...well yeah, but ask yourself this: how many people would actually bother to wear such a handkerchief in such a context anyway?
Honestly I wouldn't expect the focus of Defcon to be sexual but that being said people already have their signals. The problem is some people who might genuinely not be able to read signals (aspergers syndrome) wont know what those signals means. This would be like a person who can't drive because they can't figure out the difference between the red light and green light.
You also have the problem that there are so many different types of people coming into Defcon that many of them aren't hackers and don't even know when they are putting out this or that signal and mis-communication can happen. The only solution for that problem is a clarification of do's and don'ts and a standard set of signals. Honestly I don't have this problem and never had a problem with women. If I'm at an environment like Defcon I typically do what I'm there to do and I don't pay much attention to the groupies. I would probably not be in a circle which cares more about the women at Defcon than the lectures.
The problem here is that most people, single people anyway, would absolutely love it if Mr or Ms Wonderful came up, swept them off their feet, and took them upstairs for a good fuck. And in many cases, some people go to social events and at the back of their mind, or sometimes at the forefront, they're also thinking "Wouldn't it be nice if Mr or Mrs Attractive came up to me, whispered sweet nothings, and then we went up to the bedroom and fucked."
All the more reason to allow people who are looking for that to find each other so everyone else can focus on what they are there to do.
For all I know, it's even possible that many of the people reporting harassment actually fell into one or both of those categories on the day they were harassed. And, you know, that's fine, because it's irrelevant, and that's why the Hanky code, outside of an actual S&M party (and I'll explain why in a moment) is really completely missing the point.
For people who have Aspergers Syndrome and all these posters saying hackers lack social skills, why not? If that is the problem then something like this would be an easy solution which anyone who doesn't have Aspergers Syndrome already has figured out anyway. People already communicate with body language of all sorts anyway, even hackers do this and probably laugh at certain memes that only they get. Nerds do have memes and body language which means stuff to other nerds.
Simply being open to the concept of a relationship, brief, sexual, or whatever, with the right person is not the same thing as being open to having sex with anyone. And no means no - once someone has indicated they're not interested, it doesn't matter if they're wearing a velour green hanky with blue paisley patterns on it or not, they're not interested in the person they rejected.
I think people need to be more open in general if they want to avoid communication problems. This is one of the main reasons I am against the idea of some posers which is to add undercover cops and go that route, as that would make it even harder for people to communicate openly. If I were running a convention and it got so big that cops had to go undercover and do stings I would probably quit and start a smaller convention. There is a too big and that is too big.
The Hanky code... the concept is not "Because I'm wearing a black hanky at this event, I hereby consent to you grabbing me out of the blue and beating the crap out me." It's a conversation starter, and it's one made at a venue that's relatively tightly controlled.
You and I know this, most people know this, but I suppose some hackers who have social anxiety or Aspergers don't know this and for them it could help. I don't have a problem with any pat
It's not just about safety.. It's also about freedom.
No it fucking isn't. You bitching about "freedom" to harass like this is just like Southern states bitching over "State's Rights", when what they really cared for was the "right" to enslave and own other people.
The definition of 'rape' has expanded from the original 'unwanted sexual act' definition so much that basically she can define it to apply to whatever behavior she chooses in court
No it hasn't, and your retarded little rants are part of why no one takes Men's Rights seriously.
People like 'mightymartian' are just the useful idiots who reenforce this stupidity because they've been so-trained by the culture.
Or probably because your actions would be a huge liability to his company, and odds are many others besides the harassment victim are creeped out and bothered with your actions too.
Perhaps they suffer 'man guilt' and want to 'prove' they're not 'like that' at every opportunity, even if it destroys another's career.
No. The harasser is the one that destroyed their career. Plain and simple.
His point is that the hacker community has certain values which are as important as security is for some. Some people value liberty over security and no I don't think he's talking about the liberty to sexually harass. He never said that in his post.
The same tactic is used over and over again by the fear motivated voters. They fear this or that so we gotta over react and rush to do any dumb solution the police officers tell us without trying to see what we can do ourselves to make our community safer. Police officers aren't the brightest people in a community and yes police officers are also a part of the hacker community.
So when I say defend the hacker community that includes the police officers who are members of the hacker community and when I say the hacker community should protect itself it does not exclude the use of police officers to do it. Send in uniformed police officers but don't over react and make it into an epic scandal because that is not necessary.
You should call the cops if someone is assaulted. "Defend the community" is the bullshit excuse for trying to protect your own skin at the potential cost of others.
No organization is so important or so big that it shouldn't be brought to task for hiding sexual misconduct. Just ask the Catholic Church. Imagine, fifty years ago, if the Vatican had just decided that every time a priest interfered with a minor, they would call the police rather than trying to bury it "for the good of the community". Sure, there would have been short term repercussions, but in the long run there would have been no bankrupt diocese, no monumental world-wide scandal.
It's short term thinking that leads to the kind of decisions you want DefCon to make. The whole "we are special so we should get a free pass" mentality is part of the problem, and not part of the solution. So is coming with faux sociological crapola like "gender war". Try that one on the judge when you're defending yourself against allegations you buried sexual assaults.
