Rabblerabblerabble t'Innerneh's up in arms about this etc.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill ... he-shamer/Quote:
Over the weekend, a female “developer evangelist,” Adria Richards, overheard two male developers making what she thought were sexist jokes during a tech conference. Uncomfortable with confronting them in person, she instead tweeted a photo of the two to shame them publicly, writing that “jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and big ‘dongles’” are “not cool.” One of the dongle-joking dudes was wearing a visible nametag in the photo. Richards’s tweet was immediately spotted by an organizer for the tech conference who pulled the two men aside to confront them about the comments. According to a post on the conference’s website, the men agreed the comments were in poor taste and apologized.
That could have been the end of the story but instead, like a sexist snowball rolling down a hyper-sensitive mountain, the situation has escalated considerably. Richards wrote a blog post about the encounter, in which it’s not entirely clear that the comments were sexist (in my reading). Meanwhile, one of the male developers revealed that he had been let go from his job as a result of the public shaming, and said while he had been making a joke about the male anatomy by referring to “big dongles” (a piece of tech hardware), “forking” is a term he and his colleague used to denote “the highest form of flattery.”
Arguments about the incident moved to blogs, the message forum Hacker News, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as the social media pages of the male developers’ employer, a gaming company called PlayHaven, and Richards’s employer, an email delivery company called SendGrid. Many people were incensed that Richards would shame the men via social media rather than talking to them in person, and labeled her as oversensitive in reacting to their comments.
Others saw the incident as another example of the hostile environment for women in technology. After news that the PlayHaven employee had lost his job over the “dongle and forking” jokes, social media users lashed out at Richards, harassing her and sending her threats. On Wednesday evening, they also went after her employer, subjecting the SendGrid site and servers to a distributed denial of service attack. The DDoS attack had the company up through the night trying to restore service for its customers. On Thursday morning, it announced it was resolving the issue in another way: it posted to Twitter, Facebook and the company blog that it was terminating Adria Richards.
Over a thousand people had “liked” the firing within hours. Others were aghast that the company would “cave” to pressure from anonymous attackers. Meanwhile, PlayHaven’s CEO also published a post confirming that it had terminated an employee because of the comments made at the conference, but that it wasn’t the employee, Alex Reid, whose name tag was visible in the photo Richards took.
“PlayHaven had an employee who was identified as making inappropriate comments at PyCon, and as a company that is dedicated to gender equality and values honorable behavior, we conducted a thorough investigation,” wrote PlayHaven CEO Andy Yang. “The result of this investigation led to the unfortunate outcome of having to let this employee go.”
One tweet. Thousands of comments. Four days later, two people have been fired. Welcome to the digital age.
Sounds shit from both directions, to be honest. The Beeb have now reported on it, too.
Also, going by the first comment on that article, it seems Ms Richards
has priors in behaving this way, not that it absolves any of the dregs of humanity that announced she "deserves to be raped", mind.
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