Matthew Garrett ([personal profile] mjg59) wrote2014-10-02 09:20 am
Entry tags:

Actions have consequences (or: why I'm not fixing Intel's bugs any more)

Edit: About two months after this was written, Intel committed to a large scale diversity initiative. Actions speak louder than words, and this was an effective repudiation of the behaviour described below. I've happily worked on Intel-related issues since then.

A lot of the kernel work I've ended up doing has involved dealing with bugs on Intel-based systems - figuring out interactions between their hardware and firmware, reverse engineering features that they refuse to document, improving their power management support, handling platform integration stuff for their GPUs and so on. Some of this I've been paid for, but a bunch has been unpaid work in my spare time[1].

Recently, as part of the anti-women #GamerGate campaign[2], a set of awful humans convinced Intel to terminate an advertising campaign because the site hosting the campaign had dared to suggest that the sexism present throughout the gaming industry might be a problem. Despite being awful humans, it is absolutely their right to request that a company choose to spend its money in a different way. And despite it being a dreadful decision, Intel is obviously entitled to spend their money as they wish. But I'm also free to spend my unpaid spare time as I wish, and I no longer wish to spend it doing unpaid work to enable an abhorrently-behaving company to sell more hardware. I won't be working on any Intel-specific bugs. I won't be reverse engineering any Intel-based features[3]. If the backlight on your laptop with an Intel GPU doesn't work, the number of fucks I'll be giving will fail to register on even the most sensitive measuring device.

On the plus side, this is probably going to significantly reduce my gin consumption.

[1] In the spirit of full disclosure: in some cases this has resulted in me being sent laptops in order to figure stuff out, and I was not always asked to return those laptops. My current laptop was purchased by me.

[2] I appreciate that there are some people involved in this campaign who earnestly believe that they are working to improve the state of professional ethics in games media. That is a worthy goal! But you're allying yourself to a cause that disproportionately attacks women while ignoring almost every other conflict of interest in the industry. If this is what you care about, find a new way to do it - and perhaps deal with the rather more obvious cases involving giant corporations, rather than obsessing over indie developers.

For avoidance of doubt, any comments arguing this point will be replaced with the phrase "Fart fart fart".

[3] Except for the purposes of finding entertaining security bugs
rone: (stop casting porosity)

[personal profile] rone 2014-10-03 01:06 am (UTC)(link)
Thank you, Mr. Stallman. You may now eat something off your foot.

Re: The actual GamaSutra article that caused the whole kerfuffle

(Anonymous) 2014-10-03 01:07 am (UTC)(link)
If you thought she was talking about you, maybe you should stop doing those things. If you're not doing those things, why would you want to be associated with those kinds of people anyway? If you're not sure who she's talking about, play some rounds of whatever the newest Call of Duty is on Xbox Live with voice chat enabled. You'll soon come around to her way of thinking if those are the people you have to associate with to be called a "gamer."

That would be a 'Yes' from me

(Anonymous) 2014-10-03 01:08 am (UTC)(link)
Take a look at the recent events over on Facebook where a whole slew of accounts were banned because they didn't comply with the "Real Name" policy. This happened because a large number of accounts were reported and Facebook had a strict line on "If the name for the account doesn't match the documentation provided". That was the level of "due dilligence". Facebook has since apologized, told people what happened and has made changes to try and stop something like that from happening in the future.

Now... Intel is a very large company and the person who made this decision likely saw the complaints and pulled the advertising without even looking at the controversy. That is how most marketing and business-intelligence people act. (in my experience, at least - it's always a 'react immediately, backtrack later' situation)

Not that I am condoning this method of action - companies like Intel have a lot of responsibility because their name is known worldwide and the way the public sees the company act will influence decisions. Whether it is to boycott Intel or to cheer them on - and whether the publics response is right or wrong - it will happen and have a much larger effect than if a smaller company did similar. This is one of the reasons that decisions like this should be made by upper-level management - or even the board of directors - and not the low-level management that likely chose the current course. Of course, as I've never taken a business course and have just based all of this off personal experience I could be totally wrong.

Re: I'd just like to interject for a moment.

(Anonymous) 2014-10-03 01:10 am (UTC)(link)
You do a really good RMS impression.

(Anonymous) 2014-10-03 01:14 am (UTC)(link)
Matt, you can't justify being purposely retarded.

Re: Sad news indeed...

