I hate this attitude of "blame everything on the trolls". You can't use your real name on the internet because using your real name on the internet is basically asking for trouble. You have to defend yourself in the same way you have to look at ads and read media critically and don't believe everything someone says on the phone or in the mail. It's really nothing new, it's just on the internet this time. Scamming and spectacle has always been a good play.
People are simply not trustworthy, especially in large numbers, the internet just provides more exposure, so "don't be dumb" applies even more. Defending yourself is simply part of living in society.
I had to take down the website for my business and can only accept brick & mortar transactions because of trolls... but sure I guess you can win at your commenting game by claiming everything is shit.
I've been running a business with multiple locations for 10 years and I've never had a problem more serious than trolls on the internet doxxing me.
See, this is the problem. Don't blame it on "trolls", analyze where you screwed up and how you could have defended yourself better so you know what to do next time. Then open up shop under a different alias.
If you're not vigilant about your own security and safety, no one else will do it for you. Take responsibility for your own actions.
You're as much a victim here as someone who downloads a tiny executable off a filesharing network and thinks it's the latest movie or game. Or falls for a Nigerian scam. These are accepted facts of the internet. We defend against them. Just as much as publishing your address or information which can be associated to it should be.
Precautions are important. You can never rid the world of evil, but you can protect yourself from it, especially trivially in this case.
We made Nigerian scams illegal. We defend against them partly by prosecuting them. We work hard to reduce the frequency and the impact of them. But you're not saying that we should do any of that for trolls. I don't accept that trolling is just something that necessarily happens and that we need to accept. We can hold trolls accountable and work to reduce trolling overall.
> We made Nigerian scams illegal. We defend against them partly by prosecuting them. We work hard to reduce the frequency and the impact of them.
And guess what? They still happen. We already have the laws to attack the kind of "troll" that shows up at your door in many cases - but guess what? It still happens. Ultimately the law only gets you so far. So we must defend against them in more effective ways - like individual knowledge.
It's a lot easier and more effective to guarantee safety with online matters when you behave safely online than when you start taking risks and expect the law, the website or whatever else to deal with the consequences. That's just wishfully naive thinking.
Yes, in an absolute sense, all harm should be blamed on the abuser, I don't mean to suggest otherwise. But the prevention potential is so much higher if you can attack it at it's destination than at its source - like using a firewall on your server instead of just saying "hacking is illegal, therefore no one will hack me".
I tell my kid not to run in the street for a reason. On the Internet, you can run in the street all day, and if someone hits you, it's not your fault because "victim blaming is wrong".
Yeah, its one thing to say victim blaming about something that's difficult or expensive (monetarily, freedom or time) - it's quite another to use it to discourage individual defense.
There are people who simply cannot effectively defend themselves.
They don't have the knowledge. They're visually disabled. They've got cognitive decline, for whatever reasons.
And the scams and attacks keep coming.
Generally not trolls, so much, though that can be a thing as well.
I'm not completely against there being some wild corners of the Internet (though you might want to take a look at some of danah boyd's recent writing on 4chan and /b/, and what grew from them, and why, and how), but there's a rather large part of it that really has no business being like that.
People get hurt. Money and life savings are lost.
Not everyone's a street-wise, healthy and hale 24 year old.
Why was that information available on the internet?
That's the kind of risk you take if you make that kind of information available on the internet. Think of all the possible things someone could do with your address and assume those will be done. That's the type of precaution you should be taking.
Why were you selected over any other business owner? Just seems odd you would be selected at random and then two different people would make an effort to drive out to your house "for the lols".
Sorry, if I go into details it'll be pretty obvious who I am. My entire point is that internet trolls aren't just some sort of harmless fun for a lot of people.
Doxxing a business owner is generally very straightforward even if they take careful steps to hide their identity - there's a huge paper trail behind any real business.
If you think you can't be doxxed, you're probably just lucky.
In my experience the vast majority of people are trustworthy. The problem is that the tiny minority of people who are not trustworthy are winning the internet because they have time, and shout loudly. More, some of them do obnoxious and potentially dangerous things.
