Linux: Is Sarah Sharp a Social Justice Warrior?

Is Sarah Sharp a Social Justice Warrior?

Linux kernel developer Sarah Sharp quit recently after leveling charges of sexism and homophobia against the Linux kernel community. She explained her reasoning in a long post on her blog, but some Slashdot readers later exposed her use of a blocklist on Twitter and SJW tactics in some of her interactions with other developers.

Sarah Sharp explains why she left Linux kernel development:

Given the choice, I would never send another patch, bug report, or suggestion to a Linux kernel mailing list again. My personal boxes have oopsed with recent kernels, and I ignore it. My current work on userspace graphics enabling may require me to send an occasional quirks kernel patch, but I know I will spend at least a day dreading the potential toxic background radiation of interacting with the kernel community before I send anything.

I am no longer a part of the Linux kernel community.

This came about after a very long period of thought, and a lot of succession planning. I didn’t take the decision to step down lightly. I felt guilty, for a long time, for stepping down. However, I finally realized that I could no longer contribute to a community where I was technically respected, but I could not ask for personal respect.

I could not work with people who helpfully encouraged newcomers to send patches, and then argued that maintainers should be allowed to spew whatever vile words they needed to in order to maintain radical emotional honesty. I did not want to work professionally with people who were allowed to get away with subtle sexist or homophobic jokes. I feel powerless in a community that had a “Code of Conflict” without a specific list of behaviors to avoid and a community with no teeth to enforce it.

More at The Geekess Blog

Sharp’s blog post spawned a long thread on Slashdot, and some of the readers there noted her use of a blocklist on Twitter and SJW strategies in some of her emails with other developers:

IamTheRealMike: ”It took a hell of a lot of digging, but it seems to have started with this thread [lkml.org], way back in 2013.

Now, I’m all for professional communication, and emails can be easy to misinterpret, but this looks like a bit of an over-reaction. Someone commented that they send patches to Greg KH because Linus scares him, but added a winkey smiley afterwards, i.e. not really all that scary. Then Linus made a joke about Greg being big and squishing people that may or may not be playful or insulting, without knowing much about the relationship between these guys it’s hard to say. Squish is hardly a word you use when you’re really angry though.

And then Linus and Ingo gently tick off Greg and says he should be tougher, Linus says Greg is acting like a “door mat” and says “You may need to learn to say no to people”. Ingo says “be frank with contributors and sometimes swear a bit”. Probably this discussion would be held off list in a more traditional corporate environment to avoid embarrassing Greg (though “you are too nice” is not that embarrassing), but he takes it in his stride and agrees to be tougher.

OK, so far, just another day in open source land? Well, then Sarah Sharp flies off the handle and says:

Seriously, guys? Is this what we need in order to get improved -stable? Linus Torvalds is advocating for physical intimidation and violence. Ingo Molnar and Linus are advocating for verbal abuse.

Not *fucking* cool. Violence, whether it be physical intimidation, verbal threats or verbal abuse is not acceptable. Keep it professional on the mailing lists.

What the heck? The only thing she could be referring to this thread so far has been Linus talking about Greg being a giant who might “squish you without even noticing”. Nobody could seriously interpret that as advocating for violence unless you were so unbelievably literal you’d be unable to handle ordinary conversations.

And then there’s the conflation of “verbal abuse” with “violence”. These are two words that mean very different things. And finally the assertion that by trying to make jokes (perhaps not very well), Linus and Ingo were being unprofessional. Not surprisingly, Linus had a problem with this claim.

Now I don’t know, probably this could have been avoided if the discussion with Greg had been private. But it seems Sharp would have let rip at some other point if someone else made an off-colour joke. I can believe LKML is a tough environment, but this isn’t the best evidence possible. Perhaps there have been other incidents, but as Sharp doesn’t list any, it’s hard to say.”

CajunArson: ”First Interesting point in that thread: The first person to start dropping f-bombs on other people is none other than Sarah Sharp. Who is using the uncivil and threatening language exactly?

Second interesting point: She doesn’t seem to have a problem with a posting a rant about communications that seem to have literally nothing to do with her whatsoever. Nothing in that thread was directed at her or was even being abusive towards some other woman either.”

