaminate the other 9,999?
This isn't about one big cake that everyone has to share.
This is about thousands of cakes.
Who cares if some idiot mixes other stuff in his cake? You do NOT have to eat his cake. You have your own cake.
And that is where this discussion has problems. People keep posting about some guy who put feces in HIS cake (but not YOUR cake) and now we all have to agree that there is feces in the cakes.
Now, look at your cake. Is there any feces in it? No? Neither is there in mine. So let's look at what percentage of cakes really have feces before decrying the problem with feces being in OUR cakes.
And when we do that, you realize that there isn't a problem with feces in cakes. There is a problem with a few people and decisions that they make.
I'd like to see an analysis of the instances quoted.
I'm going to predict that there will be fewer than 20 different instances quoted... but those instances will be quoted in 50+ different posts each.
Or, to put it in the mandatory car analogy, Chevy's are unsafe because my friend sent me this link to a page that had a comment about a page that had a video of this crash. (comment repeated 50 times by 50 different people).
Create yourself TWO new accounts. One with a name that a teen boy would choose and the other with a name that suggests that you are a girl. Go on. Do it. Right now!
Then the NEXT time this subject comes up, post similar comments (not trolls) from BOTH accounts.
Then compare the scores and the follow up comments from the two accounts.
I will bet that the comment from the girl-account will be ranked higher and have more "me too" comments than the boy-account.
Sexism in FOSS does exist. But it isn't the type described by the author.
Just look at this discussion. How many different accounts reference the SAME handful of incidents as "proof" that there is sexism and that anyone who disagrees is somehow "bad".
THAT alone should be enough to tell you where the real problem is.
And claiming that a handful of sexist comments proves anything when there are truckloads of non-sexist comments only shows that certain people WANT there to be an issue.
And before you respond, tell me if you'll need a tractor to help you with all the goalpost moving you're doing.
Don't use terms you don't understand. I said 0.1% and I have not changed that.
Now, to contradict your 54 examples (provided on a page that seems dedicated to finding such examples), I'll tell you about the Linux Kernel Mailing List which has thousands of non-sexist comments. Thousands. And that is a SINGLE mailing list.
Or is it that you do not understand what 0.1% means?
And the odds are that you were not even at that presentation.
Imagine that rather than having a naked chick every so many slides (as happened in a talk @ GoCaRuCo), you would have a picture of a negroid in chains animation pulling in the next slide of the presentation. Add a whip to the scene and it would make even a mostly white audience severely uncomfortable.
That would indicate that the person giving that presentation could be racist (or very stupid).
And that SINGLE even has already been reference MULTIPLE times in this discussion.
Meanwhile, go and read the LKML to see thousands of comments without any sexism at all.
Then learn statistics.
Then you'll understand where the REAL sexism is. You might want a mirror.
It took you 5 minutes to come up with only 4 examples. And you were specifically LOOKING for such examples.
Here's the Linux Kernel Mailing List. http://lkml.org/ That's a few thousand comments without any sexism at all. It's all about the statistics.
Your post was a perfect example of the problems with this "discussion".
You aren't concerned with the statistics. And with the Internet, it is very easy for a single example of a sexist comment (whether it was intended to be sexist or not) to be shared between the people LOOKING for sexist comments.
Again, if 1.5% of the FOSS developers are women, and only 0.1% of the comments are sexist, what is the REAL problem that you're trying to "solve"?
You've linked (1) to a link (2) referencing a presentation (3) by ONE GUY at a rather small meeting (200 people).
So that ONE instance is repeated over and over (and linked to) as "evidence" of "sexism" instead of being seen as what it really is: ONE instance out of thousands of non-sexist presentations.
Again, if 1.5% of FOSS developers are women, but only 0.1% of the comments are sexist, what is the REAL problem that you're trying to "solve"?
No one is denying that there are idiots out there. Just browse at -1 here. You'll see every kind of comment for every kind of 'ism that you're looking for.
But let's look are real EXAMPLES of real COMMENTS. Okay?
And since we're talking about FOSS, we can look at the kernel mailing list. Hmmmmm, not a lot of sexist comments there. Particularly when taken as a percentage of total comments.
