Coming back from dinner one night, I was stopped (as I routinely am) by my talkative landlord landlady and her friend. As I’m sure many people reading this can relate to, the conversation quickly transitioned from pleasantries to “hey, you are a computer whiz, right?”
Most geeks know that this is the code to bow out of the conversation and run away with haste. I didn’t this time, and I’m kind of happy I didn’t. The reason is because they started asking me how to copy music to send to her ex-husband in Hawaii. My landlady is deeply religious, so my first question was “are you comfortable breaking the law?” Two jaws dropped, and neither were mine.
“What? Copying music I own and sharing it with others is illegal? But I bought it!”
And that is an excellent point. I won’t beat any dead horses here, anyone reading this probably has their own firm beliefs about fair use and music piracy. But stepping away from all that, let’s look at the initial reaction of two middle-aged average computer users, a sample of which I’m sure represents much of our 35 years and older demographic. They firmly believed that because they purchased the music that they owned it, and were free to share it with whom they pleased.
I’m not even going to continue here, or try to make any grand points about what this means. The arguments are all old, and no one stumbling across this post is going to have a changed opinion because of it. But for me, knowing that two people that haven’t been following the “war on piracy” believe that music you buy is *yours* to use as you please… well, it just makes me a little happier.
You know all those Mac vs. PC ads that Apple has been running? Well I’ve got a good retort for Microsoft’s counter-campaign:
“Vista: IT DOESN’T GIVE YOU CANCER.”
More here [zdnet].
(It should be noted that I doubt this is really limited to Apple products. A lot of new plastics come with factory toxins hitching a ride - that new car smell is another offender. I just saw low-hanging fruit and took it.)
Filed under the “geek traps” category, and tagged with the brand-new “Using computers will eventually kill you” tag. I think both are appropriate ;)
In response to my last post on Women in IT, a reader took the time to share with me her own experiences regarding women in male dominated fields. Her opinions complement the thoughts of my previous interviewee’s, and in the interest of forming a more fair and holistic view of this huge issue, I requested permission to share what she had to say here. While she has asked not be identified fully by name, I still wish to grant credit for the content of this post to Pamela M - she is the sole author of the content below, and it is very much worth taking the time to read.
As a woman studying the sciences and engineering, I was constantly made aware of my gender. My experiences in that regard certainly weren’t uniformly negative, but if I’d had to do over again, I’d have chosen a different field of study and save myself the experience of becoming an almost-but-never-quite-equal student.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of education for female students at the institution I attended was the frequency with which a female student was simply addressed differently in the classroom than a male student would have been. I remember one gentleman in particular who would address questions from male students from the front of the room, but who would walk over and sit down for a chat nearly every time one of the female students had a question, so as to make sure that she received the personal attention she needed to resolve the issue. Multiple male faculty members would always call on the women first when trying to encourage classroom participation or never fail to praise each one for a clever answer. One faculty member would often mistakenly assume that any female student would remain ahead of the curve through nonstop hard work and he would look genuinely surprised when he encountered a female student hadn’t read ahead or wasn’t familiar with a topic from an upcoming segment.
These behaviors, while relatively complimentary in nature – assuming that a female student was most likely a competent and diligent student as well as exhibiting a true desire to make sure that female students in particular were encouraged to succeed – failed to take into account the desire of many female students simply to be taught and assessed in the same fashion as a male student. It wasn’t fair to either set of students to single out the women.
Other differences in classroom behavior on the part of a faculty member were less forgivable: failure to meet a female student’s eyes, speaking down to them, making assumptions about a female student’s predilection toward the arts and language rather than mathematics and logic, or even an increased tendency to behave as though his time was being wasted when a female student asked a question, whereas a similar question posed by a male student would be taken in stride. Of course, sometimes it was obvious that male faculty and male students expected the female students to be less intelligent than the male students, and more than once I witnessed a female faculty member obviously sharing that view (whether from her own experience or in reaction to the female recruitment drives ostensibly allowing less intelligent women to enroll, I couldn’t say). The most personally irritating thing to me was when a male professor, usually older, would speak to a mixed group of students and somehow only include the male team members in his address. It’s the opposite of what happens when you walk into a into a housewares department with your spouse and somehow, despite addressing the both of you consistently, it’s crystal-clear that the salesperson is speaking only to the woman!
