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[Last week, I frantically begged amberella to send me a bit of info about the Last H.O.P.E. Conference in NYC. Luckily for me, she did! Here is a special guest post for .51 from amberella about her experiences at the Last H.O.P.E. Be sure to visit her website at http://idiosyncratic-routine.com/ as well!]
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First, let’s answer the question on most readers’ minds: Yes, there were women at The Last HOPE, even “attractive” ones! Some were your requisite, old-school geeks, some goth chicks, some professors, some militant/cyberpunks, some “normals,” etc., etc., etc… but yes, they (we) rolled in all shapes and sizes and were clearly interested in every aspect of the conference. I didn’t notice a particular skewing of female attendees towards one style of talk or another, nor see them disenfranchised from asking questions or gaining access to workspace. Remarkably enough, people treated each other like… people. It was, in a word: Refreshing.
This bowl-o-cherries sentiment isn’t without its caveats. On the one hand, I generally find that in professional (i.e. regulated or accountability-imposed) IT-focused environments, when women seem smart, competent, and unapologetic, men are usually reasonably comfortable conversing with them as “just one of the boys,” or as I’ve noted above, “a person.” Most interactions at HOPE were of this type, and therefore not all that surprising. Several presenters even mentioned the desire to include women in their area of interest, which was outright encouraging. Other interactions of a more social nature, though, constituted a veritable theater of the absurd.
Case in point: HOPE set aside part of the mezzanine for lounging in hammocks and watching video streamed from the talks for those who wanted a break or who were overflow from packed conference rooms. Across the bottom of this video was a scrolling marquee of comments pulled from a specially rigged up internal URL. This meant the crowd could watch and participate in a real-time chat, anonymously, with other people in the room. I happened to walk into the rest area looking to take a much needed nap during Steven Rambam’s presentation, glanced at the screen, and saw the message trolling news-ticker style:
Then: “I’m faithful to Red Shirt Girl #1 … I’ll take you on long walks on the beach and……” You get the picture.
I laughed and brushed it off and found a hammock. After failing to elicit a response from the women in the room (there was also “Gray Tank Top Girl” and later “Necktie Girl” in addition to me and my other red shirt counterpart) the intensity of the messages increased. I’ll spare you the details of the ensuing message thread, most of which was LOL-worthy in a purely adolescent and self deprecating way, but I will say that some of it was downright vulgar. I’m not one to flinch at vulgarity or abstain from [frequent] obscenity, but when still no women took the bait, there was an eventual message of “You won’t say anything until I rape you and then you will cry.“ I assume it was meant as a joke or incitement, but I think we all know that making rape funny is right up there with making Hitler funny: Imminent Fail. Rather than be outraged, I ignored the comment and eventually joined in the conversation, since I can make quips with the best of them and I rarely give up an opportunity to make a crowd laugh. I guess I won over the audience, since at some point the message scrolled “Red Shirt Girl #2 was epic.“ …Pretty high praise from that crowd.
I document this conversation in grueling detail because it was indicative, to me, of the problems male-female interactions take on when hardcore-geek guys settle into their comfort zone. Add in a layer of anonymity and many of them revert to aggressive behavior they would never enact in a face-to-face or professional setting. The “Lamest Post” award from the scrolling message incident has to be awarded to the statement “Are you female? Are you an attention whore? Go to HOPE!” as though any woman at the conference was dying to be the object of the message sender’s affections. I admit, I took the bait and replied, “Are you at HOPE? Are you female? Prepare to receive undue amounts of attention for breathing!” It was no surprise that after calling out the ridiculousness of said statement, the chatter subtly shifted back to Steve Rambam’s speech, which offered no shortage of fodder for hilarity.
The presenter of “From Black Hat to Black Suit: How to Climb the Corporate Security Ladder without Losing Your Soul,” Myrcurial, made more than one plea for women to enter the CISO (Corporate Information Security Officer) career track. He also explained how important it is for all CISO hopefuls to keep up with technology on their own time and participate in the community. Aye, here lies the rub. Time and again I have found that the more heavily male-dominated or niche oriented the topic, the more hostile the atmosphere in which said topic is discussed. The more hostile the atmosphere, the more women are dissuaded from joining the conversation and becoming valued contributors. Rinse and repeat.
How is it that as an increasing number of women graduate with Computer Engineering and other technical or hard science degrees and girl-geek culture explodes thanks to New Media™, that there is not a commensurate increase in women’s contributions to the hardcore techie and hacker community? It’s no longer difficult to find women espousing their love of iPhone apps and digg.com – the problem is finding those that want to infiltrate the realms of bug trackers, penetration testers, and the corporate suites reserved for CTOs and CISOs. The culture continues to be one where all but the most serious, “thick-skinned” women, even those with enough drive to end up working in a professional IT capacity, find an existence that can be highly technology driven, but that stops short of membership in the elite circles that evolve or hack that tech.
As demonstrated on a very small scale by my eventual acceptance into the “scrolling message quip makers club” at HOPE, it’s possible to muscle into the boys’ club with tenacity, spunk, and a heavy dose of ignore-the-troll. Women who seek out these communities, though, have to be prepared to fight for the chance to “prove their mettle,” as my grandmother would say. The women at HOPE have already jumped the largest hurdles to inclusion and the majority of male attendees respect them for it, regardless of childish message board antics.
