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"PHP sucks" and contempt culture
by Zenaan Harkness 02 Apr '17

02 Apr '17

Well not PHP exactly, that's just an example of course - Aurynn Shaw does a fine job on the topic, worthy of any tech belittler, not just language superiority trips... Contempt Culture http://blog.aurynn.com/contempt-culture So when I started programming in 2001, it was du jour in the communities I participated in to be highly critical of other languages. Other languages sucked, the people using them were losers or stupid, if they would just use a real language, such as the one we used, everything would just be better. Right? This sort of culturally-encoded language was really prevalent around condemning PHP and Java. Developers in these languages were actively referred to as less competent than developers in the other, more blessed languages. And at the time, as a new developer, I internalised this pretty heavily. The language I was in was blessed, obviously, not because I was using it but because it was better designed than a language like PHP, less wordy and annoying than Java, more flexible than many other options. It didn’t matter that it was (and remains) difficult to read, it was that we were better for using it. I repeated this pattern for a really long time, and as I learned new languages and patterns I’d repeat the same behaviour in those new environments. I was almost certainly not that fun to be around, a microcosm of the broader unpleasantness in tech. At least, until I got called on it. “Have you thought about…” I’d been making critical comments about PHP the language, and PHP developers, nothing more than standard “PHP sucks” sort of language. The same thing I’d been doing, and supported in doing, for years. Getting called out was hard, and I was asked to consider who and what I was criticising. I was able to access a very specific version of the self-taught narrative, where I used “real” programming languages and had “real” passion and drive, the result of which was that I fit the early hacker archetypes and was permitted status - as long as I participated in gate keeping. My self-taught narrative is not other peoples’ self-taught narrative, and I was very firmly reminded of that. Other self-taught narratives, such as starting with Wordpress-based design backgrounds and moving from more simple themes to more complex themes where PHP knowledge is required, to plugin development is a completely valid narrative, but a path that is predominately for women. This was a bombshell. I’d been loudly criticising the language and, through that criticism, implying that people using the language weren’t as good me, weren’t good programmers. And suddenly I was thinking about all the myriad ways that someone with that background would feel othered by me, like they didn’t belong and weren’t welcome in the communities I was a part of. All of the ways in which I was actively participating in the exclusion of women from STEM. Intent is Not Magic1 Of course, I hadn’t intended to do any of these things, but as I came to realise, it doesn’t matter what I intended to do, what matters is that I did it and that it had real repercussions. I intended to make fun of a language, the repercussion is that people from minority backgrounds wouldn’t want to talk to me about the things they’d done in that language, they wouldn’t feel safe talking about their achievements and exploits. And why would they feel safe? If they say what they use, we as a culture laugh at their choice. We tell them they should know better, tell them that it’s a horrible tool. Tell them that they are wrong. We ignore the achievement and focus exclusively on how it was reached, on how much better we are because we had access to narratives that the broader culture had already deemed more real. Not better narratives or better tools, just more accepted, more permitted, more discriminatory. Contempt Currency I was taught to be contemptuous of the non-blessed narratives, and I was taught to pay for my continued access to the technical communities through perpetuating that contempt. I was taught to have an elevated sense of self-worth, driven by the elitism baked into the hacker ethos as I learned to program. By adopting the same patterns that other, more knowledgable people expressed I could feel more credible, more like a real part of the community, more like I belonged. I bought my sense of belonging, with contempt, and paid for it with contempt and exclusionary