So the community can bring in uniformed cops. Why do we need uncover cops conducting sting operations to catch a few bad guys? That is just retarded in my opinion.
I'm not saying the convention shouldn't have cops and I never said that so stop implying it. I said the convention does not need to use undercover female cops to conduct sting operations because that would change the atmosphere for the worse and divide the community up as it is currently apparently doing successfully.
Divide and conquer is what goes on here and no one said the community cannot help the cops catch the bad guys or bring in uniformed officers to act as a deterrent. I'm all for that approach, I'm just against making Defcon a warzone environment where undercover cops are doing stings. If we allow undercover cops to start doing that it could spread to other offenses like drugs, so if people are smoking pot or using drugs and not harassing anyone now they should be made to worry that stings could be going on?
If you're anti drug too that is fine but in an environment which is supposed to promote a certain culture of openness and inclusion it doesn't help to over react. Think carefully and tell me that undercover cops is the ONLY or BEST way to solve the problem. If you feel that way then fine, we can disagree.
The parent poster obviously behaves this way since he just can't seem to fathom the idea that anyone else knows the proper way to act around others.
This is exactly the problem I was railing against. If you're not with us you're with the sex offenders, lets look in every closet, look under the bed, put undercover cops in every convention to to find a few guys out of a thousand or more.
Sorry but I just disagree with the efficiency of that approach. I think it's not going to solve the problem any more than putting more cops on roads and giving out more tickets will solve drunk driving. I suppose if you're a cop it's a good way to keep your job to fear monger.
The hacker community isn't an ordinary community, it's a demonized community by the media
I also would like to see the divide and conquer gender war political BS avoided. If there is a problem with Defcon it certainly should be handled internally as there are many qualified people at Defcon.
Replace hacker with "Catholic Church" or "local chapter of the Benevolent Beavers", and it comes out the same way. If you don't call the cops and you try to bury these sorts of allegations you do two things: 1. You create an environment in which it's more likely to happen, and 2. You risk at some point the whole thing catching up with you. Every organization always has some excuse for why it doesn't want the police involved, but at the end of the day, sexual assault is a felony offence, and, whether you like it or not or whether it agrees with whatever bizarre sexual ideology you seem to hold to, not reporting felonies can get you in deep, and rightfully so.
No one, not even a pack of hackers, is above the law. If someone is sexually assaulted at DefCon, the police should be immediately informed.
But the hacker community doesn't have the history of the catholic church and is not a church. Why are you so against the hacker community that you would compare it to the catholic church? Why not compare it to Nazi germany or the US government?
I'm having trouble scraping together much sympathy for someone who is running around doing something that, if he were caught and prosecuted, would ruin his life. Probably don't do that.
Then the same exact punishment should be applied to drunk drivers. Hell in fact why not just give drunk drivers life in prison since people can actually die from their lack of self control.
So would you say a drunk driver has poor driving skills and that is the real reason they got into the accident? I'm saying they have poor self control when under the influence.
The influence of an attractive woman, or of alcohol, both alter brain chemistry. A mature person develops self control and can handle themselves while under the influence while an immature person never develops this and it has nothing to do with social skills. A drunk driver could be a very skilled driver EXCEPT when drunk. A hacker could have all the social skills in the world EXCEPT when around an attractive woman. It's that particular hackers lack of self control and nothing more than that.
You don't have to know how to be able to pick up girls to be employable in a normal business setting and that's what this is really about. Some geeks don't know how to behave around girls in a social setting.
Work is not a "social" setting.
So the Aspbergers angle here doesn't make anyone unemployable.
So lets apply this to drunk drivers, if some idiot can't handle his liquor and drives drunk do we claim he or she has poor driving skills? They could be an absolute genius in other areas and normally can drive just fine, but when they get alcohol in them they lose their ability to make rational judgment and get behind the wheel when they shouldn't.
We've all known people like this and it has nothing to do with poor skills. It has to do with lack of self control when under the influence. Whether the influence be alcohol or an attractive woman some people lack the self control not to get behind the wheel and get into an accident.
As I mentioned, the large number of hackers I know.
I have known four men who were remotely as sexually inappropriate as the people the article discusses. One was an investment banker, two were unskilled laborers, and one was a computer scientist that wasn't really a hacker but we'll count him. I know more hackers than investment bankers and unskilled laborers combined. My stats do not support the existence of a disproportionate number of sexually inappropriate people in the hacker culture, but I am accepting that portion of the hypothesis in the article because I cannot disprove it and the claims in the article seem both credible and disproportionate to me.
I know more than a dozen hackers off the top of my head who are oversensitive to the boundaries of others to a degree that I would call dysfunctional. As a culture, in my considerable experience, hackers are strongly biased toward social dysfunction, but the social dysfunction they exhibit most often is not violating the boundaries of others but excessively withdrawing from them.
