Engineering a Solution for Social Problems Have you ever wished you could actually replace a troll with a very small shell script? Maybe you can. It's time to take charge and work on solving these situations from within the open source community. The internet is full of trolls. We know that this always been the case, but in the past year, the harassment coming from some online communities has become international news. There have been death threats, SWAT attacks, threats of sexual violence, hacking attempts, and many other tactics used against those most vocal against the harassment. We're going to talk a little bit about issues regarding diversity. It's no surprise that most of the people being targeted are women, and it can be a difficult thing for many to understand precisely what this harassment looks like. I'm going to show examples of what I personally have dealt with after releasing my open source project to combat harassment. The question is often raised as to why there aren't more women in open source. To answer that, everyone needs to be aware of what a female open source developer can face. Warning: there will be some graphic language. Law enforcement doesn't have an adequate way of handling online harassment. The sites being used as a method of communication don't have an adequate way of handling online harassment. Terms of Service are created not to protect the users, but to protect the interest of the companies that wrote them. However, not all is lost. With open APIs, we can work at creating safer spaces for those being targeted. I'll discuss the initial release of ggautoblocker, the problem it solved, and the roadmap for development going forward. There are many other tools that are needed. There are many ways to contribute to helping mitigate this problem. This is a new approach to an old problem, and a lot of commercial companies are already looking at ways to sell a solution. The ability to be safe should be open to all and not come at a price.

1. Fighting Harassment with
Open Source Tools
Randi Harper <randi@freebsd.org>

2. No cameras.
No social media.

3. sysinstall is easy
social stuff is hard

4. too many feelings make
words difficult.

5. GamerGate has nothing
to do with ethics in
gaming journalism.

6. that’s a nice career you have.
sure would be a shame if
something happened to it.

7. (weev)

8. Adam Baldwin is not a
Baldwin brother, which might
be why he’s such a dick.

9. cultural marxism?

10. I worked on old sysinstall,
hello?

11. cultural marxism?????

12. http://wondermark.com/1k62/

13. (weev)

14. the only thing kevin
mitnick is famous for is
getting caught.

15. hacker news supporting a post
about sexism in tech is the
eighth sign of the apocalypse.

17. probably the best tequila
story ever

18. sorry, KFC.
auto-followback is a stupid
marketing move anyways.
and your chicken kind of sucks.

19. Good Game AutoBlocker
http://github.com/freebsdgirl/ggautoblocker

20. making perl more
relevant than it’s
been in years

21. current subscriber
count: 5000+

22. got an award for being
awesome.
still not in the TIME 100, fml.

23. lolsuits

24. https://xkcd.com/1357/

25. (sorry)

34. I’ve saved hundreds of
comments just like those

35. learning c is a
lot less effort.

37. http://bit.ly/1Bd3XXK

38. police are not
equipped to deal
with online harassment

39. 8gb of redis means it’s
time to find something
that is not redis.

40. no text analysis.
just account metadata.
96.8% accuracy.

41. that code is not open
source because i broke the
dev policy in a bad way.
shhhhhhh!

42. still waiting for my
honorary degree in
troll hunting.

43. gosh, i sure will miss
writing puppet manifests.

44. GamerGate is not known
for having a strong grasp
of cause and effect.

45. Patreon: <36k/year
DevOps: >36k/year

46. 8chan: anonymous
message board

47. http://blog.randi.io

48. tequila + perl = groundbreaking
gin + ruby = ?????? (let’s find out!)

49. Twitter, why are you not
paying me for this?

50. 84% of the data we
manually verified as
targeting women.

51. http://onlineabuseprevention.org

52. http://github.com/oapi

53. Carlton is the name of
Hindsight, a Marvel
comics superhero.

54. more data means a better
understanding of the
social issues creating
these environments

55. alcohol + angry is probably
the origin story of so many
open source projects

56. don’t be me.

57. ask me about OSCON :(
(but not when there’s
a microphone present)

58. http://patreon.com/freebsdgirl

59. Everything is shit.
It doesn’t have to be.

60. resources/Q&A
• blog: http://blog.randi.io
• personal github: http://github.com/freebsdgirl
• OAPI: http://onlineabuseprevention.org
• OAPI github: http://github.com/oapi
• donations: http://patreon.com/freebsdgirl