"Many women gamers and developers, as well as those who support them, have lately come under attack from online trolls"
Please don't whitewash the GamerGaters who have also experienced such attacks. (For example, one was "doxed" and mailed a knife with a suggestion to kill himself - which I'd argue a far worse "attack" than any online threats. The anti-GamerGate media of course doesn't report on this.)
"KingOfPol" is known for lying and generally being not too mentally stable, so it's certainly not a stretch. Sarkeesian on the other hand is unlikely to lie about such things, but there was clearly some exaggeration involved.
Because she's (sort of) a public figure and if it was revealed she was lying, it would look very bad for her? She also hasn't had a history of lying about such things in the past, so there's no reason to suspect she is now. She is known to have lied about certain other issues, but not in a way that's relevant to threats or harassment. She also doesn't come across as mentally unhinged or malicious. I dislike her, but I don't think she lied about any of the threats.
The other person being discussed, KingOfPol, is known for his narcissism and fabrication of stories, so it's a bit different.
That's not an exhaustive analysis. I recommend to look at risk vs reward.
The risk of getting caught is essentially zero: just use Tor and VPN
via an 'unfriendly' third country to send fake threats to yourself, or
get a friend to do that for you. Clearly the police is not going to
investigate, because all these cyberthreats are obviously not
serious. The upside on the other hand ... Sarkeesian made how much
last time by playing the damsel-in-distress? Wasn't it over $100k?
That's quite an incentive. And then there is the political effect: the
mainstream media, for various reasons, will
automatically sides with the damsels.
I spent quite a lot of time in activists' milieu and I smell attack
techniques in a Leninian mould, see e.g. Alinsky's "Rules for
Radicals".
If nothing else, the pattern of harassment and threats made towards not just her, but other women in gaming, are readily verifiable and hard to miss. It's not just one person complaining about this stuff.
They are excluded by omission. The words "come under attack from online trolls" link to a further article that paints all GGs as the very devils themselves.
I don't know what "whitewashed" means in this context, but you are definitely off topic and your comment reads like you are trying to justify some pretty terrible actions. The fact that other bad things happen to other people in no way excuses the bad things that happened to female game developers.
It's the bias in the media. GamerGate supporters are painted uniformly as misogynists. There is a legitimate argument about press ethics, freedom of speech, and whether appreciating an attractive body is the same as objectification.
>justify some pretty terrible actions
I'm asking that the terrible actions of BOTH sides are reported. There is an awful, hateful minority on both sides, but in the mainstream media, only the terrible actions of the GamerGate side is reported.
(And there is surely legitimate argument on both sides, too.)
Any non-misogynist Gamergaters (are there any?) don't get "it" or the media. Maybe in some weird deconstruction of "equality," so long as you can provoke a response, you can plead "they were mean too!"
But, most people know who threw a punch first and who keeps throwing punches below the belt from their painful, awkward youth. The framing of the situation is not within the control of those who started the mess. Fewer and fewer 3rd parties give a shit about any morsel of authenticity in the game media ruse. More and more people are seeing people they know and/or care about get impacted and think, "Fuck GG's and anyone who stands anywhere near them." There's not enough time to separate the wheat and chaff - time to just burn the rotting pile.
Yes, there are. The majority, in fact. And there are a fair few women in the movement too, but I suppose you think they are poor deluded fools who are oppressing themselves and need the guiding arm of the authoritarian left (including its legions of male feminists) to help them think proper thoughts.
I actually don't really think so. The people sending death threats and harassment to "anti-GamerGate" and the people sending death threats and harassment to "GamerGate" are not members of the opposing side or the same side. They're all the same people: Internet trolls who see a grand opportunity.
No, it is not. If I thought the owner of said body had no value other than their body, you would be correct.
You can appreciate a persons body, you can appreciate a persons personality. Doing the former doesn't magically invalidate the latter. That I appreciated just the body with a glance, at a point in time, doesn't mean the women has no worth other than this.