I experienced less of a feeling of competition with other women than did the subject of your previous post, but I definitely saw flocks of young men crowding around female students. While somewhat flattering, at best it can make a woman dependent on having the answers available without learning to identify the resources available to her from an academic standpoint. At worst it’s downright insulting and offensive to the woman to assume that she needs the help (or company) any more than a male student would. It can be hard to discourage the more enthusiastic young men without causing offense, especially when they believe they’re being helpful and are simply attempting to be a good friend. When there are far fewer women than men around, it’s important for the male students to recognize that a female student may simply want to study and complete her classes without a lot of social activity, or that she may prefer the company of other women socially.
I do agree that some of our female faculty members were surprisingly less than impressive, considering others among our female faculty were among the best in the world. It generally tended to be the younger faculty members that were not up to snuff, most likely due to frantic attempts at recruitment on short notice, and it was easy to suspect that many of them gained tenure only due to a dearth of qualified female applicants. Their shortcomings weren’t helped by their male colleagues tending to correct them or speak down to them, even in front of the students, a practice which can intimidate some of the more intelligent women who would otherwise wish to continue on in their fields. A mentor of mine assured me that this practice can continue even into the highest reaches of academia: despite being head of one of the larger faculty committees and having been tenured nearly since the inception of her department, she still received “helpful advice” from her male colleagues and juniors, though never from other female faculty. Another female faculty member once discussed the fact that she’d often been told that she comes off as very strict and never smiled or praised a student in class. Only for a female professor would “not being sweet enough” show up on a performance review! A professor might be instructed to work on his approachability if it were genuinely interfering with students learning, but “smile more” is simply not an acceptable goal on which to base the salary of a long-established academic who is widely-regarded as one of the best instructors (not researchers, but instructors!) in her field.
I belonged to a women’s association on our campus and we used to speak a lot about the difference between wanting to be accepted as one of the guys and wanting to be allowed to retain some of our trained “female” characteristics in education and the workplace, and how a classroom or work setting generally tends to encourage one or the other but only rarely both. It’s important to recognize that, just like male students have different personalities and priorities, female students are individuals and will want different things from their educations and behave differently from each other in an academic setting. We’ve been trying to accommodate the “female” perspective for decades, and while it’s great that schools and teachers try to adjust their teaching to include different types of people and personalities, it’s important to recognize that those differences aren’t coupled to gender!
With any new female student, it’s impossible to say how hard it was for her to get to that point. She might have had an entire life of happy educational equality and be thoroughly confident in her abilities and consider her gender completely irrelevant to her education, or she might have had parents who disapproved of her choice of career and teachers who spoke down to her or graded her unfairly or any number of other things. Even if every single man attending the school at one time is a great, thoughtful, socially-savvy wonder of a human being, a woman’s experiences don’t start at the beginning of college! We’re taught all our lives about how women were for so long considered incapable of technical employment and not all of us want to feel like we’re individually responsible for proving all those past generations wrong. We read articles about how underrepresented women are in the sciences and technology, and some of us keep one eye open to see if we can figure out why. Even looking around a classroom and seeing few other women can be discouraging. For every woman who simply was more interested in studying a different subject than pursuing her interest in science or technology, how many others might really have wanted to be there and were simply discouraged or redirected or made to believe they weren’t good enough?
I think in the future it will be better. I think that women will be told more about the accomplishments of all people instead of just great women of the past, and gender will no longer really be forefront in our minds as we make our career choices. I think that interacting online with no one aware of their gender or judging them by their appearances has already helped younger women understand their capabilities. We need girls to learn well the difference between criticism actually based on their abilities and baseless criticism due to their sex and the stupidity of other children. We need to stop acting surprised when a girl shows a fledgling interest in science and technology so she doesn’t go into it feeling like she’ll have something to prove.
I think that as conditions continue to improve, more of the top tier of really intelligent women will stop saying “I’m not stupid; I could enter a different area of study instead and have a perfectly respectable and intellectually-fulfilling career without constantly questioning my own abilities and dealing with a male-dominated field, so why would I want to enter science or engineering or IT?” Women had easier in-roads into some of the more liberal arts-related fields because it was widely believed that they had at more of an aptitude for these subjects. If we consistently recognize that affinity and aptitude vary wildly from person to person regardless of gender and that women as a group are just as good at science and IT as are men, eventually these last few walls will fall.