Kita: ”So she’s a social justice warrior troll doing this for attention? Called it earlier. Expect her to have a Patreon account up within a few days, as well as a campaign started explaining why Linus is problematic and needs to be removed from Linux development soon, or how Linux needs a safe space special interest group so feminist coders can submit their commits without being threatened by people pointing out their code sucks. Because remember kids, criticism is “Cyber Violence. [popehat.com]””

As an aside, she’s a blockbot user, so yes, she most definitely is a SJW or a SJW ally: https://twitter.com/sarahsharp

(If you’re blocked and have never even spoken with her, congratulations, you’re a member of Randy Harper’s blacklist, [leagueforgamers.com] an list of white men, gamers, nerds, conservatives, KFC, President Obama, and other people Randy Harper and her radical feminist friends consider too “problematic” to be allowed to communicate with people in the tech industry.)

In short: She might be a gifted programmer, but she’s a weak willed human being, and her having a professional freakout about Linus making a joke about being intimidating isn’t surprising — it’s a calculated maneuver. Expect something else to come up soon — as mentioned, Linus will be deemed too problematic to be allowed to remain in Linux, or the Professional Victims will demand special treatment for Women in Linux Development.

Curunir: ”What struck me about what she was trying to do, and I’ve seen others try to do the same thing, is to equate some comment or comments on a mailing list, or other post, as “violence”. When I grew up we learned that “Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me.” That is, they’re just words, they are not fists or knives or guns. It’s not “violence” to berate someone or use colorful language or anything else. It may “offend” you, but taking offense at something someone says is entirely subjective, and impossible to enforce, because you end up with “speech codes”, banning words, and other asinine restrictions until everything is a euphemism or metaphor until no one knows what anyone is talking about any more.

Bullying used to mean you’re getting physically intimidated, punched, kicked, assaulted or robbed regularly. Now it seems it’s enough that someone said something that hurt your feelings. And people can get their feelings hurt by things that are totally NOT intended that way by the speaker, just because of the listener’s history or viewpoint.

Equating speech to physical violence is a very dangerous trend that will not end well.”

Anonymous Coward: ”Men are blunt to each and will call you out on your bullshit to your face. Women, on the other hand, will do it behind your back and will be far more vindictive about it. That is the real difference.”

EpyT: ”Feminism presents it as a battle between male space or a female space. It’s a false dichotomy. The hypocrisy is that feminists expect men to take the ‘chivalrous’ route and modify their interaction styles for women, yet asking women to reciprocate with some toughness and objectivity is ‘oppressive’ or ‘misogynistic.’ The net result is that men are driven out of areas where women have gotten their PC ‘safe spaces’ for their interaction and thinking styles because men do not do well there. Just ask a male nurse. Fighting discrimination with discrimination is not a solution.

I’m a fan of what works for a given environment and given group of people. The individuals making up the bulk of the effort are the ones who decide the culture simply because they are the most productive. Anything else would drive these productive individuals out and weaken the result. Linus and his lieutenants are far more productive than sarah sharp is, and she is not happy with the interaction style they set, so she goes. No big loss. She’s welcome to either adapt to that or work on a different project. If her viewpoint is truly superior and her politics in line with reality, it should be a no brainer to fork the kernel and demonstrate this. The best contributors would flock to her and, in time, her branch would be the technically superior one. She should be showing us ‘misogynists’ how it’s done instead of whining and stirring up shitstorms.”

Orgasmatron:

”1. Locate or Create a Violation of the Narrative. 2. Point and Shriek. 3. Isolate and Swarm. 4. Reject and Transform. 5. Press for Surrender. 6. Appeal to Amenable Authority. 7. Show Trial. 8. Victory Parade.

SJWs are cowards. Even the slightest resistance early on is usually enough to stop the process. In this case, step 3 didn’t materialize, so she’s stuck repeating step 2.

Fortunately, Linus seems to be a natural. He values results over pretty much all else, and his results are currently running just about all meaningful computation and communication on and in the vicinity of this planet, so threats to withdraw approval don’t mean shit to him.”

Oxdeadbeef: ”This isn’t empowering women. This is arguing that they are weaker than men far more profoundly than any MRA red piller gamer gater misogynist could ever hope to accomplish.”

MagicMerlin: ”I was curious and did some research on this. I know Linus and some of the other guys can be a lot to take. However, after reading a lot of the posts Sarah made complaining about people and things, I started to get the feeling she’s attention seeking and disruptive. She constantly brings up gender in irrelevant ways and appears to be the self styled ‘girl kernel developer’. She also punches below the belt.

For example:

“*Snort*. Perhaps we haven’t interacted very often, but I have never seen you be nice in person at KS. Well, there was that one time you came to me and very quietly explained you had a problem with your USB 3.0 ports, but you came off as “scared to talk to a girl kernel developer” more than “I’m trying to be polite”.”

