Hacking my Vagina
scanlime.org
scanlime.org
Is reverse engineering the wireless protocol easy? I imagine hacking hardware involves a lot more work than software.
I also love how she 3d printed out some plastic cases for her toy. I see cheap 3d printers eventually being so ubiquitous that a quick prototype may be just as easy to hack up as a working software program.
1. The specs for the radio chip are easily available, so she could identify the actual packets from looking at the voltages on four wires.
2. Each packet had two identical bytes that went up when she turned the remote up, and down when she turned it down.
3. There were some bytes which were always constant, and didn't seem to do anything.
From there, the code ended up being fairly simple:
https://github.com/scanlime/arduino-lelo-remote/blob/master/...
On power-up, it sends an initialization sequence, copied from the trace from the original remote. This has a bunch of settings that you can look up in the manual. Then for each packet, it sends a start sequence (essentially, "finish sending anything queued, and stand by"), puts a packet into the transmit queue (packet = 0x0100a5[power][power]00000005, where power is the power level byte), and then tells the radio to transmit.
And then of course you can debug this by comparing the traces it generates to the traces from the original remote.
How does one go about doing this? Is this done on hardware or some wireshark-esque software tool?
[1] http://www.saleae.com/logic [2] http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Bus_Pirate
I can dream.
There's been some promising blips here and there with the reprappers:
http://blog.reprap.org/2011/06/new-approach-to-printing-meta...
http://blog.reprap.org/2012/04/some-more-printed-circuitry.h...
There's gotta be a market for this.
There's a toy called the vstroker, that's basically an endcap to the fleshlight for doing accelerometer readings. (http://www.vstroker.com, NSFW). It also uses a CC25XX radio chip, and comes with a USB dongle that's basically the reference implementation. So, since these two talk on the same controls, you should be able to take the dongle from the vstroker and the lelo toy, and have full USB computer control.
Boom. Teledildonics capabilities, using a combination of toys that are (vaguely) gender incompatible.
I actually started slashdong as somewhat of a joke 8 years ago, and now I travel internationally speaking on the subject. Life is weird.
http://offbeatr.com/ http://www.passionateproduce.com/
And companies like lovepalz (http://lovepalz.com) and vibease (http://vibease.com, where the hell ARE you in this thread, Dema! I know it's like stupid AM over in Singapore but get on here and market, damnit :) ) are co-opting the "kickstarter look" even though they aren't running as actual crowdfunded projects.
In the end, you don't see a lot of products make it to market for 2 reasons. First, making hardware is difficult, but that's been covered here a bazillion times over. The contextual issue with sex tech is that people are scared to install a damn printer on their computer. Putting their private parts near it? Yeah right. If you can't design a user interface for an OS that someone is comfortable with, something as intimate as sex is sooo far off your damn radar.
I've seen 10s of companies come and go without ever getting a product to market since I started tracking this in 2004. There's a ton of factors that just aren't thought about yet.
If you want to see the state of the industry circa 2007:
That's a presentation I did back then. A lot of the info still holds, though there's many new players in the game now. I did an updated presentation in May, will see if there's video around. Or if anyone wants a presentation at their meetup of choice around the Bay Area, just lemme know.
I'm working on an article about sex tech startups (failed/succeeded, and current) that I'll hopefully get posted sometime this week.
MLNP wants to inspire and stimulate open, healthy conversations about sex and pornography. #realworldsex
Cindy on TED http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV8n_E_6Tpc
608 points should be around 60.000 visitors. Thats something any site should be able to handle, but ...
http://dreamhost.com/servers/vps/ <- All VPS plans come with UNLIMITED Bandwidth and Storage.
UNLIMITED ... till they pull the plug lol
But it might also just be that the site is overloaded. I sometimes get an "Error establishing a database connection" and sometimes "Problem loading page". So there is still a server who desperately tries to answer requests.
What kind of server do you have at dreamhost? A VPS? Is that VPS some Viruozzo/OpenVZ crap, or a Xen instance?
I am reminded of pg's discussion on finding the taboo's in society.
We still have plenty.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/27/boink-box/
http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/29/speaking-of-sex-toys-with-e...
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/24/long-distance-lovers-rejoic...
Hardly. There are plenty of hackers who have been working in this space for quite some time. The field is called "teledildonics".
But you're absolutely right about the taboos in society. If you're interested, this is an interview with me on Inc about my and my team's battle to make https://www.makelovenotporn.tv/ happen. Every obstacle an entrepreneur with a tech startup encounters - have a tech startup dealing with sex, triple them. http://www.inc.com/chris-beier-and-daniel-wolfman/venture-ca...