So if only 1.5% of developers are women... but fewer than 0.1% of comments on development mailing lists are sexist... what is the real "problem" that exists?
Come on! I RTFA and it only talked about different characteristics of different forms of "malware". It even ENDS with that crap.
Can this be done? Of course, I shared the above with the assumption that this type of installation information can be harvested from millions of client machines, infected or not. I believe this is possible, and will share some thoughts here soon.
Fuck you very much. This isn't "possible". This is "something I thought up between beers".
AND that crap was spread over THREE PAGES.
Here's the biggest flaw, once a machine is cracked, you simply cannot rely upon it to report correctly. It's been CRACKED!
Use of a lethal weapon is definitely more serious, and should be treated as such.
Where did I say that it would not be?
Finding that the cop used lethal force when not warranted can be enough for a murder charge.
It's one thing to expect the use of non-lethal weapons to be treated seriously and investigated, but they shouldn't be treated equally when they are not.
Why shouldn't they be investigated the same?
The whole point of "non-lethal" is an alternative to lethal force.
With your attitude, we end up with the situation today where "non-lethal" is used to intimidate and torture innocent people who do not immediately follow the cops' orders.
There should be a requirement for ANY use of "non-lethal" weapons to be investigated as if it were the same as a lethal weapon.
Unless the cop would have used lethal force IN THE SAME SITUATION if "non-lethal" weapons were not available then the use of the "non-lethal" weapon should be enough to get said cop suspended.
Instead of being a "safer" alternative to lethal force, the cops are using them to threaten and torture anyone who does not immediately obey the cops' orders.
Simply hook up a decent intrusion detection system (Snort is exceptionally decent in this regard) and look at the traffic patterns.
Workstations contact servers for services provided by those servers. Services that you should be aware of.
Workstations do not contact other workstations (except for IT support people).
Then look at outbound traffic. Betsy in Accounting cannot spell IRC so why would she be using that protocol?
This isn't much help if everything turns to https for command and control. But at least you'd see the sites that those were hitting. Why is someone hitting e3rt49io.cn at 3 in the morning?
I'm having a lot of trouble believing some of the claims in that article.
In a three-month study of more than 600 different botnets found having infiltrated enterprise networks, researchers from Damballa discovered nearly 60 percent are botnets that contain only a handful to a few hundred bots built to target a particular organization. Only 5 percent of the bot infections were from big-name botnets, such as Zeus/ZDbot and Koobface.
600 botnets
5% of 600 is 30. So only 30 out of 600 were "big-name"? That doesn't sound like those "big-name" ones are all that big.
60% of 600 is 360. So their tiny sample found 360 instances of NEW viruses/worms/trojans? I find it very difficult to believe that there are that many sites with custom infections.
Which leaves 210 infections that are not custom and not "big-name". How did those sites manage that? In my experience, if some site it getting infected by less virulent code, it's also infected by the more virulent code.
"Of all the enterprises where we've gone into who are customers or as proof-of-concept, 100 percent have had botnet infections," says Gunter Ollmann, vice president of research for Damballa.
Which makes me question how those sites are selected for them to investigate. NONE of them had decent anti-virus practices?
The bad guys are also finding that deploying a small botnet inside a targeted organization is a more efficient way of stealing information than deploying a traditional exploit on a specific machine.
Whoa! I'd think that they're using a different definition of "botnet" than the one I'm familiar with. Of course having more than one machine is more efficient. If nothing else, that one machine is a "single point of failure" than can be re-imaged at any time.
And Ollmann says many of the smaller botnets appear to have more knowledge of the targeted organization as well. "They are very strongly associated with a lot of insider knowledge...and we see a lot of hands-on command and control with these small botnets," he says.
I don't see how those two statements support each other. What knowledge do they need? IP ranges, routers, gateways and servers.
If they remotely control four or five hosts, for instance, then they issue commands to the bots to navigate network shares, retrieve files, or access databases, he says.
Which they cannot possibly do if they controlled 40 or 50 hosts. Or 400 or 500. Etc. Bullshit.
