Last month at the Women Who Tech Telesummit afterparty in San Francisco I was talking to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
damned_colonial about how it's a little intimidating to show up at a new social network site like Dreamwidth which is so different from other sites I've hung out on. Back a few years ago I spent most of my time on discussion-oriented sites like tribe.net, Seducersworld, and free-association ... now it's mostly Twitter and Facebook. A journal-oriented site is new to me.
Unsurprisingly she was very helpful and gave me a bunch of tips to get started. One of the things I particularly remember her saying was along the lines of "So, if you were going to write about this, it might go something like 'I was at a party last night,' and describe it a little, and then mention some of the people you met here and what you talked about, then maybe that made you think about something else, and you kind of go from there." She said it better of course but in any case it sounded like good advice to me. So here goes ...
I was at a party last night. Well, actually it was a networking event for the "Blue Hat" conference which is happening on the Microsoft campus this week. So there were a bunch of security researchers from all over, and a lot of guys who work on security at Microsoft and its competitors.
And yes I use the term "a lot of guys" advisedly. It was probably 95% male. Y'know there are a lot of things I miss about doing computer security for a living, but this is not one of them. Sigh.
Fortunately there were a few women there, including friends of mine from my Microsoft days like my research partner Sarah and her colleagues Dana, Celene (who I once tried to hire), Ellen (as usual we also talked about Burning Man) and of course Window, who's now at Apple. At one point a bunch of us were hanging out near the door and there was this tiny bubble of an area with a 50-50 gender ratio ... but then everybody went their separate ways and started shmoozing, then got dispersed in the crowd.
Of course I had some great discussions with guys too, and the three topics that came up the most were static analysis, Facebook, and Diaspora. "Static analysis" is this ultra-specialized field of automatically analyzing a program's code without running it (hence "static") and finding bugs, and it was my entire professional life for almost a decade. So it's really fun to touch base and hear about how much progress has been made since then -- and also about the areas like the user experience where there hasn't been any significant progress. However static analysis is also incredibly boring to the 99.999% of the world who care about value flow graphs and sat solvers so I won't talk about it any more here.
Facebook and Diaspora, though, are hopefully of more general interest.
Facebook discussions revolved around two things: The Social Network and how much everybody hates Facebook. The people I talked to hadn't seen the movie yet and wondered what I thought. The short answer: it's filled with misogyny (likecleverthylacine describes here), and racial stereotyping. If you can hold your nose and get over that, well, the dialog and acting are great, and it does an amazing job at portraying Zuckerberg as an ultra-successful unethical sexist geek ... the kind of guy we've all worked with in the past taken to the nth level. I saw it with a friend who's not on Facebook (for privacy reasons), and after we left she said "well, that certainly makes me feel good about my decision." Yeah really.
But what constantly surprises me about the discussions of Facebook is how many people hate, hate, hate it -- and can't wait for a viable alternative. During TechCrunch Disrupt, @missrogue had tweeted that people talk about Facebook now the way they talked about MySpace five years ago (i.e. not long before they started having major problems) but I think it's worse than that. Facebook's arrogance and dick-wagging reminds me a lot of Microsoft in the 1990s, and as evil empires go they're a lot bigger than MS was. And with their pattern of privacy abuses, prohibiting domestic violence survivors from using pseudonyms, disabling accounts without a real appeals process, banning breast-feeding photos, turning down marijuana legalization aspects, etc. etc. etc. there's something that affects almost everybody personally in a way that MySpace hadn't yet gotten to.
Which brings us to Diaspora, the nascent open-source, privacy friendly Facebook alternative. There are a lot of similar projects in the works, and Appleseed and OpenSocialWeb are both a lot farther along, but Diaspora's gotten by far the most buzz. In a classic case of "right place at the right time", the four guys from NYU launched Disapora in May just as Facebook privacy issues were hitting the cover of Time magazine, and in a few weeks raised $200,000 on Kickstarter. Since then they've moved to San Francisco, gotten free office space at Pivotal Labs, gone to Burning Man ... and on September 15, released their software to the community -- on schedule. Kudos to them.
Needless to say the kudos are not unmitigated. From a security perspective, there's (cough) ample room for improvement. I'm giving a talk on Friday on What Diaspora can learn from Microsoft about security and it was interesting to hear what people thought. Even in the security community, almost everybody agrees that Diaspora made the right choice by initially focusing on functionality rather than security, but there's a lot of skepticism whether they'll be able to raise their game. We shall see.
What's encouraging though is that everybody sees Diaspora's value. The general feel is that one way or another, the time is right for Facebook alternatives. Whether or not it's Diaspora who cracks through to mainstream adoption, it's a great learning experience and a proof by example of just how eager people are for an alternative.