I've known men like this as well and the majority of the men I know like this aren't hackers so I perceive these sorts of articles as a negative PR against hackers and the hacker community. Yes it should be posted on Slashdot as this is the best place to discuss the problem but the majority of comments here aren't really grasping the scope of the problem and think it's two sides where people either want to sweep it under the rug or it's people who want to act like being sexual abusive is just somehow innate to hackers.
It has nothing to do with poor social skills and everything to do with poor social skills. I think it's more like that drunk driver who knows he had too much to drink but puts himself on the road anyway risking his life and the lives of others. No one says only hackers are drunk drivers or that drunk drivers get into accidents because they just have poor driving skills but somehow when it's hackers and sex involved all the stereotypes and memes are used.
The truth of the matter is some people have no self control, no maturity, no common sense, and they are everywhere. The kid who got all As on all his math assignments might be the kid who can't handle his liquor, gets drunk and crashes his car. And we all know drunk driving is stupid, risky, yet people continue to do it and no one is saying we should ban cars or create self driving cars.
So I'm all for solving this problem and my solution is to utilize the hacker community itself to solve whatever social problem could be causing this. Clarification of rules via wiki, generation of new memes to introduce the new rules of conduct, if necessary include body language and signals into the wiki so that the poor social skills excuse can be removed from the equation.
We will still have men who lose all self control when around attractive women and that can be solved by banning them for life and then warning other conventions about their behavior but also we should keep track of the females making these accusations so that the same female isn't just going around accusing multiple guys at multiple conventions. These are two solutions I offer and I'm sure if we were serious about solving it we could have more, but I do know the worst solution is to take an axe to it and do stings and mass arrests.
And here, ladies and gentlemen, is the seed of every organizational sex scandal coverup in history. "Let's deal with this in-house. Don't want to give the organization a bad name."
Down that path, my friend, lies multimillion dollar payouts, jail time not only for the offenders, but also for those that tried to hide the ill deeds.
That someone could seriously write this kind of a post weeks after the Penn State report is absolutely extraordinary.
Some guy grabs a woman's crotch and he's caught, call the cops. He commitez a felony, and if you try to bury it with internal "discipline", you've just commited one too.
I'm not a part of the Defcon organization. It's not about Defcon in particular. It's about more than Defcon.
No one is defending assault, nor saying that whoever runs Defcon shouldn't follow the law. The problem with anything which becomes too popular or too big is that there will be a lot of sexual assault accusations, some will be legit sexual assaults and some wont. When more and more attention is brought to stuff like this then it removes attention from everything else, and then you have all the political elements attached to this.
The hacker community isn't an ordinary community, it's a demonized community by the media. You have heroes of the hacker community like Julian Assange being charged with a similar offense and the perception that at least some of these accusations are politically motivated. I'm not going to argue whether or not that is the case but this is the perception among hackers, another perception among hackers is a distrust of authority, and these perceptions are not going to change or be fixed by further demonization from the media.
There may be sexual assaults going on at Defcon but sexual assaults happen everywhere so why put this out there so it can further demonize hackers? If you believe sexual assaults are a problem at conventions in general then that would be fine, in my opinion sexual assaults and crimes of all sorts are a problem anytime you have any group of males over a certain number. A room full of drunk males is usually going to produce these sorts of problems but the media are going to portray this situation as socially inept hacker types abusing women as if it's somehow in the hacker nature to do it.
So the intention of my posts are to defend the individual hacker (male and female), the hacker community as a whole, against the media assault, smears and stereotypes. I also would like to see the divide and conquer gender war political BS avoided. If there is a problem with Defcon it certainly should be handled internally as there are many qualified people at Defcon. You have the NSA at Defcon, you have the FBI at Defcon, you have local cops at Defcon, you have actual agents at Defcon and you're telling me they cannot handle security problems internally? They have some of the best minds and only have to apply those minds to this problem.
I'm having trouble scraping together much sympathy for someone who is running around doing something that, if he were caught and prosecuted, would ruin his life. Probably don't do that.
The question is would it act as a deterrence? If we arrest drunk drivers and take away their license for life, give them a year in prison etc I still don't think there would be less drunk drivers. I think the problem has more to do with some people just not being particularly smart or mature when under the influence.
The goal is how do we minimize the damage. Some ideas people offer such as bringing in undercover cops and making massive arrests in my opinion would increase the damage to the community but wouldn't do anything to minimize the damage or deter the behavior in the future. I think 90% of the time if you ask the harasser about their own behavior they'll feel remorse and regret, just as if you ask the drunk driver why did they drive drunk they'll later express remorse or regret. Ruining their life isn't going to make them feel any more remorse or regret, it's not going to deter the next person, so what would be the point?
There definitely has to be some sort of punishment, and not every assault is equal, but in the least the punishment should be a lifetime ban from Defcon. Defcon can also maintain a record of who received these bans to warn other conventions of their behavior to better manage or keep an eye on them in the future.
The problem with "lets lock them up" and "lets ruin their life" is that prisons are already too full and while this offense is not trivial it is of my opinion that groping does not warrant a prison sentence. A drunk homeless guy on the street can stumble around and grope someone or say stupid shit to someone but what good is it to charge him with assault and give him sex offender status? Just to send a message? It's not going to stop the next drunk bastard from doing the same thing.