"I suspect that a sizable percentage of small botnets are those developed by people who understand or are operating inside a business as employees who want to gain remote access to corporate systems, or by criminal entities that have dug deep and gotten insider information on the environment," Ollmann says.
Again there is nothing to support those statements.
"The reason why we know this is the way the malware is constructed -- how it's specific to the host being targeted -- and the types of command and control being used. Bot agents are often hard-coded with the command and control channel" so they can bypass network controls with a user's credentials.
How can it be "specific to the host being targeted"?
Aren't "bots" always hardcoded with the "command and control channel"? Such as "use IRC" and "connect to this generated list of sites for updates".
These mini-botnets tend to rely on popular DIY malware kids, like Ivy and Zeus, to infect their victim machines, he says.
Damn "malware kids". Get off my lawn!
And they are typically more automated than bots in the big botnets: "Some designed for the enterprise worm they way around the network and look for common protocols that are open in the enterprise" and infect files, and exploit other hosts in the network, Ollmann says.
Damn! Not only are they "more automated" but they also have " a lot of hands-on command and control".
#1. Sales taxes are the most regressive form of taxation.
#2. The state does not get a cut of the money that you spend out of state. Which is an issue when you're talking a large number of millionaires or better.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, if politics was dominated (90%) by women, how could it be "sexist" (and I'm not talking about sexist against males)?
And that is the core problem.
There will ALWAYS be someone who is "sensitive" enough to be offended by SOMETHING. Why should that person be the determining factor for discussions?
And because we are talking about the sexist behaviour of males, that is socially acceptable.
But if you were talking about your perceptions of the criminal behaviour of black men based upon your observation of one incident regarding one black man ... that would NOT be socially acceptable. You would be ostracized for your "racism".
Even though, in both cases we are discussing your perceptions about a group based upon observed behaviour of a tiny segment of that group.
And THAT is why I will always prefer statistics over perceptions/opinions.
No. In the identified instances, the behaviour was clearly identified as sexist.
The difference is the opinion on whether the behaviour of those people contaminate me.
Like I keep saying. Read this forum at -1. You'll see all kinds of offensive comments. You'll also see that they're mod'ed down. Now just because I post on these forums does NOT mean that I share the opinions of the people who posted those comments. Nor am I responsible for their existence.
And I'm going to bet that you were not personally present when any of those comments were made.
Read the comments. No one is saying that those comments were NOT sexist. Almost everyone is saying that they WERE sexist.
So that part of your complaint is invalidated. The sexist nature of those comments has been acknowledged.
The point being that those comments are extremely rare.
Which is why those same comments are brought up again and again and again.
And again, read the comments. Those FEW instances have been identified as sexist by most people on this forum.
You can continue to focus on them or you can move on. But your complaint that they have not been acknowledged as sexist is invalid.
So far, so good.
No. I cannot agree with that. Perceptions can be wrong. Perceptions are OFTEN wrong.
And if 90% of the politicians were female, would it still be a "sexist field"?
It seems that you have the two items backwards. A field where the "vast majority" is not sexist is not the same as a "sexist field" where there are a few females.
Follow that with ...
Who is "them" in this case?
I post on /. and I have been called all kinds of names for my opinions. So? That's life on the Internet. You can avoid it or you can recognize that there will always be idiots in the world.
If 9,999 people on a FOSS project are not sexist ... but 1 person is ... how does that 1 person contaminate the other 9,999?
You're buying into his flawed analogy.
This isn't about one big cake that everyone has to share.
This is about thousands of cakes.
Who cares if some idiot mixes other stuff in his cake? You do NOT have to eat his cake. You have your own cake.
And that is where this discussion has problems. People keep posting about some guy who put feces in HIS cake (but not YOUR cake) and now we all have to agree that there is feces in the cakes.
Now, look at your cake. Is there any feces in it? No? Neither is there in mine. So let's look at what percentage of cakes really have feces before decrying the problem with feces being in OUR cakes.
And when we do that, you realize that there isn't a problem with feces in cakes. There is a problem with a few people and decisions that they make.
And you'll want to avoid dessert with them.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Here's a newsflash for you: there are idiots in the world. Just browse at -1 right here, right now.
What we have here is the classic "mountain out of a molehill" phenomena.