The most important thing to remember is that at some point we started calling most of the gender education problems fixed, and they’re really not. A number of lucky women never encounter sexism directly in the classroom or workplace, and that’s a great start. But I can tell you from my own experience in college that I encountered far more sexism than I ever expected to see among such otherwise intelligent people, both for and against women. It’s easy to dismiss each occurrence as a one-time event, but it becomes harder to do when you realize how many times a particular thing has happened ‘only once’! Many of the remaining issues faced by a female student in a male-dominated field are going to be easily overlooked by others – a look on a teacher’s face, an assumption made without cause, a group of all the women paired together ‘randomly’, an independent study idea denied for no good reason, suggesting the woman do the note-taking in a group project – these still occur with regularity, even if you don’t notice it, and it’s amazing the more severe problems that can be equally ignored. Many women keep silent and try not to draw attention to ourselves because it’s easiest to blend in and let the minor things slide after years of practice, but others are going to demand fair treatment and call people on it when they’re being treated differently in the classroom, consciously or not, and it’s important to continue to listen and adapt.
Eventually those enrollment numbers will even out. If schools paid more attention to ensuring fair and equitable gender-blind treatment and made college a more pleasant place for women to mix into rather than press-ganging them into technical careers to meet enrollment quotas (leaving some to wonder whether they were actually entirely qualified), it might be less of a transition … but given some time and good parenting and teaching, eventually it won’t even occur to young women that they should have any reason *not* to become a scientist or technical professional! I think that’s a worthy goal to work toward, rather than artificially enticing all remotely-qualified women toward programs using money and special programs and opportunities. Perhaps more emphasis should be placed on retaining women in a field through the college years and into the career itself, when many women throw up their hands and leave to find something new. Women having uniformly good experiences in technical education will encourage more women to enter the same programs; all it takes is time.
Thanks again Pamela!
Rochester Institute of Technology has been supporting programs to encourage enrollment of women in their technical fields. The reason for this is painfully obvious if you happen to be studying computer science (like I am) - I think I had four women total in my nine or so CS classes this year, out of 150 or more men.
I always had assumptions of what it was like to be a woman in a technical field, but realistically, it is impossible to guess what it is like without actually experiencing it. So, being curious, I discussed it with one of the girls in the medical informatics program at RIT. She took the introductory CS sequence and has a large core of Information Technology courses, but I won’t name her so as to protect her identity. I expected some of her responses, but others caught me off guard. My questions are in bold, her responses in plain text. If you have any responses, leave a comment! I’m especially interested in hearing what other girls have to say about these items.
What is it like being a woman in a technical field?
It depends. Male professors really aren’t any different toward me, they are pretty even toward both genders. But in my experience, I’ve never had a good female professor or TA. For example, one of my TAs, a graduate student at RIT, liked a guy in a class I had with her. He liked me, and she knew it - the result was that she was horrible to me all quarter. In another class, I had a male lab partner, and we had a woman leading the lab. She was really nice and helpful toward my partner, but was cold (and frankly a complete bitch) toward me.
I also definitely have to try harder to prove myself as a capable individual. It is assumed automatically that we aren’t as skilled as our male peers, and it gets frustrating.
I thought there would be more cohesion between women in male-dominated fields.
I think girls think it is extra easy for other girls in these programs, so they are complete bitches toward each other. And there is this weird egoism, in computer science especially. Some of them have these little flocks of boys that help them, and they get pretty territorial over them. If you aren’t friends with the girl and you try to talk to the boys in their group, it is bad. I feel like that the culture among girls makes this almost a respected fact, you have to make friends with the girl who is in the group before you can make friends with the guys, otherwise it feels like you are encroaching on their “property”.
Really, I think girls hang out with girls they don’t feel intimidated by. Girls that are jealous of you aren’t going to be friendly, but that is true everywhere.
What do you like about it?
Guys give you help, they generally are less competitive with girls than they are with each other. You can also look like crap, and still get massive amounts of male attention.
Why do you think guys give more help to women?
All the wrong reasons. You know - they like you, they are trying to meet you, befriend you, and they like that you rely on them.
What do you dislike about it?
Team projects suck. All guys think that girls can’t code. It gets annoying when guys have no faith in your abilities. But to be fair, they may have had some legitimate experiences to support that opinion. Guys try really hard to help girls in these programs, and I think having stuff done for them all the time stunts their abilities. It usually shows which girls are doing this when tests and quizzes come about - or when you look at the quality of the code. But we don’t all do it! Guys should really give us a chance before typecasting us.
Would you like to see more women in technical programs?
It would be nice to be able to look up to women, you know, to have upper-classmen girls who know what they are doing. But honestly, trying to imagine more women is like trying to imagine seeing dinosaurs, it is just really hard because I can’t ever see it happening. It would be great in the sense that there would be more hope and encouragement for other girls seeing women getting jobs at big companies with their degrees. It would be more relatable than hearing about a guy doing it.
