Bonum Certa Men Certa

Debian harassment: verbal and textual references to abuse every bit as bad as deepfake and AI generated images of women

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 10, 2024

Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.

In a number of recent cases, men and teenage boys have been prosecuted for creating distressing images of women.

It is obvious that victims will be distressed if the images are real. What we see in these recent cases is that the images are fake but the victims are still suffering significant emotional stress even after everybody comes to realize that the images are fake.

We need to accept that using a volunteer's name out of context is every bit as bad as using somebody's face out of context.

In Debian, we've seen Chris Lamb, Joerg Jaspert, Enrico Zini and Jonathan Wiltshire using the names of volunteers with references to abuse.

In one of the few real cases of abuse, all the evidence shows that the victims had asked me for assistance and even sent written thanks for my support.

Real cases like that are trivialized when people make up fake stories about abuse.

In a recent case in Australia, a man was convicted of photoshopping the faces of female acquaintances into suggestive photographs and posting them on dating sites to solicit undeserved attention from strangers. There was no justification for this behavior. Even though the photographs were fake, the man was sentenced to five years in prison. The punishment appears to be even more severe than many cases involving disclosure of real photographs.

On the FOSDEM web site, we've seen people like Wouter Verhelst seeking to cause exactly the same stress by publishing references to abuse next to the names of volunteers. Finding your name in rumors about harassment and abuse is every bit as stressful as finding your face in a porn site.

In recent complaints from the NixOS project, they have documented the phenomena of transgender developers who collude to bring down straight men, Christians and anybody with even mildly conservative views. They create the imagery of abuse using words rather than using Photoshop. Yet the emotional damage this does to the community and the victims of these rumors is every bit as bad, maybe worse, than the distribution of fake porn.

One of the most prominent cases was the falsification of rumors about Dr Jacob Appelbaum. After I published those emails to show it was a conspiracy, the same criminals simply turned on my family and I next.

When the same extremists targeted my family and I, they didn't care about the collateral damage done to female interns. One of my interns got married in the middle of her internship yet the rogue elements of Debian told people she was my girlfriend. Imagine having the memory of your wedding day stained by Debian gossip like that. The impact of Debian on that woman is every bit as bad as putting her face into a deepfake image.

Now we've seen rogue elements of Debian going to the extreme of creating fake "judgments". Anybody reading these documents in detail can see that a lot of the rumors are both untrue and offensive. Why would a real judge put their name and their stamp on insults like that? Yet the forged, fake "judgment" being distributed by rogue elements of Debian is every bit as bad as the images of teenage girls being created by schoolboys in Spain.

The story about the schoolgirls in Spain comments on the stress experienced by their mothers:

In an interview with the Guardian five months ago, the mother of one of the victims recalled her shock and disbelief when her daughter showed her one of the images.

“It’s a shock when you see it,” said the woman from Almendralejo. “The image is completely realistic … If I didn’t know my daughter’s body, I would have thought that image was real.”

That sounds a lot like the fake "judgment".

When the falsified accusations about Dr Appelbaum were propelled into a global news story, how stressful would that have been for his mother?

Personally, I resigned from some of my voluntary activities like Google Summer of Code and Outreachy mentoring around the time my father died. Friends and family members who use social control media have been exposed to rumors that started appearing at that very painful time. When my family is exposed to that, when it is forced on them by cyberbullying in Debian, their experiences are every bit as bad as those families exposed to the fake images of their daughters.

Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.

Hannah Grundy, Sydney

Other Recent Techrights' Posts

Microsoft Bankruptcy
"Microsoft unit in Russia to file for bankruptcy, database shows"
Techrights Does Not Compete With LLM Slop, It Exposes the Bastards, Plagiarists and Scammers Who Do That
People like Scam Altman, still facing a lawsuit from his own sister for sexual abuse against her
 
