what was nature of the harassment that they were getting that warranted such a strong response?
Solidarity against online harassment
21–30 of 43 posts
Re: Solidarity against online harassment
#22Why is this tagged with "feminism"? I'm really uncomfortable with that. I don't want ideology (of any kind) in my technology.
> Why is this tagged with "feminism"? I'm really uncomfortable with that. I don't want ideology (of any kind except for my own implicitly regressive one) in my technology.
Fixed that for you.
Re: Solidarity against online harassment
#23What exactly does this mean? Are there new centralized control mechanisms in the works for Tor? This seems like a really bad idea TBH. I don't want my privacy tools to come with some strangely ambiguous "political" feeling sentiment. Focus is the key to success and this doesn't seem like it.
I see no indication in the statement to that effect. Please take your baseless speculation and political naivete somewhere more appropriate.
Re: Solidarity against online harassment
#24I see three different top-level comments suggesting that this post is an oblique announcement of some kind of censorship or banning system being developed for the Tor software. It is clearly nothing of the sort, and Tor developers value the system far too much to try to shoehorn a backdoor into it. Respond to it for what it is - a statement of social principles.
I wouldn't say "clearly". They make reference to doing something about harassment but give no outline what that might be. The post is tagged feminism. Believe it or not, not everyone supports this type of feminism. I'm not comfortable with Tor being so overtly political.
Re: Solidarity against online harassment
#25I see three different top-level comments suggesting that this post is an oblique announcement of some kind of censorship or banning system being developed for the Tor software. It is clearly nothing of the sort, and Tor developers value the system far too much to try to shoehorn a backdoor into it. Respond to it for what it is - a statement of social principles.
These are the kind of people who think that telling 13 year old kids they shouldn't send death threats on the internet is the same thing as political censorship. I wouldn't expect a level of reading comprehension much above that of a 13 year old.
Re: Solidarity against online harassment
#26I see three different top-level comments suggesting that this post is an oblique announcement of some kind of censorship or banning system being developed for the Tor software. It is clearly nothing of the sort, and Tor developers value the system far too much to try to shoehorn a backdoor into it. Respond to it for what it is - a statement of social principles.
I wouldn't say "clearly". They make reference to doing something about harassment but give no outline what that might be. The post is tagged feminism. Believe it or not, not everyone supports this type of feminism. I'm not comfortable with Tor being so overtly political.
You mean some people are uncomfortable in having their place in the social pecking order challenged? News at 11.
Re: Solidarity against online harassment
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't say "clearly". They make reference to doing something about harassment but give no outline what that might be. The post is tagged feminism. Believe it or not, not everyone supports this type of feminism. I'm not comfortable with Tor being so overtly political.
You mean some people are uncomfortable in having their place in the social pecking order challenged? News at 11.
No. First of all you're being pretty rude. Secondly, I don't want ANY pecking order in Tor. They should just focus on making privacy tools and leave the unrelated political messaging aside.
Re: Solidarity against online harassment
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean some people are uncomfortable in having their place in the social pecking order challenged? News at 11.
No. First of all you're being pretty rude. Secondly, I don't want ANY pecking order in Tor. They should just focus on making privacy tools and leave the unrelated political messaging aside.
What other volunteer organizations would be better if they just did whatever you wanted them to?
Re: Solidarity against online harassment
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I don't want ideology (of any kind) in my technology. That too is an ideology, and it's not a trivial one.
Thinking about it, I'll concede that it is an ideology. One I'm proud to hold and I think is very tech friendly and progressive. I'll restate it: I think tech should be tech. I don't want privacy tools to contain censorship mechanisms because I believe in free speech.
So, just more food for thought: this ideology (that it's bad to look at your tech through a feminist lens, or any other random social lens) tends to be a conservative force, not a progressive one.
Tech has to be built for someone. You build for people you (probably) assume have eyes and ears and hands and written language and a financial system and a predictable reward mechanism and a notion of privacy and on and on and on. The only thing that makes a product "good" or "bad" is its interaction with a massive stack of assumptions you're making about the user.
But you only know like 0.000002% of the possible users of your product. So really you're extrapolating wildly from a tiny set of clues about your user, based on signals sent to you by your culture. (Where "culture" is just the set of stuff that filters through to you about the people around you who you don't know personally.) And that culture holds some people to be more "normal" than others. Consider (as just some examples) that test subjects start to see a crowd as half women when it's much less than half. A movie poster with women on it is intended only for women; a poster with men on it is for everyone. A movie poster with only black people is intended only for black people; a poster with white people is for everyone ...
So the product you build is based on a dirty signal -- it incorporates a massive stack of assumptions about the user, derived from a culture that you know is lying to you about what a normal person is. If you build for your internal idea of a "normal" user, letting tech be tech, then you reinforce whatever happened to be handed to you without realizing you're doing it. That's why this is a conservative ideology.
"Feminism" in this context is a progressive tool -- it's a way to look at your product with fresh eyes. How do anonymity tools look if we assume that all users are equally important, focusing on the experience of men vs. women? Huh, it seems that the user base includes a significant number of men who are hateful toward women, and that has a big impact on who participates in anonymous forums and how men and women experience them. Now we have a lot of different options for dealing with that (censorship being only one, and obviously not one the Tor project would choose). Before we* used this lens, our only option was to ignore it and preserve the status quo.
Other "-isms" are just other tools. Anything that your culture cares too much or too little about -- and therefore tends to lie to you about -- is a possible lens to learn about users you're ignoring, because your mental model of "normal" doesn't match reality.
(* Note I'm not at all affiliated with Tor, just using "we" generally here.)
Re: Solidarity against online harassment
#30I see three different top-level comments suggesting that this post is an oblique announcement of some kind of censorship or banning system being developed for the Tor software. It is clearly nothing of the sort, and Tor developers value the system far too much to try to shoehorn a backdoor into it. Respond to it for what it is - a statement of social principles.
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