Linus tends to be very direct, as are a lot of important open source communities. The critical people are very busy and get frustrated when people display various kinds of incompetence. In fact, it appears to me that they were treating Sarah very gently precisely *because* she was a girl. Or maybe it was the intel.com email adress — who knows.”

Jon3K: ”I think given the growing size of the kernel, it’s inevitable that there will be more opportunities for poor code to be submitted. There’s more humans involved, more lines of code and more opportunity for “drama”. I think it was inevitable at some point. I think he intentionally makes an example out of people occasionally. I think it keeps people on their toes. It certainly will make people double check that code before submitting it for fear of being embarrassed.”

Savuporo: ”She tried some attention grabbing drama, got all SJWy, was briefly shot down, butthurt feelings etc. Now she quit.”

Bsolar: ”That’s exactly what Linus *doesn’t* want. “How to Win Friends and Influence People” is all about manipulating people, stroking their ego and trying to act in a way so that they like you. The underlying assumption is that you should change yourself to better accomodate other people’s expectations. Linus already explained why he is completely against all of this in the first discussion with Sarah Sharp…”

More at Slashdot

Android 6.0 Marshmallow review

Android 6.0 Marshmallow has been released by Google, but is it worth updating to on your Android device? Ars Technica has a deep and detailed review that laments the lack of a solution to Android software updates in Android 6.0.

Ron Amadeo reports for Ars Technica:

If we were to ask for any new feature from a new Android version, it would be some kind of scalable update solution. Right now a custom update still needs to be built for every single individual device model, and that’s really not a workable solution when you have more than 24,000 models out there. The Stagefright vulnerability seemed to be a wakeup call for the Android ecosystem, but it came too late to affect anything in Marshmallow. Google instituted monthly updates for Nexus devices, and OEMs are pledging to bring the monthly update program to flagship devices. The majority of Android devices, though—the low-end devices—are being ignored. Monthly updates for Google, Samsung, and LG flagships only works out to a very small percentage of the Android install base.

Android is far, far behind the competition when it comes to device security. The only real solution we can see is a Windows Update-style system that can send centralized updates to every device. This would require architecting the way OEMs and carriers handle software, but something needs to change so that there’s a real update and security solution for every Android device and every Android user. If you’ve got a Nexus device, the Android security update speed is still slow thanks to the rollout system, but at least it exists. For everyone else, maybe there will be something for you in the next version.

The Good

The new home screen adds tons of genuinely useful features. App Search, predictive apps, vertical scrolling, and the uninstall shortcut are all great time savers.

The new permissions system lets users give informed consent to access their data while keeping them in the loop about breaking things from permission denial. Developers get to have a dialog with the user about why they need a permission, and old apps are fed fake data so they can be denied access without crashing.

“Adoptable Storage” finally makes SD cards as good as internal storage. Now if only there were Marshmallow devices with SD cards.

The fingerprint API isn’t groundbreaking even among the Android devices, but it’s the kind of ecosystem building that only Google can do.

The Bad

There still isn’t auto rotate support for the home screen. Google teased us in the developer preview but the feature was cut.

The new permissions page is a great first step, but it doesn’t list all of the access to the system an app actually has. Special settings like “Notification Access,” access to the accessibilities framework, and more are scattered all over the settings.

Apps can opt out of power saving features like Doze and App Standby just by changing their priority settings. We don’t trust developers to play by the rules.

The Ugly

There is still no solution for getting Marshmallow out to the billion+ devices out there.

More at Ars Technica

Ars Technica readers shared their thoughts about Android 6.0 Marshmellow in a long thread after the review:

Adipose: ”The solution for updating doesn’t belong in Marshmallow, although it would be a start. The solution must support 5+ at a minimum, and probably 4+ to solve the issue. This next year, Google must crack down on all carriers and force them to update everything to 6.x, or barring that, fully patched editions of 4.x and 5.x with the ability to accept future critical updates. Anything less is a complete failure on their part. ”

Neodorian: ”…limiting hardware options for faster updates would remove one of the strengths of the ecosystem which is OEMs (theoretically) competing to outdo each other on hardware, features, and options. Updates make this Android’s weakness but at the same time, it’s also the main strength. You can theoretically port Android to just about anything so if a hardware company perceives a big enough market for a specific form factor or new chipset, they can build it and have a base OS ready to port. ”

Ulf: ”I hope my android tablet gets 6.0 for the use storage option alone, while you can theoretically manage apps and space, in practically nearly all apps prefer internal storage and refuse to acknowledge the SD card at all.

