I am a Cranky, White, Male Feminist

Today, I was re-reading an linux.com article from 2014 by Leslie Hawthorne which had been reshared by the Linux Foundation Facebook account yesterday in honor of #GirlDay2017 (which I was regrettably unaware of until it was over). It wasn’t so much the specific content of the article that got me thinking, but instead the level of discourse that it “inspired” on the Facebook thread that pointed me there (I will not link to it as it is unpleasant and reflects poorly on The Linux Foundation, an organization which is in most circumstances largely benevolent).

In the article, Hawthorne describes the difficulties that she faced as a woman in getting involved in technology (including being dissuaded by her own family out of fear for her future social interactions). While in her case, she ultimately ended up involved in the open-source community (albeit through a roundabout journey), she explained the sexism that plagued this entire process, both casual and explicit.

What caught my attention (and drew my ire) was the response to this article. This included such thoughtful responses as “Come to my place baby, I’ll show you my computer” as well as completely tone-deaf assertions that if women really wanted to be involved in tech, they’d stick it out.

Seriously, what is wrong with some people? What could possibly compel you to “well, actually” a post about a person’s own personal experience? That part is bad enough, but to turn the conversation into a deeply creepy sexual innuendo is simply disgusting.

Let me be clear about something: I am a grey-haired, cis-gendered male of Eastern European descent. As Patrick Stewart famously said:

I am also the parent of two young girls, one of whom is celebrating her sixth birthday today. The fact of the timing is part of what has set me off. You see, this daughter of mine is deeply interested in technology and has been since a very early age. She’s a huge fan of Star Wars, LEGOs and point-and-click adventure games. She is going to have a very different experience from Ms. Hawthorne’s growing up, because her family is far more supportive of her interests in “nerdy” pursuits.

But still I worry. No matter how supportive her family is: Will this world be willing to accept her when she’s ready to join it? How much pressure is the world at large going to put on her to follow “traditional” female roles. (By “traditional” I basically mean the set of things that were decided on in the 1940s and 1950s and suddenly became the whole history of womanhood…)

So let me make my position perfectly clear.  I am a grey-haired, cis-gendered male of Eastern European descent. I am a feminist, an ally and a human-rights advocate. If I see bigotry, sexism, racism, ageism or any other “-ism” that isn’t humanism in my workplace, around town, on social media or in the news, I will take a stand against it, I will fight it in whatever way is in my power and I will do whatever I can to make a place for women (and any other marginalized group) in the technology world.

Also, let me be absolutely clear about something: if I am interviewing two candidates for a job (any job, at my current employer or otherwise) of similar levels of suitability, I will fall on the side of hiring the woman, ethnic minority or non-cis-gendered person over a Caucasian man. No, this is not “reverse racism” or whatever privileged BS you think it is. Simply put: this is a set of people who have had to work at least twice as hard to get to the same point as their privileged Caucasion male counterpart and I am damned sure that I’m going to hire the person with that determination.

As my last point (and I honestly considered not addressing it), I want to call out the ignorant jerks who claim, quote “Computer science isn’t a social process at all, it’s a completely logical process. People interested in comp. sci. will pursue it in spite of people, not because of it. If you value building relationships more than logical systems, then clearly computer science isn’t for you.” When you say this, you are saying that this business should only permit socially-inept males into the club. So let me use some of your “completely logical process” to counter this – and I use the term extremely liberally – argument.

In computer science, we have an expression: “garbage in, garbage out”. What it essentially means is that when you write a function or program that processes data, if you feed it bad data in, you generally get bad (or worthless… or harmful…) data back out. This is however not limited to code. It is true of any complex system, which includes social and corporate culture. If the only input you have into your system design is that of egocentric, anti-social men, then the only things you can ever produce are those things that can be thought of by egocentric, anti-social men. If you want instead to have a unique, innovative idea, then you have to be willing to listen to ideas that do not fit into the narrow worldview that is currently available to you.