(Anonymous) 2014-10-03 01:22 am (UTC)(link)
Cough bull shit

(Anonymous) 2014-10-03 01:31 am (UTC)(link)
"Avoiding" controversy would be ignoring it and carrying on with the existing ad campaign. What Intel did instead was take a clear stance pro-GamerGate.

[identity profile] alan-de-smet.livejournal.com 2014-10-03 01:43 am (UTC)(link)
Intel is favoriting supporting tweets? Egad. I'm not able to find this via searching. Was this their @intel account, or something else? If it was the @intel account, it must have been scrubbed; no favorites since September 10th.

Re: Confused now.

(Anonymous) 2014-10-03 01:53 am (UTC)(link)
Except it's not one side saying equality and the other saying ethics. It's one side saying things ranging from nothing at all to things like "hey, they game conferences are kind of unpleasant for women -- can you do something about that?" or "hey, guess what? there are lots of women buying games! isn't that cool!" and the other side shitting themselves, coming up with the idea that OMG these people who are okay with women playing games must be unethical, and actively harrassing them.

Because bashing someone by pretending that they're a radical feminist is an easier sell than bashing them because OMG! they thing that maybe it would be nice if the gaming world were a little friendlier to women.

(Anonymous) 2014-10-03 01:54 am (UTC)(link)
Wait. Everyone who disagrees with Gaters has been labelled, BY THEM, as evil. Despite there being LESS THAN ZERO actual-factual evidence anything really egregious, and not more easily explained by friendship rather than overt malice. The hypocrisy of the entire Gate/NYS community never ceases to astound me.
"BLARGH - stop silencing dissent! We will now proceed to silence all dissent to GG!"

(Anonymous) 2014-10-03 01:54 am (UTC)(link)
Thank you for this level of integrity. <3

GGs can fuck off.

Re: Misdirected hate.

(Anonymous) 2014-10-03 01:56 am (UTC)(link)
Well, you had to expect that in this kind of thread.
But I'm certain you'll find enough frustration from other vendors to maintain your gin consumption.

(Anonymous) 2014-10-03 01:58 am (UTC)(link)
I don't know you, but I was linked here and just wanted you to know that someone appreciates this.
nentuaby: (Default)

[personal profile] nentuaby 2014-10-03 02:19 am (UTC)(link)
You don't say.

(Anonymous) 2014-10-03 02:44 am (UTC)(link)
Honestly I don't care what women characters look like in games. Women moaning about sexism? Shut up!

I'm sure 80% of the ladies moaning have either seen a stripper ona hen night or are frigid.

Seriously some people need to worry about important stuff, like landmines and human slavery and stop bitching about minor crap.

[personal profile] diana11 2014-10-03 02:46 am (UTC)(link)
Perhaps the "war" part is overstated. There is such a thing as a company not wanting to expending resources to support the position taken by any conflicting parties, at least not, until there is clarity about how conflict will resolve. Why alienate any customers, by tying your name to one position or the other?

Companies routinely stop ad campaigns, if there are complaints. Perhaps Intel isn't taking a position at all, and they are merely reacting to a flood of supposed complaints, in order to help protect their brand.

The original article contains has a certain view of "gamer culture", and people might find a number of the statements they could have claimed as offensive.

So maybe Intel knows or doesn't know about the GamerGate campaign... maybe it is or is not related to the early end of the campaign

I would just rather believe all this can be easily ascribed to stupidity, so there is no reason to assume Intel's termination of the campaign is a malicious act, or taking one position or another with regards to the article.


Re: Are you honestly surprised?

(Anonymous) 2014-10-03 02:47 am (UTC)(link)
Hear Hear!

Hello

(Anonymous) 2014-10-03 02:56 am (UTC)(link)
Seeing the world in absolutes must be a comfortable, if sad, existance.
agent_dani: (Default)

[personal profile] agent_dani 2014-10-03 03:01 am (UTC)(link)
There's an old phrase, "not deciding is still a decision." Specific, it's the decision to not change anything that was decided until the point.

Further, there is no such thing as "undeciding" if you will - truly reverting a decision is not possible; it's making two opposed decisions in sequence.

A proper laptop

(Anonymous) 2014-10-03 03:41 am (UTC)(link)
Can you suggest me a modern AMD laptop works with FSF approved distro? That doesn't reqire blob. Thanks.

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