Do you think there will ever be gender equality in technical fields?
No. Most of this stuff is just not what girls are into. Look at engineering - it has been around much longer, but they are still having problems with female enrollment in engineering programs. I think if there were more female role models in these areas, there would be women to look up to, so other girls would see that it was possible for them to do too. It is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem, we need a lot of women doing these things to attract more women, but we aren’t going to see a lot of women doing them until that happens.
What do you have to say to other women who disagree with you about that?
If they really think equality will happen, that is great! But they should really share it, because I don’t see it. I know a ton of guys that hang around building 70 [RIT's computing and information sciences building. -Robert], but I never see any girls. The girls that are involved with the association for women in computing are nice, but they really aren’t doing anything effective to make the programs more attractive to other women. I’ve seen them once, giving out cookies. I really think it did more for the guys than the girls *laughs*.
Thanks for answering my questions!
No problem.
I upgraded to Wordpress 2.6 like a good administrator as soon as I was aware of the release. Shortly after, I noticed that clicking on an individual post was resulting in Wordpress being unable to find the post, meaning my blog was probably useless to a lot of you for a couple days. The problem was actually a bug in the 2.6 and my utilizing “index.php” in my custom permalink structure.
The problem has been fixed in Wordpress - if you are experiencing the same problem update to the latest release of wordpress (2.6.1 contains the actual fix) and things should be back to normal.
Sorry for any inconvenience!
I just wasted an hour tracking down a problem with an application that controls Sharp projectors via a RS-232 (serial) connection. On sending the projectors a “POWR 1″ code to turn the projector on, we were getting “ERR” in response. The problem ended up being that the bulb on the projector was burnt out, so the projector was intelligently unable to turn itself on.
This is one case where a simple problem turned out to be a fairly annoying one.
GCJ, the GNU compiler with java extensions, does a great job at compiling Java into bytecode, but still has some bugs in its libraries when dealing with Swing components. Installing Sun’s Java packages on Debian thus is occasionally necessary, and has historically been a chore. I won’t list the process here to even show my distaste for it - it just wasn’t very fun.
Things are much easier now, though. Just make sure a non-free package repository is listed in your sources.list, and things become magic:
sudo echo "deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
(Note that if you aren’t using lenny, you should change that. Also, feel free to choose a different mirror.)
Now update your package repository:
sudo apt-get update
And finally install whichever Sun Java packages you want!
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin
Cheers to Matthias Klose (Ubuntu), Juergen Kreileder (Blackdown), Barry Hawkins, Jeroen van Wolffelaar, and the other folks behind debian-java for adding these packages to Debian’s repositories. It is another push that greatly enhances the usability of the project for both developers and users alike.
My coolest project from work as of late has been to write a program to control the Sharp LCD projectors in RIT’s Software Engineering department through a serial interface. I really like writing code that interfaces with hardware, so this was one I enjoyed doing.
One thing I learned quickly is that debugging serial applications is hard. When my code wasn’t working, I didn’t know if it was because of the hardware, the software, or the command messages I was sending. If serial consoles or line printers were still widely available, it wouldn’t be hard to see what was going on. Since they aren’t, an alternate solution was devised utilizing GNU screen.
With two Linux boxes running Debian, I set one up with my code to send data from, and the other with screen attached to the serial device at /dev/ttyS0. Screen functions normally, but with the added bonus of displaying messages recieved from the serial device, and when entered, sending messages to the device. Screen makes it possible to visualize serial communications and send test messages without having to write or modify any code, making it an infinitely useful tool in debugging serial applications.
My bug turned out to be twofold: one hardware, and one software. The first was that the serial connection to the projector was not complete; there is a break somewhere in the wall. The second was that the manual states only that the command message be followed by a newline character. I was sending Unix newlines, like ‘\n’. The projector was written expecting Windows style newlines, which is a newline prepended by a carriage return, or ‘\r\n’. This simple fix, which I would have never stumbled over without the help of screen, was the source of my software based problems.
I haven’t used antivirus for near five years now, and yes, even on my Windows hosts. According to the popular opinion of the Internet, my Windows machines should now be zombies supporting the botnet efforts of Russian organized crime - but they aren’t. The reason for this is, and I am going to make a bold statement here, is I am just as secure without antivirus software as I would be with it. Now that you all know where I’m heading, I’ll explain why it is true for me, and why it is probably true for you too.