So even though I would have enjoyed it a lot more if it hadn't been so overwhelmingly male, I came away from the party optimistic. There's some really interesting things happening with next-generation social network sites and emotional software. I have a feeling that Facebook may well be in for a much bumpier ride than anybody expects ... and that fairly soon there will be a lot more options for people who don't want to spend their online lives in a creepy, panoptic environment where the people are the product.
damned_colonial about how it's a little intimidating to show up at a new social network site like Dreamwidth which is so different from other sites I've hung out on. Back a few years ago I spent most of my time on discussion-oriented sites like tribe.net, Seducersworld, and free-association ... now it's mostly Twitter and Facebook. A journal-oriented site is new to me.Unsurprisingly she was very helpful and gave me a bunch of tips to get started. One of the things I particularly remember her saying was along the lines of "So, if you were going to write about this, it might go something like 'I was at a party last night,' and describe it a little, and then mention some of the people you met here and what you talked about, then maybe that made you think about something else, and you kind of go from there." She said it better of course but in any case it sounded like good advice to me. So here goes ...
I was at a party last night. Well, actually it was a networking event for the "Blue Hat" conference which is happening on the Microsoft campus this week. So there were a bunch of security researchers from all over, and a lot of guys who work on security at Microsoft and its competitors.
And yes I use the term "a lot of guys" advisedly. It was probably 95% male. Y'know there are a lot of things I miss about doing computer security for a living, but this is not one of them. Sigh.
Fortunately there were a few women there, including friends of mine from my Microsoft days like my research partner Sarah and her colleagues Dana, Celene (who I once tried to hire), Ellen (as usual we also talked about Burning Man) and of course Window, who's now at Apple. At one point a bunch of us were hanging out near the door and there was this tiny bubble of an area with a 50-50 gender ratio ... but then everybody went their separate ways and started shmoozing, then got dispersed in the crowd.
Of course I had some great discussions with guys too, and the three topics that came up the most were static analysis, Facebook, and Diaspora. "Static analysis" is this ultra-specialized field of automatically analyzing a program's code without running it (hence "static") and finding bugs, and it was my entire professional life for almost a decade. So it's really fun to touch base and hear about how much progress has been made since then -- and also about the areas like the user experience where there hasn't been any significant progress. However static analysis is also incredibly boring to the 99.999% of the world who care about value flow graphs and sat solvers so I won't talk about it any more here.
Facebook and Diaspora, though, are hopefully of more general interest.
Facebook discussions revolved around two things: The Social Network and how much everybody hates Facebook. The people I talked to hadn't seen the movie yet and wondered what I thought. The short answer: it's filled with misogyny (like
cleverthylacine describes here), and racial stereotyping. If you can hold your nose and get over that, well, the dialog and acting are great, and it does an amazing job at portraying Zuckerberg as an ultra-successful unethical sexist geek ... the kind of guy we've all worked with in the past taken to the nth level. I saw it with a friend who's not on Facebook (for privacy reasons), and after we left she said "well, that certainly makes me feel good about my decision." Yeah really. But what constantly surprises me about the discussions of Facebook is how many people hate, hate, hate it -- and can't wait for a viable alternative. During TechCrunch Disrupt, @missrogue had tweeted that people talk about Facebook now the way they talked about MySpace five years ago (i.e. not long before they started having major problems) but I think it's worse than that. Facebook's arrogance and dick-wagging reminds me a lot of Microsoft in the 1990s, and as evil empires go they're a lot bigger than MS was. And with their pattern of privacy abuses, prohibiting domestic violence survivors from using pseudonyms, disabling accounts without a real appeals process, banning breast-feeding photos, turning down marijuana legalization aspects, etc. etc. etc. there's something that affects almost everybody personally in a way that MySpace hadn't yet gotten to.
Which brings us to Diaspora, the nascent open-source, privacy friendly Facebook alternative. There are a lot of similar projects in the works, and Appleseed and OpenSocialWeb are both a lot farther along, but Diaspora's gotten by far the most buzz. In a classic case of "right place at the right time", the four guys from NYU launched Disapora in May just as Facebook privacy issues were hitting the cover of Time magazine, and in a few weeks raised $200,000 on Kickstarter. Since then they've moved to San Francisco, gotten free office space at Pivotal Labs, gone to Burning Man ... and on September 15, released their software to the community -- on schedule. Kudos to them.
Needless to say the kudos are not unmitigated. From a security perspective, there's (cough) ample room for improvement. I'm giving a talk on Friday on What Diaspora can learn from Microsoft about security and it was interesting to hear what people thought. Even in the security community, almost everybody agrees that Diaspora made the right choice by initially focusing on functionality rather than security, but there's a lot of skepticism whether they'll be able to raise their game. We shall see.
What's encouraging though is that everybody sees Diaspora's value. The general feel is that one way or another, the time is right for Facebook alternatives. Whether or not it's Diaspora who cracks through to mainstream adoption, it's a great learning experience and a proof by example of just how eager people are for an alternative.
So even though I would have enjoyed it a lot more if it hadn't been so overwhelmingly male, I came away from the party optimistic. There's some really interesting things happening with next-generation social network sites and emotional software. I have a feeling that Facebook may well be in for a much bumpier ride than anybody expects ... and that fairly soon there will be a lot more options for people who don't want to spend their online lives in a creepy, panoptic environment where the people are the product.
