Totally agree. The idea that women need to be duped into doing cybersecurity using emotional manipulation misses the point that you have to be quite clever in the first place to do it, so it's unlikely to work.

I kind of feel that I want my girls to do something in IT / programming but sometimes I feel like all these rah-rah girls coding cheerleading incentives to get girls interested might actually give them the impression that normally they don't belong. Girls don't need pink computers, they just need an interest in how they work. That's how the rest of us learnt. I didn't know that IT wasn't a "girl" thing until I realised I was always the only girl in my class.

That's just what I thought when I read it too. (Also female developer.) Sometimes I think that people just don't get that infosec is interesting to some people, and not others. I doesn't really matter what gender the people happen to be. If you don't dig computers much, then you probably won't get more interested based on some change in nomenclature, which will fall down as soon as you realize "oh, you're talking about cybersecurity, right".

So much this. I don't really understand how people equate refugees as being somehow linked to terrorists, other than running away from them and when I see Republican hopefuls saying to close their borders it makes me want to scream at them for their lack of compassion. ISIS don't have a hope in hell of building their 'global caliphate' but they are going to make life miserable for as many people as possible for as long as they can. What you said about the death cult is spot on, and I think it's a poor reflection of the state of our own society that we'd have fellow citizens thinking that it's a good idea to go and join up with a group that condones such brutality in the guise of righteousness. I hope that in taking down those accounts that Anonymous would at least make it hard for them to coordinate attacks and recruit new people to their ranks. (I don't have mod points either or I'd give you some.)

I have to agree with this. I am a woman and a developer, and also an introvert. I grok computers and always have because I've had one at home from a young age and I thought they were fun. I played games, I fixed problems and that's how I got interested in finding out more. I'm certainly not the only female developer around, there are definitely a lot of us, but the underlying reason that you don't find lots and lots of women in the industry is that women don't find it all that interesting. (In fact, I have a lot of guy friends who think it sounds boring, for that matter.) Whenever I talk to young girls (meaning, young enough to be considering which career path to take) when I ask them what they think about computers / coding / tech stuff in general, they either just give me a blank look or just straight out tell me they're not interested and they want to do art or something. I never really encountered sexism while learning, despite being the only girl, but that doesn't mean that other people have had the same experience. Coding is easy at first in the "ooh look! I made it blue" sense but most of the time it's thinking about how to solve a problem, or fixing why things aren't working and it takes a certain personality type to enjoy that sort of thing. A lot of people lack the tech background to just dive in so I think it can be intimidating when you get to the knowing-what-you-don't-know phase of the learning curve. A supportive environment would help with that but really, if you want to code, you just need to hammer away at it with some determination because there are a ton of high-quality free resources out there these days.

Technically I'd say that Kash Heed is correct but if you look at what the majority of crimes in the lower mainland consist of, I'd guess most are petty crimes such as property crimes and auto theft. I'm fairly sure that some of the downtown eastside people are being counted as committing crimes too, but they are talking about drug crime. Violent crime seems to be more of a gang thing however because if the down and out east hastings crowd had a gun they would have sold it long ago to buy a rock.

I don't like my ID getting scanned when I go into bars for the same reason I don't enter competitions and hate telemarketers. The last time my ID was scanned I didn't even realize they were going to do it until it was already done, they didn't ask for my consent. Presumably if you are going to some lame nightclub to commit crimes and hang out with your gang buddies, you'd be able to drum up a fake ID so why are we getting our privacy invaded just because we want to check out a band and have a few beers?

I hope they save my site about the Cramps that I made back in '98, it took me hours.