Today in Media Hysteria: Female Hackers!

Breaking: Women can be hackers too. Except when women hack, according to a FOX local affiliate in LA, they are actually called ‘hacktivists’ or ‘hack fairies’ or ‘phreakers’ (hunh?). And unlike men, they are solely capable of hacking for all that is good; there are no black hats among them.

Moreover, the woman most prominently featured in the video doesn’t do what we tend to think of as ‘hacking’ in the video, per se; ‘social engineering‘ is probably a more apt description of figuring out passwords by educated guesswork and creating fake social media accounts to thwart evildoers (h/t Zanzan42).

Oh well. More cutesy female/computer puns than you can handle below:

(The Awl via Gizmodo via BuzzFeed)

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Robert Quigley