Well if she didn't post her naked pictures in Facebook, even if it was hacked, nobody would get them. Is it not a common sense not to post your naked pictures on the Internet? Especially if you don't want people to look at them...
If you don't wantto have your car stolen it's common sense to not own a car. If you don't want your money to be stolen it's common sense to be broke. If you don't want your kids to be kidnapped it's common sense to remain childless. If you don't want to be murdered it's common sense to commit suicide.
Of course people should be aware of risks and manage them appropriately, but it's also possible to not blame them for the abuse of others.
> If you don't want to be murdered it's common sense to commit suicide.
I really dislike this line of thought, because I think it boils the issue down to black and white, all or nothing. "... it's common sense to commit suicide" makes no sense, of course, but how about "... it's common sense not to walk alone at night in a high-crime area"?
I don't believe for a second that she "deserved what she got". But I don't think "do not put naked pictures on the internet" is bad advice either, specially considering the (very) large number of cases in which women's pictures were stolen.
Is there really no possibility for a middle ground?
It's not that it's bad advice. It's that it's not a good response in this case, because it sounds like blaming the victim, which is unfortunately all too common.
There's a time and place for such advice, and this isn't it, in my opinion.
Right, do nothing to be ashamed of and nothing can be made public to hurt you.
Given your stance on this, you obviously would have no issue with your full internet browsing history being made public and associated with your real name, the one by which your partner / current flirt / potential employer knows you and might find you, right? I mean, if you didn't want people to know that you're into midget goat porn, you'd just not browse for it, correct?
First of all, nowhere does it say that she posted her pictures on Facebook at all (either to her friends or in a private message), just that her Facebook account, along with her email account, were hacked.
Second of all, as other commenters have noted, you're blaming the victim - the classic "if you don't want to get raped, don't look sexy".
It's right up there in quality of advice with "don't dress sexily if you don't want to be raped."
Or, as the bible puts it "Women should be modest in their appearance. They should wear decent and appropriate clothing and not draw attention to themselves"|
I made it up to "this were all men" and "this isn't about me, it's about hatred of women" and I remorselessly closed the window as if I stepped into a quarrel that is none of my business. In my universe there is no such thing as "hatred of women" and the psychopathic misogynists are like UFOs. I keep hearing about them but I have never seen any.
Implying that the woman who wrote this article is a liar, and has invented her story like a UFO abductee, also seems harsh, some might say "misogynistic" even.
Sadly this attitude seems too common to put it down to psychopathy, which is seemingly only about 1 percent of the population (though mostly male apparently).
No. It's the most common and primitive reaction to a preventable problem.
Bike stolen? Don't leave it in a bad spot.
Mugged? Don't walk through back alleys.
Server hacked? Don't listen on all ports.
Email? Bad password + reuse.
If you've never been on the receiving end of a similar comment you don't know how irritating and unhelpful it is. It's not malice or hatred .. it's a lack of a different perspective and information.
I challenge the notion that online trolls are genuinely hateful, almost regardless of their target. They're just sadists who find pleasure in other's suffering.
I think it's horrible and these people deserve rehabilitative punishment by law, but it's silly to label it as hate, or, when the target happens to be female, misogyny.
Considering that it appears to disproportionally target women, labeling it "misogyny" seems completely fair, whatever underlying mental disorder they suffer from.
> Considering that it appears to disproportionally target women
That's a pretty big [citation needed]. All I see is that misogyny is a disproportionally popular news item, which is not at all the same thing.
And if it's just an expression of people's mental disorders, that's not hate, and it's not productive to fixing the issue to call it hate when it's not.
> That's a pretty big [citation needed]. All I see is that misogyny is a disproportionally popular news item, which is not at all the same thing.
I have to admit I don't have hard numbers to back my claims, but I think it would be common knowledge if men were routinely called "sluts" and threatened with rape by trolls.
> And if it's just an expression of people's mental disorders, that's not hate, and it's not productive to fixing the issue to call it hate when it's not.
Oh, for that matter, I think most racists and homophobes could use psychological help as well, but it doesn't change their behaviour.
Men are routinely the subject of death threats and similar style trolling. Men who die have their rememberance pages trolled. Young men are entrapped by criminal gangs into sending them nude photographs, which are then used to blackmail those young men.
Sexual violence online appears to be mostly aimed at women, and mostly from men. But it's not hard to find examples of men receiving those threats or women making threats of sexual violence. This is especially true for non-hetero-normative men.