Police going undercover to stop assault is "toxic"? You are messed up. Seek help.
Why should police have to go undercover to stop assault? Why not have uniformed officers to stop assault? If the goal is deterrence then a uniformed officer is the better route. If the goal is mass arrests and bad press then undercover officers are the best route.
I'd rather Defcon bring in female uniformed officers (and male officers) to police. Why do we need undercover officers conducting stings as if Defcon is some sorta crackhouse or something?
we expect the social rejects that think assaulting women is acceptable to not show up. I really doubt they'd be missed.
But they'll still show up so all this will do is make Defcon look bad as less legitimate people show up. The people who wont show up will be the women who fear that Defcon is filled with sexual predators after hearing about all the arrests, and the males with better judgment than to want to be in such an environment where they are hearing about it.
It's bad press for Defcon. Bad press for Defcon will affect the quality of the people who will show up and in my expectation lower the quality. Undercover cops are to be expected in a convention as large as Defcon or in any convention but to specifically send undercover cops there to act as bait is another matter entirely. This could produce problems because if there are massive arrests, stings etc that will produce even more bad press articles such as this and potentially create a negative meme about hackers and Defcon itself.
The point is you're creating an environment which would be so toxic that male hackers wont want to show up at all.
Look it's pretty simple if you don't want to be arrested for sexually assaulting women then don't sexually assault women. If the hacker community cannot handle that, then they need to be exterminated because there is no place in society for scum like that.
Are these posts serious or are they troll posts? The convention had 16,000 or so people and you want to find just a handful out of thousands and then overreact and declare war on the entire hacker community?
If you have so little self control that a woman leaning over a bar is an attractive nuisance to you, you should probably stay out of bars.
Once again that is not the solution. You're saying either all the males gotta leave or all the attractive females gotta leave, or we gotta respond with paranoia and fear and flood the place with undercover cops.
All of these solutions are counter productive if you think about them rationally and strategically.
Women who are out of high school know the difference between men whose development is arrested at age 15 and men who are predators.
Anyone afraid of being taken for a predator should carefully examine why.
Like I said, overreactions like this don't help. If someone doesn't want undercover cops in every workplace and every convention then they have to be a predator? Seriously you think a hacker convention is going to like this idea?
Why don't we just call it a police convention and get it over with and change Defcon into a more formal convention. In fact why not just bar anyone under 25, ban drugs an alcohol, and screen everyone to make sure no sex offenders can get in?
Minefield? "Try to not commit violent felonies against the undercover cops. We won't tell you which is which." Is a *good* minefield to have. People who commit violent felonies should be caught, and I am curious why you are expending so much effort defending those who assault women.
So why not put undercover cops everywhere. Isn't that the only way to prevent sexual harassment? Every office in America, every bar, even churches should be flooded with undercover cops so that you can feel safer.
If people like you become too paranoid to attend, then fewer woman would be attacked. Sounds like a win/ win for people who actually matter.
I never attended Defcon but assuming that all the males stop attending Defcon then it wont be Defcon anymore. So what you're saying is you want to basically change the entire culture of Defcon and make it a paranoia atmosphere with undercover cops troll baiting to catch one or two guys out of thousands?
Not likely. There's two kinds of men who treat women like shit; there's the extroverts who are really skilled at reading body language and figuring out which women actually like their treatment, and which don't. These men do indeed get lots of pussy; it's pretty sad really, for the women, but IMO the fault lies with their parents for not clueing them into this and warning them about these men.
The other kind is men who think they're like group 1 above, but they're not, they're introverted losers (note: I'm not saying all introverts are losers, just these men), and they can't read womens' body language at all, don't know what they can get away with and what's over the line (group 1 above knows the difference), so they make pathetic attempts at emulating group #1, but fail miserably. These men are pathetic, lonely, and despicable creatures. These are the men that apparently are very numerous at hacker conventions.
Seriously, what kind of moron thinks he's going to get into a woman's pants by grabbing her crotch at a bar, then disappearing into the crowd before she can do anything about it? It shows a seriously juvenile mentality.
It's not just about reading body language. A woman can put out fake body language or change her mind. It's ultimately about respect.
Who said it was a justification for any sort of behavior? If you did this simply for stating this in a conversation, the next place you or your company would find yourselves is a wrongful termination lawsuit.
Do you see what that article does? It's divide and conquer. Yes women are victims, and so are men. We should be trying to defend the community and make it safe for everyone instead of promoting a gender war which could divide the community forever.
Exploitation for them is OK. Fighting back against their exploitation is "against freedom".
I suggest you look into a Chinese hacker circle rather than a white man one like DEFCON. The orientals gives women much more respect due to their traditional buddhist/taoist values.
Slashdot Mirror
...well yeah, but ask yourself this: how many people would actually bother to wear such a handkerchief in such a context anyway?
Honestly I wouldn't expect the focus of Defcon to be sexual but that being said people already have their signals. The problem is some people who might genuinely not be able to read signals (aspergers syndrome) wont know what those signals means. This would be like a person who can't drive because they can't figure out the difference between the red light and green light.