That's why people get upset - because it is a tiny minority that spoil the whole thing. If only we could stop that tiny minority ...
> In my experience the vast majority of people are trustworthy.
Sure, but in quantity there will always be some people - even some of those normal, trustworthy people who feel particularly strongly about something and decide to go on the offensive.
There's nothing you can do about that, that "tiny minority" of abusers will always exist in any given situation involving enough people. Ignoring this effect is stupid. Trying to counter it is a waste of time and potentially harmful to speech. Defending yourself is the cheapest option, just do it. Tell other people how to do it.
Maybe I'm just a cynic, but I'm beginning to feel like the trolls are smarter than the people who whine about trolling in this day and age - they're able to defend themselves better at least.
It takes a little more than that to be in the same category as Einstein. Also, if your age is important to make the achievement impressive, it's generally not that impressive. Like cool, good for you, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
I know of several ppl who finished their PhDs in 2-3 years (average is 5-6) with great results and yet I don't see them get news coverage and front page treatment on HN. I think we should all be wary of hype. She seems like a smart person and if she makes massive contributions to physics in the future, then by all means, let's compare her to Einstein. But until then, what purpose does this hype serve?
It's not worth a whole lot because I imagine tech is one of the few industries that don't follow the trend (especially in the bay area). I know this is a tech site, but MOST careers are not in software.
I believe gender bias is a huge issue, but I wonder if the riddle was worded differently if the responses would be different:
>Here’s an old riddle. If you haven’t heard it, give yourself time to answer before reading past this paragraph: a father and daughter are in a horrible car crash that kills the dad. The daughter is rushed to the hospital; just as she’s about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate—that girl is my daughter!” Explain…
I'd also be curious to see what the results would be if it was a mother/daughter crash — I suspect that most people would say the father is the surgeon (rather than saying the girl has two moms), but I'd like to see at what rate.
My answer in the original question was two dads, but I'm not entirely sure if I misinterpreted "he's about to go under the knife" originally, or if I'm biased (I also might want to think I misinterpreted it because I don't want to be biased).
The article provides a lot of additional evidence of bias. I just found the first riddle interesting.
the basis of the riddle is the widely held assumption that the surgeon is is male, which is more or less justified based on demographics, even if it is a biased assumption.
now, it's an interesting riddle because it exposes the way we often generalize from demographics even when there are reasonable contextual clues that our generalization isn't accurate.
however, I don't go so far as to call this a prejudicial kind of bias. I don't really think that the tendency to generalize from observations is unreasonable or necessarily connected to prejudicial or exclusionary actions.
I read this comment before the article. I also assumed that the surgeon was male - my best guess at an answer to the riddle was in the wording: the people in the car crash were "a father and daughter" not "a father and his daughter", so my answer was that the man killed in the crash was "a father" and not "the girl's father", thereby allowing the possibility of the surgeon to be the girl's father.
The whole riddle is set up to be intentionally difficult. The way it primes you with "father" and "son" as parent comment mentions. I think there's some validity to it, but I think it's a clever linguistic trick more than anything.
I actually read the parent comment before going to the article and I still had a hard time figuring out the answer. It may be because I was primed with the fact it's a "riddle"; the entire time I was trying to come up with a clever answer rather than thinking the surgeon was the mother. Father+daughter vs father+son didn't have much of an effect, but bias was probably present, nevertheless.
>I would find some middle road where it is not a crime, but a civil order.
In the past this road has lead to people being committed because someone just didn't like them. Broadening committal to people deemed not acceptable by society is a dangerous path.
More like your landlord selling the keys to your apartment, but you still have the key to a series of safes inside. Everyone can get a lot of your stuff and probably watch you poop, but hopefully those safes are built well enough to keep everyone out of your valuables.
IMO part of figuring it out for yourself is a little research (which can be as basic as simple observation). Then you decide what to keep or trash as part of "yourselfing" it.
They've spammed business, social media accounts, email...
For some people the impact on their life is very real.
I can't use my name publicly on the internet because of trolls. This impacts my life in a huge way.