It's a hard problem. Well funded companies full of smart people have tackled it and failed (youtube comments).
Just for clarity: the experience of women online is likely to be pretty miserable. Many people, of both sexes, experience hatred.
PS: I hate it when people ascribe bigoted opinions to mental illness. That excuses the behaviour whilst also stigmatising mental illhealth. Arseholes are arseholes because they're arseholes, not because they have a mental illness that causes them to be an arsehole.
Exaggeration is a well known and powerful poetic tool. Although hate is not an exaggeration of what is going on, it is an emotionally loaded term that delivers the message clearly. You get all the relevant information from the context, and you get the urgency, and the disgracefulness of the act by using poetic replacement terms.
I agree that it's a powerful tool. It's a short-circuit for logic that, at times, can be useful to apply (such as, for example, wartime when debate can be deadly). I don't think this is one of those times.
If we release our energy as hate and disparagement of harassers without fixing the problem at its core (or even finding out what that is), then all we've done is used exaggeration to make ourselves feel better, and add more poison and fear to the world.
That's why I'm against calling things "misogyny" which aren't. Mind you, I do think misogyny is a real thing and a real problem, but I think it's quite buried in the social media and you'll rarely hear about it.
Real hatred isn't funny, rational, or outrageous enough to be viral, and real hatred doesn't get off on reactions. That's the difference.
Ah, the "obviously the most important discussion to have about this is what the exact meanings of words are" derailment tactic. Honestly you could play mansplaining bingo in here.
I'm not exaggerating here for the sake of the argument but I really don't find derogatory comments toward women in my daily routine reading. I read HN, reddit, tech magazines, blogs, regular newspapers (many local) and most of them have little to none censoring and people say harsh things towards other persons (stars, VIPs, judges, lawyers, cops, politicians for example). I admit I don't read magazines and blogs targeted at women other than by hazard.
If you want convincing examples, do a search on #gamergate. Don't spend too much time on it though, it's fairly infuriating / depressing to see what people allow themselves to do when they feel they'll get away with it.
The woman in the video didn't say she encountered misogyny on tech blogs or local newspapers, she had her photos posted to revenge porn sites. If you're not familiar with what she's talking about, great, but that's no grounds to claim it doesn't exist.
What universe is that? One where all the foaming-at-the-mouth misogynists trolls have had their Internet license of abusing people protected by long distance and anonymity revoked?
The fact that you "keep hearing about them" should give you a hint. Women who come to the attention of a subsection of Internet trolls do find themselves harassed online (death threats, rape threats, etc.). See Gamergate or Adria Richards for recent examples. It's pretty well documented.
It's a more sane universe than yours it seems. And I'm going to keep it that way by excluding people like you from it if you can't tone down your aggresivity. I don't know what Gamergate is nor do I know Adria Richards and I don't intend to know all the victims in this world. /ignored
It's a small word but makes a big difference: "my". In MY universe. The people I know directly. I don't know directly any misogynistic persons nor do I know terrorists and psychopaths. So the subject is not relevant to me and I don't feel guilty nor responsible about what other people do.
The fact that I got downvoted 5 times in less than a minute for saying that in MY "universe" (technically that part of the universe that I'm perceiving directly) there is far less abuse and psychopaths than in other's "universes" says a lot about the quality and usefulness of this conversation. Having a dissonant feeling, opinion or view is penalized like you penalize bad behavior in a trained dog. I clearly don't belong to the HN herd and you can shove karma up your a$$. This is just a hypocritical herd praising diversity and political correctness while (self?)governed by some opinion Nazis. So long and thanks for all the fish.
It seems like this could be a useful area for a honeypot.
Take photographs of a willing model (who knows what they're going to be used for); "dox" this model (release the images with fake details); collect information of the harassing people who send messages.
I'm not sure what you then do with the information of harassers.
Ploce in the UK spend a lot of time dealing with online a use. It might account for about half of all calls forwarded to frontline police.
This isn't a case she should be making at all. This is a hacking issue, not any "hatred of women" or anything else she's trying to make it out to be. She's embarrassed and trying to deflect it onto something else. Hacking, yes. Hatred of women and rape issues, no.
I'm also having problems with the video showing the very pictures she was so embarrassed about. There is some sort of disconnect there I don't have time to go into.
I disagree. I view JLaw's photos because I'm a heterosexual man, I wouldn't be interested in viewing a man's nude photos. I didn't look at Kim Kardasian's ass either, because I don't find her attractive.