You also have the problem that there are so many different types of people coming into Defcon that many of them aren't hackers and don't even know when they are putting out this or that signal and mis-communication can happen. The only solution for that problem is a clarification of do's and don'ts and a standard set of signals. Honestly I don't have this problem and never had a problem with women. If I'm at an environment like Defcon I typically do what I'm there to do and I don't pay much attention to the groupies. I would probably not be in a circle which cares more about the women at Defcon than the lectures.
The problem here is that most people, single people anyway, would absolutely love it if Mr or Ms Wonderful came up, swept them off their feet, and took them upstairs for a good fuck. And in many cases, some people go to social events and at the back of their mind, or sometimes at the forefront, they're also thinking "Wouldn't it be nice if Mr or Mrs Attractive came up to me, whispered sweet nothings, and then we went up to the bedroom and fucked."
All the more reason to allow people who are looking for that to find each other so everyone else can focus on what they are there to do.
For all I know, it's even possible that many of the people reporting harassment actually fell into one or both of those categories on the day they were harassed. And, you know, that's fine, because it's irrelevant, and that's why the Hanky code, outside of an actual S&M party (and I'll explain why in a moment) is really completely missing the point.
For people who have Aspergers Syndrome and all these posters saying hackers lack social skills, why not? If that is the problem then something like this would be an easy solution which anyone who doesn't have Aspergers Syndrome already has figured out anyway. People already communicate with body language of all sorts anyway, even hackers do this and probably laugh at certain memes that only they get. Nerds do have memes and body language which means stuff to other nerds.
Simply being open to the concept of a relationship, brief, sexual, or whatever, with the right person is not the same thing as being open to having sex with anyone. And no means no - once someone has indicated they're not interested, it doesn't matter if they're wearing a velour green hanky with blue paisley patterns on it or not, they're not interested in the person they rejected.
I think people need to be more open in general if they want to avoid communication problems. This is one of the main reasons I am against the idea of some posers which is to add undercover cops and go that route, as that would make it even harder for people to communicate openly. If I were running a convention and it got so big that cops had to go undercover and do stings I would probably quit and start a smaller convention. There is a too big and that is too big.
The Hanky code... the concept is not "Because I'm wearing a black hanky at this event, I hereby consent to you grabbing me out of the blue and beating the crap out me." It's a conversation starter, and it's one made at a venue that's relatively tightly controlled.
You and I know this, most people know this, but I suppose some hackers who have social anxiety or Aspergers don't know this and for them it could help. I don't have a problem with any pat
It's not just about safety.. It's also about freedom.
No it fucking isn't. You bitching about "freedom" to harass like this is just like Southern states bitching over "State's Rights", when what they really cared for was the "right" to enslave and own other people.
The definition of 'rape' has expanded from the original 'unwanted sexual act' definition so much that basically she can define it to apply to whatever behavior she chooses in court
No it hasn't, and your retarded little rants are part of why no one takes Men's Rights seriously.
People like 'mightymartian' are just the useful idiots who reenforce this stupidity because they've been so-trained by the culture.
Or probably because your actions would be a huge liability to his company, and odds are many others besides the harassment victim are creeped out and bothered with your actions too.
Perhaps they suffer 'man guilt' and want to 'prove' they're not 'like that' at every opportunity, even if it destroys another's career.
No. The harasser is the one that destroyed their career. Plain and simple.
His point is that the hacker community has certain values which are as important as security is for some. Some people value liberty over security and no I don't think he's talking about the liberty to sexually harass. He never said that in his post.
The same tactic is used over and over again by the fear motivated voters. They fear this or that so we gotta over react and rush to do any dumb solution the police officers tell us without trying to see what we can do ourselves to make our community safer. Police officers aren't the brightest people in a community and yes police officers are also a part of the hacker community.
So when I say defend the hacker community that includes the police officers who are members of the hacker community and when I say the hacker community should protect itself it does not exclude the use of police officers to do it. Send in uniformed police officers but don't over react and make it into an epic scandal because that is not necessary.
You should call the cops if someone is assaulted. "Defend the community" is the bullshit excuse for trying to protect your own skin at the potential cost of others.
No organization is so important or so big that it shouldn't be brought to task for hiding sexual misconduct. Just ask the Catholic Church. Imagine, fifty years ago, if the Vatican had just decided that every time a priest interfered with a minor, they would call the police rather than trying to bury it "for the good of the community". Sure, there would have been short term repercussions, but in the long run there would have been no bankrupt diocese, no monumental world-wide scandal.
It's short term thinking that leads to the kind of decisions you want DefCon to make. The whole "we are special so we should get a free pass" mentality is part of the problem, and not part of the solution. So is coming with faux sociological crapola like "gender war". Try that one on the judge when you're defending yourself against allegations you buried sexual assaults.
So the community can bring in uniformed cops. Why do we need uncover cops conducting sting operations to catch a few bad guys? That is just retarded in my opinion.
