The casual sexism in those statements popped out to me, too. I found the post overall interesting (although in some ways it felt like an advertisement), but those comments in particular were jarring and took me out of what I was reading.

A 'wall of porn' is unprofessional and unacceptable at just about any conference other than a porn conference. The goal of the network team should be control of the network, including the WoS. If they weren't able to do that, I probably wouldn't find much value in attending. All that is irrespective of whatever gonads I possess.

On the other hand, it doesn't take much empathy to understand why a woman might be put off by these statements that imply she is so delicate that the visage of porn 'hurts' her in some way. Nor would I be surprised if she were to find their actual sexism offputting and decided not to attend.

> other than a porn conference

I can take that tangent…

Even at a porn conference[1, SFW], it looks like a "wall of porn" would still be unacceptable. (Also from searching "XBIZ show" on Google images — NSFW.)

Many of the attendees are payment processors or dating websites, others are LGBT, and anyway everyone is "at work". From the pictures, something like 20-40% of attendees are women (not counting models, but also not counting the male models).

[1] http://www.xbizshow.com/

Agree on this. It was… weird to see someone making a correlation between "not enjoying porn on display during a security conference" and the gender of the person. It's good that they're filtering it, it's bad that they need to, it's sad that they consider it a gender issue.

It does intuitively seem like one gender would be far more likely to raise issue with it, and I'm pretty sure most would agree with this perception outside of trying to intentionally frame issues in gender neutral ways, which isn't necessary to conclude the content may not be appropriate regardless.

It's both a professionalism issue and a gender issue.

The reason it's a gender issue is because our culture often treats women as purely sex objects rather than having their own merits as people, so the introduction of porn into a professional context isn't just a professionalism issue; it also invokes that template in a detrimental way.

Probably something related to stereotype threat in here as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat

I can't say I was offended by reading this, but the implication that public porn displays are a "womans issue" was weird to me.

You solve such things to create a welcoming environment, not because woman you think don't like to see boobies.

I can't agree more. That's just plain sexism to take action on a thought that women don't like to see boobies.

To think that women (or men for that matter) can't understand that the WoS display is just that - a WoS display? That's just insulting condescension.

Yeah, it's interesting. I wonder if it has something to do with sexual harassment training? I've definitely been "taught" that having pinups can be grounds for sexual harassment claims when working for a large grocery chain. At my current job, there's no training but it's understood that if you're making anybody uncomfortable at work, you're probably doing it wrong. I like that thinking better, but it relies on some empathy or at least shared values (maybe harder internationally?).

Grocery stores have to employ who they can get - they can't offer tech wages nor interesting projects. Either you're stacking cans at 45 cases per hour, or you're scanning and bagging 3 items a minute, or cleaning toilets and pushing carts. So mandatory training has to be clear to even the lowest elements of our society.

While plenty of men would find it offensive and plenty of women would find it funny, if they kept the porn you can be 100% certain it would be singled out as an example of how this industry doesn't make women feel welcome. Saying it's sexist to acknowledge this is concern trolling.

Suggesting that the key issue is how not filtering would be perceived, beyond the circle of the conference attendees, itself seems to be flirting with concern trolling.

I am not sure what to think about this. What does porn have to do with gender? I suppose some women like porn, as well as some men do. Regardless, why would you display porn at an event that does not have any direct connection to it?

As I understand it, they want to have a display of what the internet looks like without filtering to demonstrate the value of filtering, but also pre-filter it of any content that you would need to filter.

I think you missed the point - the point is to show what can be intercepted when you use insecure WiFi and protocols.

As the actual developer of the tool that was used, porn filtering was something that was added later on, after the porn became a problem. The issue is that trying to filter such things is often a losing game, as most conference NOC staff don't want to put in proxies for a variety of reasons.

The solution I ended up with was to use Yahoo's trained machine-learning algorithm to attempt to detect, score, and ignore images on an unbounded scan (generally from 0-100). In most cases the threshold was set to 70, however was something folks could independently sat if they ever wanted to open the front-end on their own machines. There was also a mechanism to blacklist images from the screen if one happened to pass through. I've run it at BSidesLV, BSidesChicago, Thotcon, CircleCityCon, BSidesDetroit over the years and I can tell you, monitoring and trying to block porn from hitting the board was generally what I ended up doing while running this.

> but as a cis man I’d find a big public wall of porn in a conference disgusting.

Sure, but would you initiate a hostile work environment claim or try to get someone fired using Twitter because of it?

> would you initiate a hostile work environment claim

I most definitely would. And if that didn’t work, I might post to Twitter about it.

Absolutely. I wouldn't want to work with someone that wouldn't. I might not raise hell over a one off inappropriate comment. But it if it becomes a regular thing. At a previous company I went to the owner and flat out said that a particular employee was sexually harrassing people. He knew it already and it was creating a toxic environment. I outright said that if someone files a lawsuit and it makes it into the local newspapers, this company is done. I left shortly after, within a year a large percentage of the other employees did also.

>Maybe I’m a minority, but as a cis man I’d find a big public wall of porn in a conference disgusting. I’m definitely not against porn, but there’s a time and place for everything.

So which one is it?

What are some strategies for dealing with this sort of toxic reply? I also feel pornography has its place (alone or with 1 other consenting adult), and parent's refrain is sung far too often by other men.

>or with 1 other consenting adult

Why would the number of consenting adults have any impact?

Pointing out "I am not against X, but ..." is toxic now? There are many instances where this is pointed out instantly, so I do it here too. Just write the second part, without the "but" to stop contradicting yourself.

Saying porn isn't appropriate in some environments isn't the same as "being against porn" (=being generally opposed to it), so there is no contradiction.

Your reply is the toxic one, and you're missing GP's point.

Yeah I get that you believe my reply is toxic. You are wrong there btw.

It wasn't about the point in the first place, rather the "I am not against X, but <statement which contradicts X>" formulation.

You believe phones should only show pornography and no other apps should exist. Thank you for revealing your true character.

I am astonished how you even came to that nonsense.