If you’re reading this, it may be because I suggested that the world would be a better place if we saw fewer gendered toilets at your conference. I’d like to explain why.

I’m in Auckland after KiwiFoo, which was pretty darn awesome, and well worth a hectic travel schedule to attend. And while I have a lot of good things to say about my contributions at the conference, I instead want publicly say a few words of thanks to two people who have consistently made made my life better, and whom I deeply appreciate.

This was originally made as a response to a Facebook post discussing diversity issues in tech.

Anna: I am a feminist who has attended and spoken at your events. I’m not familiar with the experiences which you’ve had in the past; I’ve not been involved with them, and so I am in no position to comment. I have absolutely no desire to ruin your reputation or spread rumours.

However I am perfectly happy to comment on things that I’ve personally observed, and to call you out when I feel that you’re being actively harmful to diversity, especially diversity in open source.

Exobrain is my collection of digital minions which help me run my life. They know my goals, my location, my to-do list, and help me best plan what I’m doing, both personally and professionally. Best of all, none of my data is revealed to third parties, because I control all my agents, and all the code is open source.

Holy smokes. So having looked at the actual code for this, the bug in iOS / OSX is way worse than described on gizmodo. The article is misleading when it says your home network is safe, it’s not. If I poison your DNS queries, compromise your home router (they’re very exploitable), have privileged access to the network infrastructure between you and what you’re connecting to, or all manner of other things, then I own your connection, and whatever data you send across it; credit card details, bank account logins, facebook passwords, all of it. If I hijack anything that’s doing a software update, then I may potentially own your device.