I'm not saying the convention shouldn't have cops and I never said that so stop implying it. I said the convention does not need to use undercover female cops to conduct sting operations because that would change the atmosphere for the worse and divide the community up as it is currently apparently doing successfully.
Divide and conquer is what goes on here and no one said the community cannot help the cops catch the bad guys or bring in uniformed officers to act as a deterrent. I'm all for that approach, I'm just against making Defcon a warzone environment where undercover cops are doing stings. If we allow undercover cops to start doing that it could spread to other offenses like drugs, so if people are smoking pot or using drugs and not harassing anyone now they should be made to worry that stings could be going on?
If you're anti drug too that is fine but in an environment which is supposed to promote a certain culture of openness and inclusion it doesn't help to over react. Think carefully and tell me that undercover cops is the ONLY or BEST way to solve the problem. If you feel that way then fine, we can disagree.
The parent poster obviously behaves this way since he just can't seem to fathom the idea that anyone else knows the proper way to act around others.
This is exactly the problem I was railing against. If you're not with us you're with the sex offenders, lets look in every closet, look under the bed, put undercover cops in every convention to to find a few guys out of a thousand or more.
Sorry but I just disagree with the efficiency of that approach. I think it's not going to solve the problem any more than putting more cops on roads and giving out more tickets will solve drunk driving. I suppose if you're a cop it's a good way to keep your job to fear monger.
Let me re-write it.
"but assuming that all the males *who can't keep their hands to themselves and do not know how to behave in mixed company* stop attending Defcon"
Sounds like an improvement to me...
But is that what you really believe is likely to happen? Those males were never welcome at Defcon to begin with.
So why not put undercover cops everywhere.
Cost.
So you really wouldn't mind a cop in your living room watching you every day if it could be made cheap enough?
You keep saying all the males. Don't dirty they guys who know how to behave with your brush.
99% of the guys at Defcon knew how to behave, but that didn't stop someone from writing this article blaming the entire hacker culture.
Replace hacker with "Catholic Church" or "local chapter of the Benevolent Beavers", and it comes out the same way. If you don't call the cops and you try to bury these sorts of allegations you do two things: 1. You create an environment in which it's more likely to happen, and 2. You risk at some point the whole thing catching up with you. Every organization always has some excuse for why it doesn't want the police involved, but at the end of the day, sexual assault is a felony offence, and, whether you like it or not or whether it agrees with whatever bizarre sexual ideology you seem to hold to, not reporting felonies can get you in deep, and rightfully so.
No one, not even a pack of hackers, is above the law. If someone is sexually assaulted at DefCon, the police should be immediately informed.
But the hacker community doesn't have the history of the catholic church and is not a church. Why are you so against the hacker community that you would compare it to the catholic church? Why not compare it to Nazi germany or the US government?
I think you're onto something. But iphone sucks so that wont work.
I'm having trouble scraping together much sympathy for someone who is running around doing something that, if he were caught and prosecuted, would ruin his life. Probably don't do that.
Then the same exact punishment should be applied to drunk drivers. Hell in fact why not just give drunk drivers life in prison since people can actually die from their lack of self control.
So would you say a drunk driver has poor driving skills and that is the real reason they got into the accident? I'm saying they have poor self control when under the influence.
The influence of an attractive woman, or of alcohol, both alter brain chemistry. A mature person develops self control and can handle themselves while under the influence while an immature person never develops this and it has nothing to do with social skills. A drunk driver could be a very skilled driver EXCEPT when drunk. A hacker could have all the social skills in the world EXCEPT when around an attractive woman. It's that particular hackers lack of self control and nothing more than that.
You don't have to know how to be able to pick up girls to be employable in a normal business setting and that's what this is really about. Some geeks don't know how to behave around girls in a social setting.
Work is not a "social" setting.
So the Aspbergers angle here doesn't make anyone unemployable.
So lets apply this to drunk drivers, if some idiot can't handle his liquor and drives drunk do we claim he or she has poor driving skills? They could be an absolute genius in other areas and normally can drive just fine, but when they get alcohol in them they lose their ability to make rational judgment and get behind the wheel when they shouldn't.
We've all known people like this and it has nothing to do with poor skills. It has to do with lack of self control when under the influence. Whether the influence be alcohol or an attractive woman some people lack the self control not to get behind the wheel and get into an accident.
What stats do you have other than stereotypes?
As I mentioned, the large number of hackers I know.
I have known four men who were remotely as sexually inappropriate as the people the article discusses. One was an investment banker, two were unskilled laborers, and one was a computer scientist that wasn't really a hacker but we'll count him. I know more hackers than investment bankers and unskilled laborers combined. My stats do not support the existence of a disproportionate number of sexually inappropriate people in the hacker culture, but I am accepting that portion of the hypothesis in the article because I cannot disprove it and the claims in the article seem both credible and disproportionate to me.
I know more than a dozen hackers off the top of my head who are oversensitive to the boundaries of others to a degree that I would call dysfunctional. As a culture, in my considerable experience, hackers are strongly biased toward social dysfunction, but the social dysfunction they exhibit most often is not violating the boundaries of others but excessively withdrawing from them.