I can think of no quick fix, only that a growing number of tech communities geared towards women offer some refuge and an estuary environment to grow one’s confidence before trying to conquer the “real world,” and that historically, female creep into male dominated realms has been steady, unrelenting, and eventually accepted. In the short term, this offers little consolation.
A spot of hope (no pun intended) for this dreary state of affairs? More than once during the conference I heard the statement, “Women make the best social engineers.”
Yesterday, I mentioned the Last HOPE Conference that was held in New York City last weekend. Alas, I was unable to attend this year, but I got in touch with someone who did, and later today, you can read amberella’s take on this year’s conference.
The HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) Conference was first held in 1994 and was hosted/sponsored by 2600 magazine - “the Hacker Quarterly” - to celebrate its (then) 10 year anniversary. Over the years, the HOPE conference has featured speakers, presenters and attendees such as Kevin Mitnick, Jello Biafra, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), Richard Stallman, and Adam Savage, and was the scene of Steve Rambam’s infamous arrest in 2006.
This year’s conference, the Last HOPE, was so named because the hotel where the conference was annually held was rumored to be facing destruction. Steven Levy, who wrote “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution” and was recently mentioned on .51 for his “10 Great Tech Books” list in a recent issue of the IEEE Spectrum, gave the keynote, and this year’s talks included everything from everyday anarchy - “Bagcam - How Did TSA and/or the Airlines Manage to Do That to Your Luggage?” and “Escaping High Security Handcuffs” - to advanced hacking - “Advanced Memory Forensics: Releasing the Cold Boot Utilities” - as well as the Limor Fried & Phillip Torrone “Citizen Engineer” presentation, which I mentioned yesterday.
All is not lost so fear not - the Next HOPE has already been suggested for 2010. (And if it happens, I’ll finally get to go!)
Be sure to read amberella’s guest post about her experiences at the Last HOPE.
By now, most geeky folks have heard of Make magazine. Phillip Torrone, Senior Editor, is one of the great minds behind it. Now “pt” has teamed up with Limor “Ladyada” Fried, mastermind behind Adafruit Industries and countless electronics projects, to bring us “Citizen Engineer”, an “online video series about open source hardware, electronics, art and hacking”.
Naturally, there’s a lot of jumping up and down going in my lair at the moment. The premiere video, “Volume 01 - Phones: SIM card and payphone hacking”, is *exactly* the kind of video I’ve been wanting to see. No pleasantries and chatter, just straightforward hacking. This video debuted last weekend at “The Last HOPE” Conference in NYC (more on HOPE later today), and I hope it gets a great deal of play because I want to see many more like it.
Pros:
Cons:
Be sure to watch this video and give them loads of feedback. The more they hear from folks, the more likely they are to produce more vids!
A big thanks from .51 to Jeanine Potts for supporting the site with her contribution!
Jeanine also signed up for an email subscription to .51 and is entered in this week’s contest. Good luck!
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned some of the problems I was having with my IBM ThinkPad T40. One day, out of the blue (as these things typically happen), my system randomly shut itself down with about five seconds of warning. Exciting! This happened repeatedly over the course of a day - specifically, whenever I tried to recompile my local Ikiwiki build.
At first, I thought it was the battery, but no. Then, perhaps the power supply, but that wasn’t it. Finally, someone suggested that it could be a fan problem. I removed a few appropriate screws from the bottom of the laptop and lifted out the keyboard only to find that the fan was working just fine.
Curiouser and curiouser.
The next step was to tell the fan to just stay on all the time. I’m running openSUSE 10.2 on this laptop, so after switching to superuser mode, I keyed in this:
echo enable > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan
And just to make sure that it was doing its job, I keyed in this:
watch -n 0.5 acpi -V
This polled the system every half second to check the processor’s temperature. Then I ran the ultimate test: I recompiled the Ikiwiki build to see if the system would overheat again. Up the temperature crawled: 65 degrees C, 75, 80, 85, 90 - and the fan kicked on and down the temperature went. Success!
Sort of. Then every time I logged on, I had to go through those same steps. So, I opted to write a little script and then added it to my /etc/init.d/ directory so that it would load every time I booted up and logged on. Thanks to Dave Taylor’s “Wicked Cool Shell Scripts” I had a general idea of how to structure the script. (Though I must admit the simplicity of this is all mine; Taylor would have added some testing of some kind and shown a bit of flair. Mine is basic, rudimentary, not sexy at all and likely incomplete. Give me time!)
Here’s the script:
#!/bin/sh
# this is a script to make sure that the fan comes on automatically on login/bootup
sudo echo enable > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan
exit 0
To test it, I rebooted, then logged back on. I skipped the step where I kicked off the “echo enable” by hand, so to speak, and went right to the command line to recompile the Ikiwiki build - the best way I could think of to max out the processor. 60 degrees, 75, 88, 90 - and the fan kicked on. Success again!
To clean this up, I should find the best way to verify that the script actually runs the desired command (nothing shows up when I key in “ps -aux”), but that’s for another day. For now, my system doesn’t overheat and I can actually get some work done.
One project down, four to go!
Additional Note: Just to be sure, I ran Yast2 (specific to openSUSE distros), selected “System” and checked in the “System Services (Runlevel)” section to make sure that my script was listed. It was there, but it was not, however, enabled. Once I enabled it, I tested “stop” and “start”, then made sure to add it to runlevel 5. While I still haven’t figured out how to verify at the command line that things are working correctly, I have managed to get the system to run my script on when I log in.