behaviour. And now, I realise how much of it is an anxiety response. What if I chose the wrong thing? What if other people judge me for my choices and assert that my hard-earned skills actually aren’t worth anything? What if people find out I’m a fraud? By perpetuating a culture of contempt as the means of acquiring credibility, I was able to avoid these difficult, introspective questions. We don’t have to look at how we’re harming other people who want in, don’t have to acknowledge the niggling little voice in the back of our head asking are you good enough. It wasn’t me that was wrong, it was them. Instead, I was taught to use emotional weaponry to silence and exclude others, resulting in the remaining voices being the most toxic and exclusionary, the most able to tolerate toxicity and exclusionary attitudes. This pattern is common in tech, from extremely high-profile projects like the Linux kernel to the ongoing os/language/editor “wars” to the vile reactionary attitudes towards the introduction of Codes of Conduct, to any developers making disparaging comments about other peoples’ ability to code, and the growing contempt around people whose first or primary language is JavaScript. And now This culture has ramifications. PHP communities, for example, have lacked access to the development of DevOps tooling, the use of PHP is widely derided as being insecure by default, are they are widely mocked for being an “objectively bad language.” Yet people make their livings working with PHP, deploying PHP, trying to secure PHP. Don’t they deserve the help that we received, the help of good practises and security-first development? These people who can’t improve their work because we won’t work with them and drive them away from our communities with mockery and spite. And then they engineer things on their own, because they still need these tools, and we have the gall to ask why they didn’t use these other tools. Tools that we mocked them for asking about, telling them to get a real language, to rewrite their entire app, to rebuild from scratch because their particular path was not blessed enough. Because we were the problematic elements. I’m Tired of This It’s 2015, and I saw a presenter at a Python conference make fun of Java. How would that feel to people trying to move from Java into something else? I wouldn’t feel welcome, and I’d have learned that the idea that the Python community is welcoming wasn’t true. I’m tired of calling people out again and again for dumping on PHP. I’m tired of people dumping on Windows, that most popular operating system, because it’s not what we choose to use, tired of the fact that we don’t make it easy to use our tools and teach them how to move, when they’re ready. Instead, we lecture and dismiss and heap scorn upon them. We don’t reinforce our communities with respect or a sense of achievement, but with shame and contempt and awfulness. We exclude people. I’ve excluded people. Directly, me. I have to own up to that and deal with it. We excluded people. Directly. All of us. Even if we didn’t intend to, it does not matter. We make fun of the things others care about, make them feel small, make them feel like their achievements didn’t matter. Make them feel like they’re not welcome. What can we Do? SHUT. UP. No, really, cut it out. If you need to make fun of a language, do it with your own language, inside your own community. JavaScript is really good at this, because they’re trying to help people write better code within JavaScript. Do it around friends only, and acknowledge that it’s extremely problematic that you’re doing it at all. Find some amazing project to celebrate in a language you’re contemptuous of. Go to meetups of what you despise. Say you don’t know anything, and see how welcoming they are to new people. See what they say, what they do, and ask if you’d be as welcoming to them when they come to your meetups. Work to change your community. Ask people who try to pay for their membership in contempt to stop, or to leave. Make it unacceptable to use these behaviours as a means of obtaining social wealth. The best advice we give programmers is to leave things better than how they started. We do it with code, why don’t we do it with communities? Why don’t we do it with people, colleagues, friends? Ask why it’s okay to do these things in your community, and leave things better than when you started. Intent is magic!↩ http://www.shakesville.com/2011/12/harmful-communication-part-one-intent.ht…