I've known men like this as well and the majority of the men I know like this aren't hackers so I perceive these sorts of articles as a negative PR against hackers and the hacker community. Yes it should be posted on Slashdot as this is the best place to discuss the problem but the majority of comments here aren't really grasping the scope of the problem and think it's two sides where people either want to sweep it under the rug or it's people who want to act like being sexual abusive is just somehow innate to hackers.
It has nothing to do with poor social skills and everything to do with poor social skills. I think it's more like that drunk driver who knows he had too much to drink but puts himself on the road anyway risking his life and the lives of others. No one says only hackers are drunk drivers or that drunk drivers get into accidents because they just have poor driving skills but somehow when it's hackers and sex involved all the stereotypes and memes are used.
The truth of the matter is some people have no self control, no maturity, no common sense, and they are everywhere. The kid who got all As on all his math assignments might be the kid who can't handle his liquor, gets drunk and crashes his car. And we all know drunk driving is stupid, risky, yet people continue to do it and no one is saying we should ban cars or create self driving cars.
So I'm all for solving this problem and my solution is to utilize the hacker community itself to solve whatever social problem could be causing this. Clarification of rules via wiki, generation of new memes to introduce the new rules of conduct, if necessary include body language and signals into the wiki so that the poor social skills excuse can be removed from the equation.
We will still have men who lose all self control when around attractive women and that can be solved by banning them for life and then warning other conventions about their behavior but also we should keep track of the females making these accusations so that the same female isn't just going around accusing multiple guys at multiple conventions. These are two solutions I offer and I'm sure if we were serious about solving it we could have more, but I do know the worst solution is to take an axe to it and do stings and mass arrests.
And here, ladies and gentlemen, is the seed of every organizational sex scandal coverup in history. "Let's deal with this in-house. Don't want to give the organization a bad name."
Down that path, my friend, lies multimillion dollar payouts, jail time not only for the offenders, but also for those that tried to hide the ill deeds.
That someone could seriously write this kind of a post weeks after the Penn State report is absolutely extraordinary.
Some guy grabs a woman's crotch and he's caught, call the cops. He commitez a felony, and if you try to bury it with internal "discipline", you've just commited one too.
I'm not a part of the Defcon organization. It's not about Defcon in particular. It's about more than Defcon.
No one is defending assault, nor saying that whoever runs Defcon shouldn't follow the law. The problem with anything which becomes too popular or too big is that there will be a lot of sexual assault accusations, some will be legit sexual assaults and some wont. When more and more attention is brought to stuff like this then it removes attention from everything else, and then you have all the political elements attached to this.
The hacker community isn't an ordinary community, it's a demonized community by the media. You have heroes of the hacker community like Julian Assange being charged with a similar offense and the perception that at least some of these accusations are politically motivated. I'm not going to argue whether or not that is the case but this is the perception among hackers, another perception among hackers is a distrust of authority, and these perceptions are not going to change or be fixed by further demonization from the media.
There may be sexual assaults going on at Defcon but sexual assaults happen everywhere so why put this out there so it can further demonize hackers? If you believe sexual assaults are a problem at conventions in general then that would be fine, in my opinion sexual assaults and crimes of all sorts are a problem anytime you have any group of males over a certain number. A room full of drunk males is usually going to produce these sorts of problems but the media are going to portray this situation as socially inept hacker types abusing women as if it's somehow in the hacker nature to do it.
So the intention of my posts are to defend the individual hacker (male and female), the hacker community as a whole, against the media assault, smears and stereotypes. I also would like to see the divide and conquer gender war political BS avoided. If there is a problem with Defcon it certainly should be handled internally as there are many qualified people at Defcon. You have the NSA at Defcon, you have the FBI at Defcon, you have local cops at Defcon, you have actual agents at Defcon and you're telling me they cannot handle security problems internally? They have some of the best minds and only have to apply those minds to this problem.
I'm having trouble scraping together much sympathy for someone who is running around doing something that, if he were caught and prosecuted, would ruin his life. Probably don't do that.
The question is would it act as a deterrence? If we arrest drunk drivers and take away their license for life, give them a year in prison etc I still don't think there would be less drunk drivers. I think the problem has more to do with some people just not being particularly smart or mature when under the influence.
The goal is how do we minimize the damage. Some ideas people offer such as bringing in undercover cops and making massive arrests in my opinion would increase the damage to the community but wouldn't do anything to minimize the damage or deter the behavior in the future. I think 90% of the time if you ask the harasser about their own behavior they'll feel remorse and regret, just as if you ask the drunk driver why did they drive drunk they'll later express remorse or regret. Ruining their life isn't going to make them feel any more remorse or regret, it's not going to deter the next person, so what would be the point?
There definitely has to be some sort of punishment, and not every assault is equal, but in the least the punishment should be a lifetime ban from Defcon. Defcon can also maintain a record of who received these bans to warn other conventions of their behavior to better manage or keep an eye on them in the future.