Pushing people away and then making assertions that “if people were pushed away so easily, then they didn’t really belong here” is the most deplorable ego-wank I can think of. You’re simultaneously disregarding someone’s potential new idea while helping to remove all of their future contributions from the available pool while at the same time making yourself feel superior because you think you’re “stronger” than they are.

To those who are reading this and might still feel that way, let me remind you of something: chances are, you were bullied as a child (I know I was). There are two kinds of people who come away from that environment. One is the type who remembers what it was like and tries their best to shield others from similar fates. The other is the type that finds a pond where they can be the big fish and then gets their “revenge” by being a bully themselves to someone else.

If you’re one of those “big fish”, let me be clear: I intend to be an osprey.

IETF, MTI codecs and Fedora

Background

Cisco announced that they will be releasing an implementation of H.264 under a BSD license along with distributing binaries to encode and decode this video format. Their purpose for doing so is to push it as a WebRTC standard with the IETF. The problem faced by Fedora is that the patent licensed granted by Cisco covers only the binaries that they themselves build and distribute. If the IETF approves the use of H.264 in addition to (or instead of) the VP8 codec as part of mandatory compliance in the WebRTC standard, Fedora would have to ship (or provide access to) a pre-compiled binary codec over which we have no control. We cannot ship a version that we ourselves build because it would not be covered under the patent license grant.

Fedora’s Response

The issue was escalated to FESCo, the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, today with the question of how we should respond. We elected to make the following statement[1]:

Fedora is a distribution that cares about software freedom and our users
freedom. Firstly, we cannot ship binary-only prebuilt software within Fedora.
This rules out inclusion of OpenH264 binaries direct from Cisco, or other
providers. Secondly, we cannot ship software built from source which is not free
for any use, freely distributable, and free from patent restrictions.
Therefore, Fedora is similarly unable to ship rebuilt OpenH264 code.

Fedora would be much happier with a non-patent encumbered codec in the standard
as it would relieve us of the burden of caring for a codec implementation that
we cannot fix if it is buggy on our platform, let us ship improved or more
efficient versions of the codec if that is asked for, and relieve us of the
burden of making sure all implementors of the standard were using a proper
technique to retrieve the patent-encumbered portion from the internet so that
we weren't shipping non-free code.

Acceptance of an insufficiently-free license of the OpenH264 codec would mean
that open-source vendors are not able to implement it on their own terms. They
must rely on the implementation provided by a third party (Cisco) and create
workarounds to have the user download that implementation after installation,
increasing the burden on open-source users. This creates an unequal environment
for open-source vendors.

As members of the Open Source community, we feel that it is necessary to take a principled stand here. Allowing the WebRTC standard to mandate a patent-encumbered codec ensures an uneven playing field for open source distributions. I would like to encourage anyone reading this to write to the IETF at rtcweb@ietf.org and express concern at how much damage it would do to force an insufficiently open codec to be required for compliance with the future of the World Wide Web. Please make it clear to the IETF that to select H.264 as a mandatory codec would be to reduce the availability of competitive and alternative implementations.

[1] http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtcweb/current/msg09546.html

Net Neutrality and you

By now, you’ve probably heard the term “Net Neutrality” banded about on the Internet. Perhaps you wonder what it means. Perhaps you’ve been watching certain biased news networks and have a warped understanding of the term. In either case, I’d like to try and provide a human-readable explanation of what the positions are on Net Neutrality.

I think the first thing I need to describe is a little bit of how the Internet actually works. When you type in an address in your web browser, you are not connecting directly to that web server. Instead, what happens is that your request travels through intermediaries. First it goes to your Internet service provider that you bought your connection from (e.g. Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, NetZero, etc.). From there, it’s transmitted through several high-bandwidth providers, sometimes owned by the same company, sometimes another company, until it arrives finally at the server you wanted to talk to. We’ll call these middle hops (including your ISP, and the backbones that they talk to) “intermediaries”. I will use several of these companies as examples below, however they are only hypothetical examples and should not be misconstrued as an endorsement or accusation of misconduct by any particular entity.

