skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Patricia Roberts) (11/14/88)
The following was mailed to me by someone who is managing to keep up with the worm argument. I thought it was infruriating and fascinating. Please direct flames to the author, or to alt.flame. Please direct discussions of the rape metaphor to soc.women. I think both of those are worth discussing, but not exactly appropriate to this group. I think the analogy of women and computers is appropriate to this group, though. Is this a common analogy? (I haven't seen it before.) Does it show up other places? What sort? -Trish From: beb@mit-amt (Brian E Bradley) Subject: Re: Fooey on your cynical, litigious personalities Newsgroups: news.sysadmin Message-ID: <3282@mit-amt> Let's call it what it is: "computer rape". Sure, you lost a day's work because of the virus, and you got heartburn. But that's not what really bothers you. Your machine seems somehow -- well, DIRTY... You don't really trust it anymore. It's been "doing it" for someone else. And, deep down in the back of your mind, you KNOW that your rival's code was BETTER than yours: once the computer tasted HIS code, it could think of nothing else. Gentlemen, let's be sensitive to the victims, too. Because of the Worm, our relationship with our Signifigant Automata is forever changed. Their increasingly infected chassis are more and more human every day. The appearance of dangerous diseases in the electronic ecology means that the majority of guys will marry one machine and avoid the swinging "network" information meat market. Unless, of course, his machine is down for some reason, or the guy needs something "special". In a surprisingly short time, a user will be able to go to the drugstore 24 hours a day to buy "network protectors"; perhaps they will even be ribbed, colored, scented, and disposable after one use. In the meantime, even the most ardent civil libertarians among us are growling and threatening to bludgeon virus publishers to death with baseball bats. Control over personal property is a much more compelling motivation than concepts like "the free marketplace of ideas". But, until the law catches up with the current marketplace of intellectual property, software publishing (and "genetic" publishing, for that matter) is an ill-defined and lawless game. Perhaps some future court will rule that a man can kill to keep his black box from being raped. And "rape" is the issue here. To spare my colleagues the embarassment of irrational, emotional public displays, I would like to point out that many systems administrators are behaving like the victims of forcible rape. Be aware of your own actions, and be careful that your choices are not driven by unhealthy motives, such as obsessive paranoid reactions to a perceived loss of security. Set reasoable goals, curb your extremism, and don't pop a blood vessel over it. If youthink you're suffering, I suggest a brief dip in Women's Movement books. They've been grappling with the same issues as we Worm-Fighters, but they've had centuries of life-and-death experience coping with the problem. Of course, the Computer Security Support Groups DO exist, but they are impossible to find or join...
kylo@uncecs.edu (Kylo Ginsberg) (11/18/88)
This article was infuriating. I'll hold my temper here though and just make a couple points. Trish asks: >think the analogy of women and computers is appropriate to this group, >though. Is this a common analogy? (I haven't seen it before.) Does >it show up other places? What sort? In my experience, this is a common analogy but certainly not mapped out the way the @*$*@$ writing that article did. I've heard people refer to a computer as a she, just as they might a ship or their Mustang. I can't think of any examples of this analogy going further than the pronoun, but I can certainly imagine people running with it like this guy. I've always thought this was strange (Mustang as a she?), but thanks to this fellow's assholery I have some speculations. I imagine some (computer?) jock sitting around thinking: a machine (ship, Vax, Mustang) is this stupid, irrational thing which is often uppity and a royal pain. But if its owner/manager babies it just right, it will run like a charm, (how does an engine "purring" fit into this analogy?) and give the owner/manager a certain kind of strokes. There's something macho about knowing how to handle one of them, keep them in line. You get the idea. Let me come at this from another angle. This guy had a good insight in that people feel violated by this worm. Their space was violated. So far, this language need not lead to "computer rape". It seems to me that an excellent analogy for this worm is somebody breaking into your home. In my (limited) experience, people whose homes have been broken into experience an analogous feeling of having been violated. But, if you add violation together with the she-ness of the thing violated, then this guy's response is perhaps more predictable. I wonder if he would react similarly hearing about sugar being poured in the gas tanks of his cronies' Mustangs? Here's another vantage point for why this analogy might exist: go listen to some Beach Boys songs. I just listened to "This Car of Mine", "Little Honda," and "409". The following might be some criteria for the women-as-machine analogy: 1) possession 2) complexity, these things need to be tuned up, they're unpredictable, etc 3) investedness--I'm not really sure what word to put for this, but this analogy is only used for very significant machines, ones that deliver some sort of (ego?) strokes to the owning person. Anyway, "409" ends: Nothing can catch her, Nothing can touch her, Giddyup 409, Giddyup 409, 409, 409,.... --Kylo