If I went around saying women had no value other than for pleasuring a man - now that would be objectification. I do not think that.
> You can appreciate a persons body, you can appreciate a persons personality. Doing the former doesn't magically invalidate the latter.
Making a statement about a body excludes the personality from the statement. There's nothing to invalidate because there is no content on that subject. I'm not making a value judgment here about you--this is how language works, logically. The word "body" exists to distinguish from the mind; talking about one excludes the other.
Generally speaking, you can save yourself a lot of trouble by restricting references to the "body" to a medical context. In every other situation, refer to the person. There's no downside to it, and it avoids misunderstandings.
> If I thought the owner of said body had no value other than their body, you would be correct.
No one but you knows what you think, they only know what you say.
Just to be clear: I'm not judging you as a person and I'm not trying to start a fight. I'm trying to give you advice about how your use of language will be interpretted.
Edit: Just to be super clear, if you had written "whether appreciating an attractive person is the same as objectification", I would agree with you. But by referencing the body, you're using the word for the object.
Upvoted, you're right here. It's the media bias. I personally found asking for covering both sides equally futile, because only one fits the ongoing popular narrative. I personally am waiting for the whole thing to blow over; there ain't much room for a rational discussion or figuring out proper courses of actions right now.
Not only that, the entire reason harassment against women in gaming is in the news right now is to attack GamerGate. Nearly every article is focused on using it as proof that GamerGate are misogynistic scumbags. It's been a huge boon for every asshole who actually wants to drive women out of gaming - they're guaranteed widespread media coverage about how awful gaming is to women and how their actions represent gamers as a whole, and as a bonus their actions get blamed on people who hate them. Win-win!
People have even called for gamers to be forced to use their real names as a solution to the harassment, which would of course make the harassers' lives even easier - but hey, it'd let the people making the proposal bring down social consequences on supporters of GamerGate, so why not?
I vaguely hinted at supporting GamerGate, and this was enough for you to slander me as "trying to justify some pretty terrible actions". At no point did I attempt to justify any violent threats; quite the opposite, I simply pointed out more violent threats and suggested they should be given equal reporting.
The article in question could have addressed the real issue of doxing and online threats without taking a side in this political GamerGate fiasco.
As I've written three times now, violent threats against ANY person are unacceptable and cannot be justified. I am against violent threats and I make no exceptions for people I don't like or don't agree with.
I'm beginning to think you are willfully misunderstanding me. I think I'm done here.
I think you underestimate the average Joe's desire to save a few dollars... The key barriers I see are having to install special software and getting to grips with Bitcoin.
Perhaps it is possible to ship a client with some default blacklisting of certain products, sellers etc, if a person wants to avoid stumbling by accident across such stuff. (Maybe even such blacklists would become updated and mandated by law.)
You need to insulate the user from the Bitcoin transaction entirely. It should look to the user like they're paying in local currency. Unfortunately, we're not there yet. We know how to create an automated p2p currency exchange, we think. But nobody's done it yet.
I read it more along the lines of "some folks and I have come up with a reasonable solution, but it's nowhere near production ready so no one would want to test it."
When OpenBazaar seems more mature I will definitely consider listing (my entirely legal) items on it first, at least to experiment. Lower fees + I'm happy with Bitcoin = Win.
There are absolutely legitimate uses for this kind of platform. It's the online equivalent of the local boutique retail shop, street vendor, or home yard sale.
I kinda hoped the devices would actually serve the apps themselves. I guess a URL makes more sense though. But I wonder if it will lead to physical devices that give 404s when they are obsoleted.
There's no reason it couldn't mean that anyway - if a device is open to the Internet then the URL it serves via Physical Web could easily be its own. But it allows for less-smart devices too.
The biggest problem I can see, as with all proximity devices, is spoofing. How do I know the item listed as "Bus Stop" is actually the bus stop, and not someone's malicious Raspberry Pi hidden in the bush next to it?