Google Bribes EFF. EFF Promotes LLM Slop as 'Fair Use'. To GAFAM It's a Low-Cost Lobby Hedge.
So the bribes pay off ("slush fund") and the word spreads
Slopwatch: Fake Text and Images, Financial Bubbles, and Scams in "Intelligent" Clothing
Sometimes what they mean by "AI" is just cheap labour somewhere else, as we discussed in IRC a few hours ago
Why Microsoft is Collapsing (Similar to What's Happening at IBM), As Insiders See It
IBM seems like one heck of a mess
Reliable Computing Means Free (Libre) Computing
Sites that want to promote security ought to deal with the biggest issues
Links 31/05/2025: US Court Orders Sides With RFE/RL, War Updates From Ukraine
Links for the day
Gemini Links 31/05/2025: ARM Server and power_supply Subsystem
Links for the day
Links 31/05/2025: Slop Stigmatised as Disinformation, Catalyst/Driver of "Death of Communication"
Links for the day
Common Sense 101: Do Not Write Blog Posts Saying You Want to Murder Colleagues (or Yourself)
Only crazy people would think stabbings are a joke
Links 31/05/2025: Microsoft-Connected Builder.ai is a Fraud and US is Purging Students Based on Race/Nationality
Links for the day
Gemini Links 30/05/2025: Limmat, Doomscrollers, and Arguments Parsing
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, May 30, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, May 30, 2025
The "AI" (Slop) Bubble Already Popped, But It's Not an Overnight Collapse
where Microsoft put its money
No More Steven Astorino at IBM, Chatter About Weekly/Nonstop Layoffs at IBM
What happened? Good luck guessing.
Looking at Corruption in Europe, Going Beyond the EPO
Expect a new series to kick off very soon
Slopwatch: Security SPAM and LLM Slop for SEO and FUD Purposes, Perpetually Tarnishing the Perception of Linux and (Open)SSH Security
A lot of this Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD) comes from Microsoft and its LLMs
Links 30/05/2025: Google's LLM Slop Pushers Are Killing Journalism and Shira Perlmutter Fails to Stop Bribed Regime From Legalising Plagiarism (in "AI" Clothing)
Links for the day
Links 30/05/2025: Offline Arts and "Threshold of Patience"
Links for the day
Signing Off Serious Lies With a Statement of Truth is No Joking Matter
It's not hard to see what's happening here
Links 30/05/2025: LLM Slop Already Ingests and Vomits Its Own Garbage, Facebook Exec Admits Copyrights a Concern Too
Links for the day
Mass Layoffs at Microsoft Result in More Whistleblowers From Microsoft
Microsoft's predatory pricing is further
Slopwatch: Planet Ubuntu Became LLM Slop and Some People Fail to See the Immorality of Plagiarism
it lessens the incentive for people to publish real articles
EPO Poll: 68% Dissatisfied With Quality of Slop (Wrongly Framed as "AI") for Patent Classification
Slop does not work, it's just falsely advertised with extra hype (funded by slop pushers that sponsor the major media)
Big Crowds Gather to Learn About Software Freedom From the Man Who Started GNU/Linux in 1983
"It was a great success"
Microsoft Layoffs Again in Bay Area
Microsoft relies on people's false belief that being "in LinkedIn" will get you a job; well, seems like even working inside LinkedIn really sucks and you lose the job
Gemini Links 30/05/2025: Fighting Against the Bad News, and Slop is Dehumanisation Disguised as "Intelligence"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, May 29, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, May 29, 2025
Links 29/05/2025: Chinese Cracking Against EU Institutions (Prague), More Assaults on Media and Its Funding Sources
Links for the day
EPO Workers Caution That the Officials Are Still Illegally Trying to Replace Staff With Slop (to Lower Quality and Validity of European Patents)
Nobody in Europe voted for any of this
Links 29/05/2025: US Health Deficit and Malware Disguised as Slop Generator
Links for the day
Links 29/05/2025: Turtle Roadkill, Modern 'Tech' as a Sting
Links for the day
Thanks for All the Fish, Linux Format
people who once wrote for it (or for other magazines) comment on the importance of this news
People's Understanding of the History of GNU/Linux is Changing
RMS is not a radical, he's just clever enough to see and foresee what's going on
Microsofters Were Scheming to Take Over This Entire Web Site (in Their Own Words!)
Money gets spent censoring/deplatforming people who speak about real issues; no money gets spent actually tackling those underlying issues
Bicycles for the Minds and the Story Harrison Bergeron
"The goal of having people in charge of the tools they use and that the tools should amplify ability" has long been abandoned
Links 29/05/2025: YouTube Problem and Giant Privacy Hole in Microsoft OneDrive
Links for the day
[Video] Cory Doctorow Explains DMCA: DRM in the Browser (or Webapp) Will "Make It a Felony to Protect Your Privacy While You Use It."
Pycon US Keynote Speaker Cory Doctorow
United States Courts With Sworn Testimonies Are on Our Side, We'll Present the Same Here
Chronicling what happened is a moral imperative
Serial Sloppers Ruin and Lessen the Incentive to Cover "Linux"
The Serial Sloppers (SSs) ought to be named and shamed, but almost nobody does this
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, May 28, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, May 28, 2025