Do you find watching images of women taken against her wish respectful?
Pictures shown are not the one that were stolen. Those were the one she took later to reclaim feeling of control. Might not be the way I would cope, but certainly is not a disconnect with anything.
Yes, this is precisely the case she should be making. Technology, protocols, and vulnerabilities are ethically agnostic, people aren't (short of psychopaths). There are always going to be exploitations of vulnerabilities, and there are always going to be vulnerabilities to be exploited. But sexual harassment is an ethical issue, that civil humans ought to vomit upon. It ought to be as criminal as trafficking. People doing it shouldn't get away with it, they ought to exposed as the psychopaths they are. Unfortunately in the case of revenge port, they aren't. And worse, by tackling this as an "hacking issue", you are keeping it that way.
This has very little to do with hacking. Sure there was a hack, but I get the impression she could have dealt with that if it would have ended there. The results would have been the same if it would have been the more stereotypical "revenge porn".
What got to her were the thousands of men who continued to download, share and comment on the pictures.
Anonymous people on the internet would call you a faggot cocksucker for much less than asking to have your picture removed from a site. There's no civil communicating with some people and trying to will just hurt you.
The sites distributing her photos should be liable for damages under the DMCA though.
If you've been on the internet for any length of times, you've been called bad names and have moved on. Why can't women do the same?
It's a difference of scale. If somebody calls you a "slut" once, it's easy to assume that it's the person doing the name-calling is the one with the problem.
But what if every second e-mail you receive implies you are a slut?
First having your naked pictures out in the internet against your consent is an awful thing that shouldn't happen to anyone. Having your information out in the public eye and emails like the ones she received is terrifying and the more severe problem here.
That being sad I disagree with the whole subtext of the story:
that these people get off on the idea of a non consenting victim.
quotes from http://www.hystericalfeminisms.com/consent/:
"It’s one thing to be sexualised by people who are attracted to you, but it’s quite another thing when the lack of a ‘you’, when dehumanization, is the main factor."
"Take ‘creepshots’, a global phenomenon which entails photographing women without their knowledge or consent, in order to share them in a sexual context online. On similar sites, people link to Facebook pages asking if anyone can hack or find more pictures of the girl. Here, again, women are used as objects whose lack of consent, of participation, provides the reason and allure of their sexualisation."
"This dynamic is a commonplace online and is a concrete manifestation of a larger discourse around the female body, the notion that it is erotic to sexualise someone who is unaware. We all know the tropes: the sexy teacher/student/nurse/waiter/bartender/doctor. All jobs, if staffed by women, can be sexualised. What is sexy is not the job, not even the woman, but the fact that while the woman is just doing her job you are secretly sexualising her."
Now I am sure there are people that find that arousing but I've just completed high school-university stage and my insight in my peers is a bit different. The people that say stuff like that do it mainly because they find the girl desirable, but have a problem communicating that in a normal way. In other words they are socially inexperienced and that's their way of talking to someone of sexual interest. Overanalyzing this might say that they use insults and threats as a shield to rejection.
Pictures of naked people are wanted because they are pictures of naked people. Context matters and in some edge cases may be turned in a fetish but the main allure of almost all "creepshots" is sexual desirability and not the lack of consent.
Similarly I've talked to people that raped and people that were nearly stopped and the reason was always sexual tension(small sample, date rapes, rape = sex/fingering w/o consent). Control? Maybe but not the main reason at all.
I think her video is supposed to be more a psychological coping mechanism for herself and other victims, not a solution to the original problem. And it might actually be more important - you need to be mentally stable first and then you can do something about it.
I agree with you. But she's saying things which are, in my opinion, untrue.
It's easy to say "good job, you're stronger than that" and it is helpful. For everyone else that is not in a better mental state there should be an objective discussion from a wider viewpoint.
Anyway, the submission has been flagkilled so I guess HN is not the place for such a discussion.
Finally nudes that everybody is allowed to share, because it is supposedly for the greater good. (They were already pushed on me on Facebook and G+, and now HN).
This made me wonder if open source pornography exists?
Maybe sexual education should include computer security too. Now when many people have relations over the Internet. Just like you learn to protect yourself with condoms, you should also learn to protect yourself with strong passwords and encryption.
You should learn to protect yourself by keeping it offline.
"Strong passwords and encryption" is hopeless because you have a key logger running on your machine - a reasonable, simple default assumption that can and should be taught instead of encryption that only works in theory (and said theory is much too complicated for most people to have time to wrap their mind around anyway.)