>How do I know the item listed as "Bus Stop" is actually the bus stop, and not someone's malicious Raspberry Pi hidden in the bush next to it?
The same way you know that top search results are accurate for a given word/phrase. As stated multiple times throughout the introduction[1] the solution for filtering out spam will probably have an implementation similar to internet search engines.
How do I know the top 100 items listed as "Bus Stop" aren't someone's malicious raspberry pi hidden in the bushes, spitting out hundreds of URLs and varying the signal strength so they appear to be coming from different locations and...wait a minute. I think my phone just got DOS'ed.
You will never stop DOSs. It's trivial (I imagine, can't think why it wouldn't be) to DOS someone's cell signal. Allowing users to see which items are "certified real" and not raspberry pis in bushes is an easy engineering problem we've solved in a number of different contexts.
I don't think so. I think the proper analogy, that authors of the proposal have missed, is not search & spam, it's ATM and skimmers. How do you know you're not inserting card into a scanner?...
... well, everything proves that most likely, you have no clue.
I'm going to repost what I commented on CloudFlare's blog, since they don't appear to have published it (yes, I was a little angry. I've had to put up with these CAPTCHAs for the last week):
Ha, so much irony, CloudFlare.
The company that is determinedly CAPTCHA-walling as much of the internet as it can get its hands on supports Network Neutrality...? Reeaally?
You support network neutrality, as long as your users don't use Tor. And don't use a VPN. Or any other kind of shared IP. Or have cookies disabled.
No, your support of network neutrality is utterly, utterly shallow. You might pragmatically support it, as it pertains to you not having to pay any more for your data pipes, but you share none of the principles behind it - that all people should have the same access to content.
Oh look - I try to access BattleForTheNet.com: "Please complete the security check. Please enable cookies".
An IP address is not a person. Somehow Twitter, Facebook, Google, can figure this out... Why can't you?
Edit: Also, is anybody else affected by these CAPTCHAs? I can't believe it's just me. Literally half of all news articles and such I try to read, I'm getting CAPTCHA-walled by CloudFlare. It's quite scary to suddenly realise how much control this single company has. (Not to mention incredibly annoying. I've taken to simply avoiding several news sites I used to browse.)
Your blog comment has been posted; we don't moderate things that are criticism (or anger) only spam. But the moderator does need to be awake.
As the for CAPTCHA problem you are seeing, having you tried contacting CloudFlare Support about it? We can look at the IP you are coming from and see what's happening.
To expand on the CAPTCHA problem, I had to complete a CAPTCHA to go to torrentfreak.com.
I got nothing where the CAPTCHA box should have been ([0]). After some time, I refreshed and got [1]. I wrote the CAPTCHA, was given a large bunch of text ([2]) and I copied it to the input field right below. Then, I submitted the form but it still didn't work (would just bring me to the CAPTCHA again). I guess this form of CAPTCHA is for JS-less browsers, but apparently it doesn't work. I had to enable JS for both TorrentFreak, Cloudflare and Google (reCAPTCHA) in order to make show the CAPTCHA and be able to contine.
The above happened right now. It also happened with Reddit (except [0]) a week ago or so. This is all on a vanilla (i.e. no addons) TBB.
> having you tried contacting CloudFlare Support about it?
I could do - but I'm kind of angry that I even have to. What about the less technically literate, who might barely know what CloudFlare is, let alone figure out how to contact their support? (Yes, I use a VPN, but there's plenty of ways a non tech person might have a shared IP.) And why should I have to go to this effort, just to get read access to a website?
And what if I'm on a different IP tomorrow? Begging for my IP to be unblocked is no long term solution. (What about when malicious activity comes from it tomorrow, after you unblocked it? You'll just block it again.)
Just now, in my other browser tab:
>Please complete the security check to access coinmarketcap.com
(btw, Disqus is giving you different comments depending on whether https or not, that's why I missed my comment being published.)