The secret lies in the reasons people would have you believe you need antivirus software. Obviously the reason is to prevent and clean infections, but the effectiveness of these tasks is dependent on the signatures created for the software. To give a rough outline, the process goes like this:
- Virus is coded and released
- Antivirus labs obtain a sample of the virus
- Labs reverse engineer and create signature for the virus
- Signatures are downloaded by your AV software to be able to detect and clean the virus
Ignoring heuristic scanning for a second, note that between events one and four you are vulnerable to the virus that was released. The amount of time it takes for AV labs to release a signature for a virus varies, but in that time you are unprotected from it. That means that your signature based virus detection and cleaning system is effective only for attacks that have been around for a bit.
With heuristic scanning, there is a chance that it will pick up new viruses that don’t yet have signatures. This is fairly effective for trivial viruses that repeat methods used by other viruses, but poses no resistance to viruses using new techniques, engines for encrypting malicious code, or polymorphic engines. Unfortunately for Joe Public, the damaging viruses are the advanced ones - heuristic scanning is only going to prevent you from doing something really silly (like opening that screen saver someone sent you in an e-mail).
Viruses aren’t even that dangerous. I’m sure I’ll catch some flak for this statement, but they are generally contracted by user ignorance or idiocy. Viruses by definition require user interaction to propagate, which means that if you are infected with a virus, it is because you did something to contract it. Worms are a different story, they can infect you without your participating in the event. However, antivirus is completely ineffective in blocking the initial wave of worm infections (even with heuristic scanning) anyway, which is the same time you are most likely to come in contact with the worm. If you don’t do anything to contract viruses, you don’t have to worry about them.
So say I am a discerning user who doesn’t open shifty attachments or download warez executables (ie, I in general know what I am interacting with) - what is my risk of contracting a virus with antivirus? Slim to nil. And without antivirus? Slim to nil, because I don’t open the attack vector required to be infected by viruses. And say I contract a virus using a new attack vector that catches me off guard because it uses some new technique - what is my risk now? Antivirus wouldn’t catch it even using heuristic scanning because it is using new techniques, so it doesn’t matter whether it is installed or not. My risk hasn’t increased because my machine lacks antivirus software.
This plays out practically, too. In my five years of not running antivirus software on a Windows box that I keep patched and behind a router with NAT (which is the new default setup for many families), I have not contracted a single virus nor been hit by a single worm. This isn’t something I’m bragging about - it is just a fact that defies the common notion that antivirus is a necessity, especially on Windows boxes.
If you don’t keep your machine patched, your company policy requires it, or you are gullible, you should probably have antivirus software - your risk will decrease by having it there. If you are security conscious, aware, and scrupulous, you can save your system resources and some money by ditching your antivirus software - you are no more secure with it than you would be without it.
I had a friend share a blog post of a story that has been all over the Internet lately regarding Microsoft having a government backdoor in Windows. The story shared is located here, but I’m sure drudging around tech news sites run by 14 year olds or ignorant IT professionals will expose you to similar content.
Full disclosure: I’ve been using Linux for over five years regularly, and am typing this post from my laptop running Debian Linux to my server running Debian Linux, but I do use Windows on my desktop. Hopefully that sentence will cut down on comments accusing me of fanboyism, because I’m going to stick up for Microsoft here.
Actually, I don’t need to stick up for them - because the ‘backdoor’ doesn’t exist as far as anyone knows. I can’t pretend to know whether one exists (a huge reason why open source is better in cases like this), but in this instance the authors of titles are just being media whores and trying to amplify the situation for traffic. The reasons why this is true are straightforward, and numbered for your pleasure:
1. The component in question is not a part of Windows by default.
The program the article’s author is claiming has a backdoor is the Malicious Software Removal Tool, which does not ship by default with any version of Windows. Yeah, it is a component produced by Microsoft, but even if there was a backdoor in it, it isn’t a backdoor in Windows.
2. It isn’t a backdoor.
Backdoors allow an outsider unauthorized access into a system. As the article reports, the Malicious Software Removal Tool may report the IP address of the machine through the tool to a central location. Reporting an IP is nowhere near the same class as a backdoor. While I won’t argue that doing this against the user’s will is a breach of privacy, people seem to be in love with escalating issues, and it is as stupid as it is unfounded.
3. Everything is speculation.
Find a fact worth the attention these stories are getting. Everything is based on interpretation of events, and the discussion following those interpretations are once again removed before “facts” are arrived at. Sensationalist writing has always annoyed me, and that people take it seriously even more so.
So there you have it. The fabled Microsoft Windows government backdoor is a manifestation produced by someone who fails both at basic computer security and journalism. Just as the title of this post states: the Microsoft Windows government backdoor… isn’t.