This is worse for non-google store apps… Amazon Prime lets you download videos now but they have no way to access the SD card. You can’t even “move” the app to the SD card to get around this. ”

A. Frizzle: ”Since these phones have all pretty much matured to a point where they all function about the same, these aesthetic and usability upgrades do not mean as much to me. Though, with security becoming more and more important due to mobile transactions and banking, it has made me more aware of the security flaws of the OS’s. I am a huge Android fan, but if they do not get security under control they are going to start loosing a lot of customers. Especially non-Nexus device sales. ”

Feistypenguin: ”After reading up on the permissions system, I can see why Google was hesitant to expose it to users. I can see apps getting a lot of negative user feedback because someone likes to hit the “deny permissions” button for everything.

On the other hand, users may get conditioned to hitting the “accept” button when every new app they use is spamming permission prompts at them. If I buy a new phone with Android 6, I would be curious to see if I would have to accept every permission for every app in piecemeal fashion, all over again.

I do like the idea of even OEM apps falling under this permission restraint though. It helps head off security concerns because Samsung/Sony/whoever decided to include a non-removable file manager or keyboard with full access to everything on the phone. ”

Retrospooty: ”No-one updates low/mid range phones for long if at all. Google does alot of updates through Google services too, but OS updates are just not ever going to happen the way you seem to want it. If having the “latest OS” regardless of what your device does, is important you, you should probably go with IOS. If you are set on android and want immediate updates, get a Nexus. Here is the reality you have to deal with and make a choice. ”

PhilGil: ”Until Google/OEMs/Carriers get their shit together and figure out how to address security updates I’ll probably be sticking to cheap phones that can be replaced more frequently. Being able to unify SD and internal storage greatly increases the usability of low-end hardware. ”

OrangeCrush: ”A billion Android devices are floating around with major security flaws that will never be updated. With mobile banking becoming a bigger deal, it’s not acceptable for the ecosystem solution to be either “assume the ignorant masses will never be impacted because their device still works for them” or “buy new hardware in order to get a software fix.””

Academic Sam: ”What I would really like is to be able to create a fake profile and let apps that wants to grab my data use that profile. Wonder if I can use “Android for work” for that. Granted, the new permissions goes a long way towards fixing that. However, I fear that some apps would refuse to work at all if it cant get its grubby hands on my contact list.”

Trandyr: ”Contrary to what the article says, in the new version of Android the Widgets *do* get a vertical scrolling list (with letters, etc.), just like the App Drawer. It’s actually done really well. If a given app has multiple widgets, they show up horizontally in the list, and each app has a row vertically. If there are more than 2-3 widgets for an app, the widget list scrolls sideways for that particular line, letting you pick any of them.”

More at Ars Technica

Rumor: Google may let Android apps run on Windows 10 Mobile

Windows 10 has lagged far behind Android and iOS when it comes to app development. But rumors are circulating that Google might announce Android app support for Windows 10 Mobile soon.

Max Nottingham reports for BetaNews:

Chatter on Twitter suggests that Google will be present at Microsoft’s grand “Windows 10 Devices” event tomorrow, and it would announce Android apps support for Windows 10 Mobile devices. Bolstering the theory is the two company’s seemingly improving relationship, the biggest testament of which was up on display when the two recently agreed to drop 20 patent lawsuits they had filed against each other. If it indeed true, what does it mean for Microsoft’s mobile operating system? Revival.

It’s not a new idea, per se. The possibility of running Android apps on Windows Phone handsets has been talked about for years. We also saw developers forcibly run port of Android apps on Windows Phone handsets and manage to do it on several occasions. But Microsoft never hinted its interest to announce support for Android apps on its handsets, and Google’s terse relationship with Microsoft — just one Google app on Windows Phone Store (also remember the Google-Microsoft-YouTube fiasco?), made it pretty clear that Google wasn’t going to help Microsoft in saving Windows Phone.

But things are changing. “Google and Microsoft have agreed to collaborate on certain patent matters and anticipate working together in other areas in the future to benefit our customers”, Google had said after the two companies recently decided to resolve several of their patents issues.

But that hasn’t stopped the rumor mill from offering yet another claim of such a possibility. If Google does step on the stage at Microsoft’s event tomorrow, the company will be able to tap on more devices, whereas Windows Phone handset users will be able to use many of the apps they need to stick to the platform. We will know for sure tomorrow.

More at BetaNews

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