THAT is the real problem. And THAT is why so few examples of sexism can be presented but so many examples of non-sexist comments abound.
I'd like to see an analysis of the instances quoted.
I'm going to predict that there will be fewer than 20 different instances quoted ... but those instances will be quoted in 50+ different posts each.
Or, to put it in the mandatory car analogy, Chevy's are unsafe because my friend sent me this link to a page that had a comment about a page that had a video of this crash. (comment repeated 50 times by 50 different people).
I can take that challenge because I'm not blinded by ideology as you are.
Read the LKML. There are thousands upon thousands of FOSS development comments there.
So far, the people crying "sexism" have only been able to produce one page with 54 examples of sexist comments.
So, with a single mailing list (out of many) I have demonstrated that fewer than 0.1% of the FOSS development comments are sexist.
Unless you, for some reason, do not believe that the LKML is really about FOSS development. But then, that's your problem.
Create yourself TWO new accounts. One with a name that a teen boy would choose and the other with a name that suggests that you are a girl. Go on. Do it. Right now!
Then the NEXT time this subject comes up, post similar comments (not trolls) from BOTH accounts.
Then compare the scores and the follow up comments from the two accounts.
I will bet that the comment from the girl-account will be ranked higher and have more "me too" comments than the boy-account.
Sexism in FOSS does exist. But it isn't the type described by the author.
Just look at this discussion. How many different accounts reference the SAME handful of incidents as "proof" that there is sexism and that anyone who disagrees is somehow "bad".
THAT alone should be enough to tell you where the real problem is.
Nice of you to try to engage in a discussion that you are not mentally prepared for.
In the future, I recommend that you try to understand the topic under discussion prior to deciding to voice your opinion.
It's all about the STATISTICS!
And claiming that a handful of sexist comments proves anything when there are truckloads of non-sexist comments only shows that certain people WANT there to be an issue.
Don't use terms you don't understand. I said 0.1% and I have not changed that.
Now, to contradict your 54 examples (provided on a page that seems dedicated to finding such examples), I'll tell you about the Linux Kernel Mailing List which has thousands of non-sexist comments. Thousands. And that is a SINGLE mailing list.
Or is it that you do not understand what 0.1% means?
Nice try, you've failed statistics.
And the odds are that you were not even at that presentation.
That would indicate that the person giving that presentation could be racist (or very stupid).
And that SINGLE even has already been reference MULTIPLE times in this discussion.
Meanwhile, go and read the LKML to see thousands of comments without any sexism at all.
Then learn statistics.
Then you'll understand where the REAL sexism is. You might want a mirror.
You are ASSUMING that the claims of sexism are factual.
Yet when the STATISTICS are presented to you, you claim that it is "ire and denial".
Again, when 1.5% of the developers are women, and only 0.1% of the comments are sexist, what is the REAL problem that you are trying to "solve"?
It took you 5 minutes to come up with only 4 examples. And you were specifically LOOKING for such examples.
Here's the Linux Kernel Mailing List. http://lkml.org/ That's a few thousand comments without any sexism at all. It's all about the statistics.
Your post was a perfect example of the problems with this "discussion".
You aren't concerned with the statistics. And with the Internet, it is very easy for a single example of a sexist comment (whether it was intended to be sexist or not) to be shared between the people LOOKING for sexist comments.
Again, if 1.5% of the FOSS developers are women, and only 0.1% of the comments are sexist, what is the REAL problem that you're trying to "solve"?
You've linked (1) to a link (2) referencing a presentation (3) by ONE GUY at a rather small meeting (200 people).
So that ONE instance is repeated over and over (and linked to) as "evidence" of "sexism" instead of being seen as what it really is:
ONE instance out of thousands of non-sexist presentations.
Again, if 1.5% of FOSS developers are women, but only 0.1% of the comments are sexist, what is the REAL problem that you're trying to "solve"?
You're talking about sexism targeted at a specific individual ("your code sucks because you're a girl").
There can also be generalized sexism. That would be comments about women not directed at any specific individual. Such as telling sexist jokes.
The question is, where is that behaviour demonstrated in FOSS development? So far there have been very few examples of such.