The problem with "lets lock them up" and "lets ruin their life" is that prisons are already too full and while this offense is not trivial it is of my opinion that groping does not warrant a prison sentence. A drunk homeless guy on the street can stumble around and grope someone or say stupid shit to someone but what good is it to charge him with assault and give him sex offender status? Just to send a message? It's not going to stop the next drunk bastard from doing the same thing.
Police going undercover to stop assault is "toxic"? You are messed up. Seek help.
Why should police have to go undercover to stop assault? Why not have uniformed officers to stop assault? If the goal is deterrence then a uniformed officer is the better route. If the goal is mass arrests and bad press then undercover officers are the best route.
I'd rather Defcon bring in female uniformed officers (and male officers) to police. Why do we need undercover officers conducting stings as if Defcon is some sorta crackhouse or something?
we expect the social rejects that think assaulting women is acceptable to not show up. I really doubt they'd be missed.
But they'll still show up so all this will do is make Defcon look bad as less legitimate people show up. The people who wont show up will be the women who fear that Defcon is filled with sexual predators after hearing about all the arrests, and the males with better judgment than to want to be in such an environment where they are hearing about it.
It's bad press for Defcon. Bad press for Defcon will affect the quality of the people who will show up and in my expectation lower the quality. Undercover cops are to be expected in a convention as large as Defcon or in any convention but to specifically send undercover cops there to act as bait is another matter entirely. This could produce problems because if there are massive arrests, stings etc that will produce even more bad press articles such as this and potentially create a negative meme about hackers and Defcon itself.
The point is you're creating an environment which would be so toxic that male hackers wont want to show up at all.
Look it's pretty simple if you don't want to be arrested for sexually assaulting women then don't sexually assault women. If the hacker community cannot handle that, then they need to be exterminated because there is no place in society for scum like that.
Are these posts serious or are they troll posts? The convention had 16,000 or so people and you want to find just a handful out of thousands and then overreact and declare war on the entire hacker community?
If you have so little self control that a woman leaning over a bar is an attractive nuisance to you, you should probably stay out of bars.
Once again that is not the solution. You're saying either all the males gotta leave or all the attractive females gotta leave, or we gotta respond with paranoia and fear and flood the place with undercover cops.
All of these solutions are counter productive if you think about them rationally and strategically.
???
Women who are out of high school know the difference between men whose development is arrested at age 15 and men who are predators.
Anyone afraid of being taken for a predator should carefully examine why.
Like I said, overreactions like this don't help.
If someone doesn't want undercover cops in every workplace and every convention then they have to be a predator? Seriously you think a hacker convention is going to like this idea?
Why don't we just call it a police convention and get it over with and change Defcon into a more formal convention. In fact why not just bar anyone under 25, ban drugs an alcohol, and screen everyone to make sure no sex offenders can get in?
Minefield? "Try to not commit violent felonies against the undercover cops. We won't tell you which is which." Is a *good* minefield to have. People who commit violent felonies should be caught, and I am curious why you are expending so much effort defending those who assault women.
So why not put undercover cops everywhere. Isn't that the only way to prevent sexual harassment? Every office in America, every bar, even churches should be flooded with undercover cops so that you can feel safer.
If people like you become too paranoid to attend, then fewer woman would be attacked. Sounds like a win/ win for people who actually matter.
I never attended Defcon but assuming that all the males stop attending Defcon then it wont be Defcon anymore. So what you're saying is you want to basically change the entire culture of Defcon and make it a paranoia atmosphere with undercover cops troll baiting to catch one or two guys out of thousands?
Not likely. There's two kinds of men who treat women like shit; there's the extroverts who are really skilled at reading body language and figuring out which women actually like their treatment, and which don't. These men do indeed get lots of pussy; it's pretty sad really, for the women, but IMO the fault lies with their parents for not clueing them into this and warning them about these men.
The other kind is men who think they're like group 1 above, but they're not, they're introverted losers (note: I'm not saying all introverts are losers, just these men), and they can't read womens' body language at all, don't know what they can get away with and what's over the line (group 1 above knows the difference), so they make pathetic attempts at emulating group #1, but fail miserably. These men are pathetic, lonely, and despicable creatures. These are the men that apparently are very numerous at hacker conventions.
Seriously, what kind of moron thinks he's going to get into a woman's pants by grabbing her crotch at a bar, then disappearing into the crowd before she can do anything about it? It shows a seriously juvenile mentality.
It's not just about reading body language. A woman can put out fake body language or change her mind. It's ultimately about respect.
Who said it was a justification for any sort of behavior? If you did this simply for stating this in a conversation, the next place you or your company would find yourselves is a wrongful termination lawsuit.
Do you see what that article does? It's divide and conquer. Yes women are victims, and so are men. We should be trying to defend the community and make it safe for everyone instead of promoting a gender war which could divide the community forever.
"You're not against "freedom", are you?"
Their definition of freedom is one way.
Exploitation for them is OK. Fighting back against their exploitation is "against freedom".
I suggest you look into a Chinese hacker circle rather than a white man one like DEFCON. The orientals gives women much more respect due to their traditional buddhist/taoist values.
What Chinese hacker circle?