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Hacking my Vagina

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Re: Hacking my Vagina

#211

Post by jQueryIsAwesome »

rjknight wrote: post #207
jQueryIsAwesome wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like yor attempt at emotional manipulation, labeling as "awkward" people trying to have a civilized discussion about a strong bias and doble-standard; also calling it sexist when if anything we are asking for gender neutrality wish is the opposite of sexism for all I care.

Dude, I agree with your basic premise that it should be possible to discuss bias and double standards. I agree that sometimes bias against male opinions and experiences can happen and, when it does happen, it's not easy to get anyone to accept it because it doesn't fit our accepted narratives about sexism. Gender neutrality is definitely a noble aim. But in this case I think you're wrong. This thread is a totally leg…

> I find it hard to believe that an equally detailed and well-written post from a male perspective would not be received in much the same way.

I can only assume that you are very naive; for the average male is impossible to read this article without imaging a woman using the device; wish does not mean that there aren't legitimate and interesting discussions in this thread; but is clear that the exponential popularity grow of this article is strongly correlated with that fact.

Re: Hacking my Vagina

#212

Post by cynwoody »

djcapelis wrote: post #110
georgeorwell wrote: post #103

Warning: this is not a politically correct viewpoint, but nevertheless it's my perspective. The actual best thing about this post being in first place on Hacker News is not that it's a woman posting but that she has a Y chromosome and most people don't realize it. It's like her recently-acquired vagina is a new laptop to be hacked. It's still objectification of women if you try to turn into one and then objectify you…

My girlfriend wrote this post for the same reason she wrote the the other posts on her blog: to share her work and talk about neat hacks. Your statement that she's doing it for attention is incredibly sexist. Also she's queer, so the idea that she's doing it for male attention is pretty funny really.

>Also she's queer

Your good fortune, mankind's loss:

https://plus.google.com/photos/107665675896730237663/albums/...

Re: Hacking my Vagina

#213

Post by mistercow »

Karunamon wrote: post #106
mistercow wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have plenty of evidence and basis in experience, and anyone can see exactly what I mean by following what I mentioned above. >The only person who has made this conversation sexist is you and those who brought the topic up. Ah yes, the same thing that anyone steeped in unchecked privilege says when they've got nothing left to argue. Black people are racist for complaining about discrimination, feminists are sexist f…

Ah yes, pre emptively insulting anyone that disagrees with you. A fine debate tactic if there ever was one. Look, we really really don't need every single Goddamn topic that involves females to turn into an ultrafeminist soapbox. At the very least it seems to attract a certain amount of crazy negativity (see SRS on Reddit), at best it's highly offtopic. This is Hacker News, not Feminist News. Here you're judged by th…

"Unchecked privilege" isn't an insult.

Re: Hacking my Vagina

#215

Post by benedikt »

pjscott wrote: post #40
jtchang wrote: post #3

Really cool! Is reverse engineering the wireless protocol easy? I imagine hacking hardware involves a lot more work than software. I also love how she 3d printed out some plastic cases for her toy. I see cheap 3d printers eventually being so ubiquitous that a quick prototype may be just as easy to hack up as a working software program.

In this case, here are the clues she used to reverse-engineer the wireless protocol: 1. The specs for the radio chip are easily available, so she could identify the actual packets from looking at the voltages on four wires. 2. Each packet had two identical bytes that went up when she turned the remote up, and down when she turned it down. 3. There were some bytes which were always constant, and didn't seem to do anyt…

> 1. The specs for the radio chip are easily available, so she could identify the actual packets from looking at the voltages on four wires.

How does one go about doing this? Is this done on hardware or some wireshark-esque software tool?

Re: Hacking my Vagina

#216

Post by georgeorwell »

rdl wrote: post #189
georgeorwell wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a radical feminist in the sense of "intercourse is rape" but hmmm... I think I have body modification phobia - so that would include women getting breast implants - and also exhibitionist phobia and also pull-the-wool-over-your-eyes phobia. (Although quite frankly, I wasn't fooled for long just based on the extremely masculine technical writing. I have never read anything that a woman wrote that looks remotel…

Jeri Ellsworth and Limor Fried (ladyada) write similarly to this, are both female, and tend to be awesome. And Joanna from Blue Pill. Plus a bunch of female phd students, university post docs, and industry people. I think what you read as "masculine tech writing" is just competence. True, there are a lot of incompetent female tech people who write, but 3-7x more incompetent men who write (due to overall prevalence of…

Well, thanks for the vote of confidence. It'll be interesting to see what those women have to say.

It might be the case that this strikes me as a man's writing just because there are more men in tech, but I don't know that it's the incompetence per se. It's sentences like, "Often in this situation I’ll break out something like the Saxo board, with an FPGA and a thick USB 2.0 pipe," that I just have a very hard time imagining a woman writing. In the same way that a woman couldn't have written Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. I think it's the implied, "I'm so cool because of all my techno whizbangs." But it's even in the non-tech writing: "In other words, I wanted to hack something I actually use: my vagina." is so horrid that I have to believe that even the bona fide female Xeni Jardin, lover of techno whizbangs, would have a hard time accepting it as... womanly... to talk about "using her vagina".

My girlfriend has screamed at me more than once over the futility of sharing my thoughts with "you people" who "will never understand [my] perspective", but at least a few here are kind, even if I'm not, and for that I'm grateful.

Re: Hacking my Vagina

#218

Post by brandon »

benedikt wrote: post #215
pjscott wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, here are the clues she used to reverse-engineer the wireless protocol: 1. The specs for the radio chip are easily available, so she could identify the actual packets from looking at the voltages on four wires. 2. Each packet had two identical bytes that went up when she turned the remote up, and down when she turned it down. 3. There were some bytes which were always constant, and didn't seem to do anyt…

> 1. The specs for the radio chip are easily available, so she could identify the actual packets from looking at the voltages on four wires. How does one go about doing this? Is this done on hardware or some wireshark-esque software tool?

My favorite tool for this is the Saleae Logic[1], but I've had mixed success with the cheaper Bus Pirate[2] as well.

[1] http://www.saleae.com/logic [2] http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Bus_Pirate

Re: Hacking my Vagina

#219

Post by mistercow »

Karunamon wrote: post #104
mistercow wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it deserves to be upvoted for those reasons. I just don't think that's necessarily the primary reason it has been upvoted. Examining the "would this be ranked this high if it were about penis hacking instead?" question is productive because it addresses that.

>I just don't think that's necessarily the primary reason it has been upvoted. So do you always assume bad faith on the part of others or..?

Good or bad faith doesn't enter into it.

Re: Hacking my Vagina

#220

Post by rdl »

georgeorwell wrote: post #216
rdl wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeri Ellsworth and Limor Fried (ladyada) write similarly to this, are both female, and tend to be awesome. And Joanna from Blue Pill. Plus a bunch of female phd students, university post docs, and industry people. I think what you read as "masculine tech writing" is just competence. True, there are a lot of incompetent female tech people who write, but 3-7x more incompetent men who write (due to overall prevalence of…

Well, thanks for the vote of confidence. It'll be interesting to see what those women have to say. It might be the case that this strikes me as a man's writing just because there are more men in tech, but I don't know that it's the incompetence per se. It's sentences like, "Often in this situation I’ll break out something like the Saxo board, with an FPGA and a thick USB 2.0 pipe," that I just have a very hard time i…

Those specific examples, and a few more in the article, did seem over the top; I assumed they were meant ironically due to the topic of sex.
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