No one is denying that there are idiots out there. Just browse at -1 here. You'll see every kind of comment for every kind of 'ism that you're looking for.
But let's look are real EXAMPLES of real COMMENTS. Okay?
And since we're talking about FOSS, we can look at the kernel mailing list. Hmmmmm, not a lot of sexist comments there. Particularly when taken as a percentage of total comments.
So if only 1.5% of developers are women ... but fewer than 0.1% of comments on development mailing lists are sexist ... what is the real "problem" that exists?
Come on! I RTFA and it only talked about different characteristics of different forms of "malware". It even ENDS with that crap.
Fuck you very much. This isn't "possible". This is "something I thought up between beers".
AND that crap was spread over THREE PAGES.
Here's the biggest flaw, once a machine is cracked, you simply cannot rely upon it to report correctly. It's been CRACKED!
Where did I say that it would not be?
Finding that the cop used lethal force when not warranted can be enough for a murder charge.
Why shouldn't they be investigated the same?
The whole point of "non-lethal" is an alternative to lethal force.
With your attitude, we end up with the situation today where "non-lethal" is used to intimidate and torture innocent people who do not immediately follow the cops' orders.
Me too. And I still live there.
Nice try, but don't rely upon your personal claims next time.
The fact is that a demonstratively 100% legitimately innocent person was pulled from his car and arrested by the cops.
The cops were out of control.
You know, the black guy that the cops pulled from his car and arrested ... only to have it turn out that he was a city official?
Richard McIver?
Yeah, that's it.
In order for the cops to have more effective use of tear gas, it was a crime to possess a protective mask (or materials that could be used as such).
The cops can have protectives masks. Everyone else could not.
There should be a requirement for ANY use of "non-lethal" weapons to be investigated as if it were the same as a lethal weapon.
Unless the cop would have used lethal force IN THE SAME SITUATION if "non-lethal" weapons were not available then the use of the "non-lethal" weapon should be enough to get said cop suspended.
Instead of being a "safer" alternative to lethal force, the cops are using them to threaten and torture anyone who does not immediately obey the cops' orders.
Simply hook up a decent intrusion detection system (Snort is exceptionally decent in this regard) and look at the traffic patterns.
Workstations contact servers for services provided by those servers. Services that you should be aware of.
Workstations do not contact other workstations (except for IT support people).
Then look at outbound traffic. Betsy in Accounting cannot spell IRC so why would she be using that protocol?
This isn't much help if everything turns to https for command and control. But at least you'd see the sites that those were hitting. Why is someone hitting e3rt49io.cn at 3 in the morning?
I'm having a lot of trouble believing some of the claims in that article.
600 botnets
5% of 600 is 30. So only 30 out of 600 were "big-name"? That doesn't sound like those "big-name" ones are all that big.
60% of 600 is 360. So their tiny sample found 360 instances of NEW viruses/worms/trojans? I find it very difficult to believe that there are that many sites with custom infections.
Which leaves 210 infections that are not custom and not "big-name". How did those sites manage that? In my experience, if some site it getting infected by less virulent code, it's also infected by the more virulent code.
Which makes me question how those sites are selected for them to investigate. NONE of them had decent anti-virus practices?
Whoa! I'd think that they're using a different definition of "botnet" than the one I'm familiar with. Of course having more than one machine is more efficient. If nothing else, that one machine is a "single point of failure" than can be re-imaged at any time.
I don't see how those two statements support each other. What knowledge do they need? IP ranges, routers, gateways and servers.
Which they cannot possibly do if they controlled 40 or 50 hosts. Or 400 or 500. Etc. Bullshit.
Again there is nothing to support those statements.
How can it be "specific to the host being targeted"?
Aren't "bots" always hardcoded with the "command and control channel"? Such as "use IRC" and "connect to this generated list of sites for updates".
Damn "malware kids". Get off my lawn!
Damn! Not only are they "more automated" but they also have " a lot of hands-on command and control".
Pure
Marketing
Fluff
#1. Sales taxes are the most regressive form of taxation.
#2. The state does not get a cut of the money that you spend out of state. Which is an issue when you're talking a large number of millionaires or better.