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Fwd: [tor-talk] This video has been censored by YouTube many times
by Cecilia Tanaka 02 Apr '17

02 Apr '17

For respect and consideration to some members of Tor-Talk List, I will be silent there, but I do sincerely believe that Tor-Talk List is not a place for sharing Anti-Semitic videos or any kind of racist material. It's sick, evil and completely off-topic. I was kick-banned there under the allegation of "rape apology", even being a victim of rapes. Sincerely hope the list moderators kick-ban this nazi too. Or is "nazism apology" more acceptable in the list because no member of the core team was mentioned? Ceci ------- "Don't let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It's your place in the world; it's your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live." - Mae Jemison ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: John Pinkman <john.pinkman(a)yandex.com> Date: Sat, Apr 1, 2017 at 6:32 PM Subject: [tor-talk] This video has been censored by YouTube many times To: tor-talk <tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org> it explains problems that the world faces today https://w1r3.net/yBQEEe.webm -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk

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MGTOW Movement (Re: Fem/SJW/Etc)
by grarpamp 02 Apr '17

02 Apr '17

https://www.mgtow.com/ https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mgtow https://www.reddit.com/r/MGTOW/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ap-PQAzRQw Everything has alternative points of view.

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How to identify the members of death squads within every American police department
by Ryan Carboni 02 Apr '17

02 Apr '17

A simple set of instructions: Possess a large quantity of officer testimony, maybe from Get a thesaurus and find every word associated with fear Focus on the officers who are less than the average height Keep in mind that police officers legally kill people. Or to quote that NYPD officer taunting a human being with a tazer, "You wanna ride the lightning." Presumably if the situation escalated, electrocuting a person ten times will be considered legal and reasonable. It is not hard to figure out the reasoning behind these instructions. It is hard to figure out why I'm giving them, as opposed to those ACLU executives getting paid quarter million salaries. Or police oversight agencies. No it's actually quite simple. The Russians are running everything, and have implemented full communism. I suggest that the ACLU and the EFF be liquidated into a non profit I run and control. In three years you will live in a free society. And I will not seek to be a single point of failure. Afterall, I reasonably believe that Edward Snowden has betrayed the ACLU, by having Witte act as a secretary, meaning that the ACLU is not acting as law firm for Snowden. I think it's over, you know, the weeks when they have times, to get lawyers really sort of go, "This is a special situation. How can we interpret this to our advantage?" We... we see them do this all the time, you know, whether it's drones or wiretapping or whatever, they'll go, "Well according to this law from the 1840s, you know, with X, Y, or Z authority..." Hmmmmm I'd like to know that legal opinion. Actually didn't the ACLU go in arguing against mass surveillance blind?

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Fwd: [tor-dev] GSoC 2017 - unMessage: a privacy enhanced instant messenger
by grarpamp 01 Apr '17

01 Apr '17

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Felipe Dau <dau(a)riseup.net> Date: Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 3:23 PM Subject: [tor-dev] GSoC 2017 - unMessage: a privacy enhanced instant messenger To: tor-dev(a)lists.torproject.org Hello, I am a Computer Engineering student at the Federal Technological University of Parana in Brazil and I would like to present you a peer-to-peer privacy enhanced instant messenger called unMessage [0]. I have been working on it for a while with David Andersen [1] (my advisor) and we have recently released an alpha version which should be easy for developers to install and test. It uses the Double Ratchet Algorithm [2] for encryption, Onion Services for transport metadata minimization, its own protocol for application metadata minimization, and as a result, provides private and anonymous conversations. It currently has basic features such as message exchange, user authentication and we very recently enabled voice chat using the Opus codec [3] for constant bitrate encoding. unMessage is a Python application that mainly uses pyaxo's [4] implementation of Double Ratchet Algorithm and txtorcon's [5] implementation of the Tor Control Protocol. Since its current (alpha) release, we have been discussing it with Patrick Schleizer [6] and HulaHoop [7] from Whonix [8], who are making great contributions to help us test it, as well as suggesting new features and improvements. We are also working to run it on Whonix (which will also allow it to be run on Tails) with help from meejah [9] by adding a new feature to txtorcon to make unMessage (and all the apps that use txtorcon) "Control Port Filter friendly". As we believe unMessage has potential to become a great privacy enhancing app with a code that is simple, readable and therefore easy to maintain, Patrick suggested that I submitted a proposal to have unMessage as one of the GSoC projects. We expect to implement fixes, improvements and features from our discussions in order to turn it into a maintainable, feature-rich and useful app which the community can benefit from. There are currently some "developer centered" tasks I can work on such as: - Create a test suite (with pytest) - Make unMessage's own functions/methods behave like a Twisted API should - Use automat for its finite-state machines - Make use of a logging tool - Improve comments/document the code As well as some "user centered" tasks: - Whonix/Tails support - Improve the GUI and CLI - File transfer - Use a friendlier approach for users to handle keys instead of the current base32/64 encodings - Connect/launch Tor automatically depending on what is available - Offline messages (All the other ones can be found in the issue tracker [10]) My intention with this post is not only to present unMessage to tor-dev but also see if someone is interested in mentoring me as it is not one of the official ideas but hopefully sounds like a good project. If someone gets interested, please let me know so that we can discuss which tasks would be interesting for this project and I am able to write a proposal. Thanks! -Felipe [0]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage [1]: https://github.com/rxcomm [2]: https://whispersystems.org/docs/specifications/doubleratchet [3]: https://opus-codec.org [4]: https://github.com/anemonelabs/pyaxo [5]: https://github.com/meejah/txtorcon [6]: https://github.com/adrelanos [7]: https://github.com/HulaHoopWhonix [8]: https://whonix.org [9]: https://github.com/meejah [10]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage/issues _______________________________________________ tor-dev mailing list tor-dev(a)lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev

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Crypto consequences of dimensionless constants changing their values over time?
by Georgi Guninski 01 Apr '17

01 Apr '17

This bugs me. Since 2009 it is known that the value of the dimensionless constant Pi changes over time: https://arxiv.org/abs/0903.5321 [1] Personally don't care about the curvature of space, time and whatever other dimensions, as long as macro objects and concepts keep their _usual_ properties. The end of [1] claims that "the values of the integers could vary with time". This is clearly crypto related, possibly worse than Row Hammer. Are there crypto consequences of dimensionless constants changing their values over time?

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Entrepreneurial Spirit: Business Town - What Value Creating Winners Do All Day
by Razer 01 Apr '17

01 Apr '17

> An ongoing project attempting to explain our highly intangible, deeply > disruptive, data-driven, venture-backed, gluten-free economic > meritocracy to the uninitiated. With apologies to Richard Scarry. http://welcometobusinesstown.tumblr.com/

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Kafka on the GateKeepers
by grarpamp 01 Apr '17

01 Apr '17

Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in sometime later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.” The gate to the law stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try going inside in spite of my prohibition. But take note. I am powerful. And I am only the lowliest gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the last. I cannot endure even one glimpse of the third.” The man from the country has not expected such difficulties: the law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be let in, and he wears the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper often interrogates him briefly, questioning him about his homeland and many other things, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he cannot let him inside yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.” During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this first one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the unlucky circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud; later, as he grows old, he only mumbles to himself. He becomes childish and, since in the long years studying the gatekeeper he has also come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper. Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the law. Now he no longer has much time to live. Before his death he gathers up in his head all his experiences of the entire time into one question which he has not yet put to the gatekeeper. He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body. The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the difference between them has changed considerably to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you want to know now?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.” “Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “so how is it that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.” -- Kafka

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John Stossel: Libertarian Mainstream Journalist?
by grarpamp 01 Apr '17

01 Apr '17

This John Stossel has a channel full of short videos geared toward highlighting things for the public... https://www.youtube.com/user/rickjohn12000/videos After 40+ years of reporting, I now understand the importance of limited government and personal freedom. Libertarian journalist John Stossel is a zealous advocate of free markets, a syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor. Prior to joining Fox, John co-anchored ABC’s primetime newsmagazine show, 20/20. Stossel’s economic programs have been adapted into teaching kits by a non-profit organization, "Stossel in the Classroom." High school teachers in American public schools now use the videos to help educate their students on economics and economic freedom. They are seen by more than 12 million students every year. Stossel has received 19 Emmy Awards and has been honored five times for excellence in consumer reporting by the National Press Club. Other honors include the George Polk Award for Outstanding Local Reporting and the George Foster Peabody Award.

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Checkpoint America: Papers Please, Or We'll Fuck You Up
by grarpamp 01 Apr '17

01 Apr '17

John Stossel Commentary... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnicMKKSReY

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