>You should learn to protect yourself by keeping it offline.
Those are two entirely different issues though. Just because your house requires keys to enter, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't have a house because somebody might break into it.
Educating people about security of their data is as important as educating them about the ethics and risks of sharing your data, they are not contradictory.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadNo, you shouldn't blame the victim, we should be working against the sexist dynamics in society.
Of course people should be aware of risks and manage them appropriately, but it's also possible to not blame them for the abuse of others.
I really dislike this line of thought, because I think it boils the issue down to black and white, all or nothing. "... it's common sense to commit suicide" makes no sense, of course, but how about "... it's common sense not to walk alone at night in a high-crime area"?
I don't believe for a second that she "deserved what she got". But I don't think "do not put naked pictures on the internet" is bad advice either, specially considering the (very) large number of cases in which women's pictures were stolen.
Is there really no possibility for a middle ground?
There's a time and place for such advice, and this isn't it, in my opinion.
Given your stance on this, you obviously would have no issue with your full internet browsing history being made public and associated with your real name, the one by which your partner / current flirt / potential employer knows you and might find you, right? I mean, if you didn't want people to know that you're into midget goat porn, you'd just not browse for it, correct?
Second of all, as other commenters have noted, you're blaming the victim - the classic "if you don't want to get raped, don't look sexy".
So she was too dumb, and she got what was coming?
Or even worse, with the "if you don't want people to look at them" hint, perhaps she wanted this. Maybe deep down. Subconsciously or something.
That's a particularly classy form of victim blaming that. Doubly so since you created an account on HN specifically to post it.
Or, as the bible puts it "Women should be modest in their appearance. They should wear decent and appropriate clothing and not draw attention to themselves"|
Undox.me has very basic steps of what to do if some horrible person posting your pics without your permission.
Sadly this attitude seems too common to put it down to psychopathy, which is seemingly only about 1 percent of the population (though mostly male apparently).
I'm not sure where you see a suggestion of hatred, of women, or psychopathy.
If you've never been on the receiving end of a similar comment you don't know how irritating and unhelpful it is. It's not malice or hatred .. it's a lack of a different perspective and information.
If you want to find them, look for the individuals who repeatedly post derogatory comments and hateful comments under any post made by a female.
I think it's horrible and these people deserve rehabilitative punishment by law, but it's silly to label it as hate, or, when the target happens to be female, misogyny.
That's a pretty big [citation needed]. All I see is that misogyny is a disproportionally popular news item, which is not at all the same thing.
And if it's just an expression of people's mental disorders, that's not hate, and it's not productive to fixing the issue to call it hate when it's not.
I have to admit I don't have hard numbers to back my claims, but I think it would be common knowledge if men were routinely called "sluts" and threatened with rape by trolls.
> And if it's just an expression of people's mental disorders, that's not hate, and it's not productive to fixing the issue to call it hate when it's not.
Oh, for that matter, I think most racists and homophobes could use psychological help as well, but it doesn't change their behaviour.
Sexual violence online appears to be mostly aimed at women, and mostly from men. But it's not hard to find examples of men receiving those threats or women making threats of sexual violence. This is especially true for non-hetero-normative men.
It's a hard problem. Well funded companies full of smart people have tackled it and failed (youtube comments).
Just for clarity: the experience of women online is likely to be pretty miserable. Many people, of both sexes, experience hatred.
PS: I hate it when people ascribe bigoted opinions to mental illness. That excuses the behaviour whilst also stigmatising mental illhealth. Arseholes are arseholes because they're arseholes, not because they have a mental illness that causes them to be an arsehole.
But that's just a business model (granted, it doesn't make any difference to the victim). Misogynists threaten for free.
> Arseholes are arseholes because they're arseholes, not because they have a mental illness that causes them to be an arsehole.
My working hypothesis is that well-adjusted people don't spend their free time sending rape/death threats over the Internet.
If we release our energy as hate and disparagement of harassers without fixing the problem at its core (or even finding out what that is), then all we've done is used exaggeration to make ourselves feel better, and add more poison and fear to the world.
That's why I'm against calling things "misogyny" which aren't. Mind you, I do think misogyny is a real thing and a real problem, but I think it's quite buried in the social media and you'll rarely hear about it.
Real hatred isn't funny, rational, or outrageous enough to be viral, and real hatred doesn't get off on reactions. That's the difference.
