How “dongle” jokes got two people fired—and led to DDoS attacks

An incident at the annual Python developer conference has led to allegations of sexism, death threats, the firings of two people, and—apparently—multiple DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks.

The strange saga began Sunday at the PyCon event in Santa Clara, CA, when Adria Richards, a developer evangelist for e-mail vendor SendGrid, overheard jokes being told by two developers sitting behind her during a session. The jokes were sexual in nature, she said. Richards proceeded to take a picture of the developers, then tweeted the photo and asked PyCon organizers to have a word with them.

The story ended with one of the developers getting fired, Richards getting fired, and an apparent denial of service attack against Richard's personal blog and against SendGrid. "Anonymous has reviewed the situation and rendered judgment using their collective wisdom and experience," wrote one anonymous poster in a manifesto. Could the story get any stranger?

Speaking out

According to Richards' tweets and a personal blog post titled "Forking and Dongle Jokes Don't Belong at Tech Conferences," the developers in question were sitting right behind her at PyCon and made "jokes about forking repo's in a sexual way and 'big' dongles." (Richards herself apparently made a joke about male genitalia on Twitter, using her work account, several days before PyCon.)

Richards did not tell the developers that she was offended, saying in the comments on her blog post, "I didn't want to be heckled or have my experience denied." She initially decided to remain silent about the jokes, she wrote, until she saw up on the main stage a photo "of a little girl who had been in the Young Coders workshop." At that moment, "I realized I had to do something or she would never have the chance to learn and love programming because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so," she wrote.

After tweeting the pictures of the developers, she then wrote on Twitter, "Can someone talk to these guys about their conduct? I'm in lightning talks, top right near stage, 10 rows back #pycon." She also linked to PyCon's code of conduct, which says in part that "offensive jokes are not appropriate for PyCon." On her blog, Richards concluded, "Yesterday the future of programming was on the line and I made myself heard."

PyCon staff quickly spoke to the developers, who apologized, but the staff took no further action. PyCon described its response in a blog post yesterday:

On Sunday March 17th an incident occurred involving some inappropriate comments made during a crowded plenary session. Per the stated guidelines for attendees and staff, the issue was reported to the PyCon 2013 staff and resolved privately.

Both parties were met with, in private. The comments that were made were in poor taste, and individuals involved agreed, apologized, and no further actions were taken by the staff of PyCon 2013. No individuals were removed from the conference, no sanctions were levied.

PyCon values the privacy of all attendees above everything. Except in cases wherein law enforcement must or could be involved, all reports and actions taken are kept confidential by PyCon staff.

After the incident, PyCon updated its "Attendee Procedure for Handling Harassment" to encourage conference attendees to report such behavior privately. "Public shaming can be counter-productive to building a strong community. PyCon does not condone nor participate in such actions out of respect," the updated PyCon procedures say.

One of the developers was also fired by his employer, PlayHaven, which said the inappropriate comments were contrary to the company's dedication to gender equality. PlayHaven makes a financial platform for monetizing mobile games.

“Forking” and firings

A person going under the Hacker News name "mr-hank" claimed that he was the developer who was fired. He apologized for the jokes but said Richards misinterpreted the "forking" statement. The developers were discussing the process of forking code bases, not making sexual jokes, he said. "While I did make a big dongle joke about a fictional piece [of] hardware that identified as male, no sexual jokes were made about forking," he wrote, adding:

She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate. Let this serve as a message to everyone, our actions and words, big or small, can have a serious impact. I will be at pycon 2014, I will joke and socialize with everyone but I will also be mindful of my audience, accidental or otherwise. Again, I apologize.

The other developer making jokes, Alex Reid, was not fired.

PlayHaven CEO Andy Yang acknowledged firing the developer, writing, "PlayHaven had an employee who was identified as making inappropriate comments at PyCon, and as a company that is dedicated to gender equality and values honorable behavior, we conducted a thorough investigation. The result of this investigation led to the unfortunate outcome of having to let this employee go. We value and protect the privacy of our employees, both past and present, and we will not comment on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways... We believe in the importance of discussing sensitive topics such as gender and conduct and we hope to move forward with a civil dialogue based on the facts."

Richards' own blog was subsequently hit by a DDoS attack. VentureBeat also reports that Richards has been the target of rape and death threats on Twitter, although such tweets have apparently been deleted by Twitter.

The SendGrid website has also been unresponsive much of the day. The company has not confirmed the cause, although it's assumed to be a DDoS attack. (Hacktivist group Anonymous is supposedly behind it.) "Our SMTP and Web servers are currently down," SendGrid wrote in a status update. A few hours later, the company provided some good news: "We're now accepting mail via SMTP & Web API. The Website is up, and we're working to finalize this resolution." Business customers have complained about the outage impacting their operations.

Today, SendGrid fired Richards. In a Facebook post, SendGrid wrote, "Effective immediately, SendGrid has terminated the employment of Adria Richards. While we generally are sensitive and confidential with respect to employee matters, the situation has taken on a public nature. We have taken action that we believe is in the overall best interests of SendGrid, its employees, and our customers."

A further post from SendGrid CEO Jim Franklin a few hours later expanded on the company's reasons for firing Richards. "SendGrid supports the right to report inappropriate behavior, whenever and wherever it occurs," Franklin wrote. "What we do not support was how she reported the conduct. Her decision to tweet the comments and photographs of the people who made the comments crossed the line. Publicly shaming the offenders—and bystanders—was not the appropriate way to handle the situation.

"A SendGrid developer evangelist’s responsibility is to build and strengthen our Developer Community across the globe. In light of the events over the last 48+ hours, it has become obvious that her actions have strongly divided the same community she was supposed to unite. As a result, she can no longer be effective in her role at SendGrid."

Update: The original version of this story said Adria Richards found out about her firing on Facebook and left a comment on her employer's page threatening a lawsuit. It now appears that comment was written by an impostor, and not by the real Adria Richards.

Update #2: Our editor-in-chief Ken Fisher weighs in on the controversy.