I'm asking because I work for CloudFlare and specifically I'm about to start working on the reputation system that deals with things like the CAPTCHA that you are seeing. So, I'm personally interested in understanding what you are seeing because we should not be blocking people who are legitimate.
If you don't feel like contacting CloudFlare Support you could always just email me directly: jgc (you guess the domain name :-)
All someone needs is to have read something on some social media website, followed a link, and installed some software. Boom, they're accessing the Internet through TOR.
> there's plenty of ways a non tech person might have a shared IP
e.g. some mobile internet, university/school campuses, workplaces, shared wifi points. All of which might have some abuse. I guess perhaps not the amount of a VPN/Tor.
That being said, there's more people than ever using Tor lately. And I'm sure CloudFlare are more than aware of Tor already. And lots of relatively casual users signing up for VPNs to get to blocked file sharing sites etc.
Just now, in my other tab:
> Please complete the security check to access torrentfreak.com
I can understand not allowing me to post anonymously - but to go as far as refusing me read access? Really?
Actually tackling the problem, hmm. Storing a single cookie on the cloudflare domain so I only have to auth with CloudFlare once, would be better than nothing. I don't like the tracking aspect of that though. Maybe there's some kind of advanced crypto which will solve this in a privacy conscious manner one day.
Unless IPv6 takes off fast more IP addresses are going to be shared. It's simply a terribly crude measure to assume IP address = person.
> I can understand not allowing me to post anonymously - but to go as far as refusing me read access? Really?
Read access still consumes resources - you may want to read up on what "denial of service" means and check your outrage. CloudFlare sits between you and the host server, and it's their responsibility to cut off DoS attacks before it can affect the host server. Their heuristics may not be perfect but it's not exactly a simple problem to solve.
> Read access still consumes resources - you may want to read up on what "denial of service" means and check your outrage. CloudFlare sits between you and the host server, and it's their responsibility to cut off DoS attacks before it can affect the host server. Their heuristics may not be perfect but it's not exactly a simple problem to solve.
It's hardly rocket science to determine when a DoS attack is occurring based on the overall traffic level. And until it is there is no need for countermeasures.
Blocking of read access is not something I've often experienced before, and certainly not at this scale. Usually it's just one admin blocking an IP here and there, but now, with this job outsourced... To be able to impede an IP from accessing such a huge swathe of sites is a unique and new innovation, and a scary centralisation of power.
The ability to block threats is far greater, sure, but so too is the potential for collateral damage.
I'm actually working with Tor Project to fix the captcha/etc. problem; it's not intentional, and we're trying to figure out a way to special case Tor exit nodes and other shared IPs to prevent accidental blocking.
(We have the advantage of only really caring about http/https through Tor, so we can do more advanced heuristics for abuse, blocking URLs, etc.)
- Political reasons, supporting a (electronic) currency that has minimal restrictions. (e.g. I don't need anyone's permission to install a Bitcoin app; whereas I'd need to jump through some hoops to get a bank account).
- Absolute control of my own money. My bitcoin payments will never be frozen, unlike my debit card + paypal have been.
- Ease of use; it is simply easier to pay via bitcoin (once you have the bitcoins) versus credit card. (I can click a link, my bitcoin client pops up preloaded with the amount, I click "pay". Only other thing that comes close is PayPal).
- Anonymity of purchases and donations. I can (and have) donated money to random people on internet forums without them needing to even know my (real name containing) email address (such as would be the case with PayPal). I've gifted online strangers with Pizza!
- Don't have to give vaguely untrusted merchants my card details. The most I'm trusting them with is to deliver the product.
- To support the potential future applications. This is programmable money with an API open to any software developer on the face of the earth.
- It's just freaking cool. It's like science fiction. It's like having a star wars credit chit. Which can be stored on my computer or phone. Paper wallets are cool too. So are brain wallets.
There are of course some downsides to Bitcoin, but I'm sure you can think of those yourself ;)