Next, lets describe bandwidth a little bit. The classic example is to compare it to modern running-water plumbing. Bandwidth in this case could be described by the diameter of the water pipe. The wider the pipe, the more water than can flow through it each minute. Similar to pipes as well, you have a problem when the amount of water (data) you try to send through the pipe (Internet connection) is greater than its ability to pass it through.

Let’s try and define the term “Net Neutrality”. What does it mean, and how does it affect you?

Net Neutrality is a proposal that the Internet needs to be legislated to guarantee that the intermediaries between you and the server you’re trying to talk to cannot make deals to disallow access to certain services. For example, lets say that your Internet service provider is Comcast. Comcast owns NBC/Universal, which provides a website for streaming the latest episodes of its television programs. They have other competitors in the television market, so they decide that anyone using their communication lines can only connect at full speed to nbc.com, and that sites like hulu.com, cw.com and cbs.com are going to be limited to 10% speed so that they don’t use up the available bandwidth that Comcast wants to be used for nbc.com. As mentioned above, Comcast has a certain amount of bandwidth that it can take advantage of. As more and more people get on the Internet with an assortment of devices (computers, smartphones, Internet-enabled televisions, etc.), there is an increased demand on Comcast’s bandwidth.

From Comcast’s perspective, it would now have two choices:

1. Increase its bandwidth. This is very expensive, as it involves expending millions of dollars on new equipment
2. Find ways to divide the bandwidth it already has

The second option is where we start to get into Net Neutrality territory. In the example above, I provided the example that, in situations where the available bandwidth is at its limit, Comcast might choose to restrict the passage of data destined for one of its competitors, so that it could reserve a larger part of its available bandwidth for its own services. This is not necessarily a particularly good example, because situations like this might lead to antitrust lawsuits.

There is, however, another case that is the crux of the Net Neutrality argument. It is essentially this: Should Comcast be allowed to sell different tiers of service to different customers. For example, can hulu.com come to Comcast and offer to pay double the going rate for traffic through its network, and be granted a larger percentage of the available pipe? This is the source of the largest piece of confusion in the Net Neutrality debate. Those who do not understand the technologies behind the Internet see this discussion as a free market situation. In other words, if a customer of Comcast can afford to pay more for higher quality of service, then they should be allowed to do so.

However, think back to the plumbing explanation. Comcast is not building brand-new infrastructure to support these new higher-paying clients. They are merely guaranteeing them a higher percentage of the available bandwidth pass-through. This cannot happen without lowering the available bandwidth for those services that cannot afford the higher tier. Furthermore, if large numbers of clients with deep pockets pay for the privilege of higher bandwidth, they are further reducing the available bandwidth for the lower-paying customers.

In other words, no real product is gained by paying for the new service. It is merely redistributed (and how’s that for socialism, guys?). At the same time, it reduces the ability of smaller players from being able to deliver new, disruptive technologies and products.

Where would the world be if companies like Google and Apple had not been able to do business on the Internet because Yahoo and Microsoft were the big players and owned all of the bandwidth? Without a guarantee of Net Neutrality, the next great invention may never see the light of day because there will be no way to deliver it into the hands of customers.

The guarantee of Net Neutrality is that all bandwidth through an intermediary must be treated with the same priority as any other. There should be no artificial slowing of any customer’s data simply because another customer has deeper pockets.

Many of the larger telecommunications providers argue that it’s their right as the owner and maintainer of the communication lines to do with them as they please. There is certainly a point to be made from this, but at this point, the economy of the United States and the world is at stake if the fundamental operation of the Internet changes.

I hope I’ve explained this issue in a way that is easy to understand. If so, please write your local legislators and tell them that you support Net Neutrality for the rights of consumers and small business.