The fact that you "keep hearing about them" should give you a hint. Women who come to the attention of a subsection of Internet trolls do find themselves harassed online (death threats, rape threats, etc.). See Gamergate or Adria Richards for recent examples. It's pretty well documented.
> I don't know what Gamergate is nor do I know Adria Richards and I don't intend to know all the victims in this world.
Are you both claiming that these things do not happen, and refusing information about them? That's a dishonest way of conducting a discussion.
Doesn't mean they don't exist, or aren't causing problems in the world!
Or at least, I fancied that.
Take photographs of a willing model (who knows what they're going to be used for); "dox" this model (release the images with fake details); collect information of the harassing people who send messages.
I'm not sure what you then do with the information of harassers.
Ploce in the UK spend a lot of time dealing with online a use. It might account for about half of all calls forwarded to frontline police.
http://bbc.co.uk/news/uk-27949674
I think the problem would be entrapment. The laws differ from country to country but I'm pretty certain that a honeypot wouldn't be legal here.
Which is unfortunate.
I'm also having problems with the video showing the very pictures she was so embarrassed about. There is some sort of disconnect there I don't have time to go into.
Exactly; if anything, it's love and attraction to women; male nudes are much less popular online.
Pictures shown are not the one that were stolen. Those were the one she took later to reclaim feeling of control. Might not be the way I would cope, but certainly is not a disconnect with anything.
The pictures in the video are also not the ones she was embarrassed about. She explains why she had them taken in the video.
Consent: no violation.
No consent: violation.
What got to her were the thousands of men who continued to download, share and comment on the pictures.
The sites distributing her photos should be liable for damages under the DMCA though.
If you've been on the internet for any length of times, you've been called bad names and have moved on. Why can't women do the same?
It's a difference of scale. If somebody calls you a "slut" once, it's easy to assume that it's the person doing the name-calling is the one with the problem.
But what if every second e-mail you receive implies you are a slut?
That being sad I disagree with the whole subtext of the story: that these people get off on the idea of a non consenting victim.
quotes from http://www.hystericalfeminisms.com/consent/: "It’s one thing to be sexualised by people who are attracted to you, but it’s quite another thing when the lack of a ‘you’, when dehumanization, is the main factor."
"Take ‘creepshots’, a global phenomenon which entails photographing women without their knowledge or consent, in order to share them in a sexual context online. On similar sites, people link to Facebook pages asking if anyone can hack or find more pictures of the girl. Here, again, women are used as objects whose lack of consent, of participation, provides the reason and allure of their sexualisation."
"This dynamic is a commonplace online and is a concrete manifestation of a larger discourse around the female body, the notion that it is erotic to sexualise someone who is unaware. We all know the tropes: the sexy teacher/student/nurse/waiter/bartender/doctor. All jobs, if staffed by women, can be sexualised. What is sexy is not the job, not even the woman, but the fact that while the woman is just doing her job you are secretly sexualising her."
Now I am sure there are people that find that arousing but I've just completed high school-university stage and my insight in my peers is a bit different. The people that say stuff like that do it mainly because they find the girl desirable, but have a problem communicating that in a normal way. In other words they are socially inexperienced and that's their way of talking to someone of sexual interest. Overanalyzing this might say that they use insults and threats as a shield to rejection. Pictures of naked people are wanted because they are pictures of naked people. Context matters and in some edge cases may be turned in a fetish but the main allure of almost all "creepshots" is sexual desirability and not the lack of consent.
Similarly I've talked to people that raped and people that were nearly stopped and the reason was always sexual tension(small sample, date rapes, rape = sex/fingering w/o consent). Control? Maybe but not the main reason at all.
It's easy to say "good job, you're stronger than that" and it is helpful. For everyone else that is not in a better mental state there should be an objective discussion from a wider viewpoint.
Anyway, the submission has been flagkilled so I guess HN is not the place for such a discussion.
This made me wonder if open source pornography exists?
So its not "hatred of women"....
Its " hatred of BEAUTIFUL women"!
These men hate beautiful women so much
"Strong passwords and encryption" is hopeless because you have a key logger running on your machine - a reasonable, simple default assumption that can and should be taught instead of encryption that only works in theory (and said theory is much too complicated for most people to have time to wrap their mind around anyway.)
Those are two entirely different issues though. Just because your house requires keys to enter, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't have a house because somebody might break into it.
Educating people about security of their data is as important as educating them about the ethics and risks of sharing your data, they are not contradictory.