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Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

itwire.com

11–20 of 345 posts

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#11
After reading this article, twice... huh? All I can tell is she is bitching that she didn't get respect purely out of being a woman in tech and nothing else actually substantial.

I personally encourage woman to enter various tech industry roles (programming, IT, etc), and women like this push Woman's Rights 2.0 back a decade every time they do this.

Also, MikeeUSA is a known troll, and anyone who is stupid enough to fall for his shit rather deserves it. He tends to hang out (and by hang out, I mean banned frequently) in the IRC channel for DarkPlaces, a Quake engine used by many games including Nexuiz and Xonotic, and we can't stand him either.

tl;dr: Geek men support Women's Rights; one specific geek woman didn't and suddenly its a new story and somehow its the men's fault.

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There wasn't even any nudity I could find... People should stop being offended at everything.

There's a lot of things besides nudity that can render an image inappropriate for use in a conference presentation, and judging from the description in the linked article ( There was one image of a pig indulging in sexual activity with a goose... ), I don't think it's unreasonable to expect people to be offended.

Guess I just have a very high 'offended' threshold then.

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#14
post #7

No disagreement with the basic, point, but was a bit surprised by this quote: "So, here's our situation. We have a man (presumably; at any rate he appears to want to be identified as such) in the Australian Linux community, who targets women by sending them private abusive emails from a throwaway address and with a name that can't readily be connected to any publicly known member of the community. His ISP won't hand…

I didn't read that from the quote. I read it as "It sucks that there's nothing I can do about this", not "The system should change".

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#16
post #7

No disagreement with the basic, point, but was a bit surprised by this quote: "So, here's our situation. We have a man (presumably; at any rate he appears to want to be identified as such) in the Australian Linux community, who targets women by sending them private abusive emails from a throwaway address and with a name that can't readily be connected to any publicly known member of the community. His ISP won't hand…

Unless he's swapping IP addresses on a regular basis, or hiding on a highly shared server, figuring out who this actually is without any help from an ISP or law enforcement shouldn't be that hard (this is the same way that "why the lucky stiff" was outed), assuming that the person is also an active contributor on other lists.

I tend to view this as another example of how anonymity allows people to be jerks (with the requisite comic: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/ ).

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#17
Unfortunately, this is not the first time this sort of reprehensible behavior has cost the tech community good talent. Kathy Sierra comes to mind.

Other notables (male and female) have recently removed their presence from the internet. Although it isn't always clear why, I'd speculate some sort of harassment was at play there too.

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#18
I dunno. I'm sympathetic and all, but this seems to boil down to:

"Nasty person A keeps harassing nice person B via email in ways which do not warrant the involvement of law enforcement."

Which is terrible and all - especially for person getting the nasty emails - but this really doesn't seem to have any real relevance to anyone who isn't involved.

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#19
post #7

No disagreement with the basic, point, but was a bit surprised by this quote: "So, here's our situation. We have a man (presumably; at any rate he appears to want to be identified as such) in the Australian Linux community, who targets women by sending them private abusive emails from a throwaway address and with a name that can't readily be connected to any publicly known member of the community. His ISP won't hand…

MikeeUSA frequently states dumb shit like "oh, women deserve to be raped since the day they first bleed because this is what God created women for" and other shit.

He does it purely for the sake of trolling, and people periodically bite the trollbait.

Is this illegal? No. Should he be beaten with in an inch of his life? Yes. Is that going to happen outside of a prison? Probably not, no one is quite sure of his exact address.

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