Did you take time to read the article? It's just great - full of technical details, including the reasoning behind the creation of the hack.
Many times I've seen dumb things in the front page - complex pointless hacks (I remember one about locales and printf which advocated a libc recompile while I suggested a perl oneliner).
This is a genuinely interesting and creative hack.
EDIT: as I mentionned below, "The title is misleading" - it is linkbait. But the content is there.
Scientists See Promise in Deep-Learning Programs Machine Learning: Neural Network vs Support Vector Machine Suite of 300 icons for web and user interface design
But you are right that there is a lot of link-baitiness on HN. Doesn't mean we can't wish for better.
I don't think he is saying it shouldn't make it on HN, if anything he's speculating as to whether or not it would be on the #1 spot if it were a male sex hack instead..
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4826621
[edit] I ended up deleting the submission because it turned out to be an Onion-like site.
Though it's admittedly lower tech. I would welcome technological advances for men as well. Why not? It interests both the human and hacker in me.
The question is this: is this doing well on HN because HN is full of progressive-minded feminists upvoting a neat DIY project on its merits, or is it doing well on HN because it serves as fodder for the nerd-girl fantasies of a primarily male readership?
I really think this is an important point that often gets missed on male dominated social news sites. Readers are quick to pat themselves on the back for the community's mature lack of slut-shaming, while neglecting to realize that an entirely different form of sexism and woman-objectification is taking place.
Is not only the fact that she is a woman, is the surrounding context of a sexual stimulation device that provoque so many upvotes. Personally I would downvote this if I could, I don't like my tech articles biased by hormones.
In fact, the only awkward thread, which seems a little sexist is this one... Food for thought.
For example If a boss needs to hire a good secretary for one of his employees; and assign him the task of finding one and then tells him "Don't let your hormones decide for you" is pretty clear what he means; that sexual attraction and gender should be irrelevant in the selection proccess and he should focus in practical skills a secretary should have. And there is nothing sexist about that; because sexism is discrimination based on gender and this is an enforcement for the lack of that kind of discrimination.
Also, why does it have to be a secretary? Are they 100% female now? If he was looking for an engineer, would he need to be told not to let his hormones decide?
The majority of secretaries are female (not all); and is no secret that sometimes people hire based on looks instead of actual skills.
But in this case I think you're wrong. This thread is a totally legitimate discussion of a very interesting, detailed and inventive technical post and I find it hard to believe that an equally detailed and well-written post from a male perspective would not be received in much the same way.
I don't think you're being sexist, but you are being wrong about something in a way that an average internet commenter would find hard to distinguish from sexism (and the average internet commenter is not particularly capable of nuanced thought).
I can only assume that you are very naive; for the average male is impossible to read this article without imaging a woman using the device; wish does not mean that there aren't legitimate and interesting discussions in this thread; but is clear that the exponential popularity grow of this article is strongly correlated with that fact.
So do you always assume bad faith on the part of others or..?
Yes. (With the caveat that "is full of" == "has more than 3")
But there's a problem beyond the double standard. It's like public nudity: it sounds cool when you're a hormone-addled teenager, but then you realize that most people's bodies aren't a nice sight at all. That's why I'm thankful for common decency, and why I'm concerned about all the public dildo-waving: in most cases, I don't want to see your filthy body, and I certainly don't want to picture you having sex.
Of course, I have no problem with this blog post - but the "openness" that's bothering some of these posters does have the potential to impinge on my rights of peaceful enjoyment of our public meatspace.
For the obvious joke?
Immaturity can make the day so bright some times.
Anyway, this is the first article of it's kind I've ever seen on HN, so I'm not too worried. I haven't seen anything remotely approaching the misogyny that feels absolutely rampant on the rest of the internet (e.g. Reddit) that drove me here.
In any case, more directly addressing your comment, I think it's a great question to ask- gender and sex differences in society are always interesting/potentially fruitful discussion topics, IMHO.
1 http://www.amazon.com/Cobra-Libre-Massager-Vibrating-Stimula...
Uh, yeah, speak for yourself.
There is also a noticeable lack of women in tech, so an article for and about women is more notable and interesting than articles about dudes wanting to be or being entrepreneurs. Those are being written roughly the same way twenty times per day.
Now if you're curious about how big your hypothetical penis article gets, the best way to find out is probably not by posting thinly veiled sexist comments. Instead I suggest finding out how to hack your penis (literally, if you want) and then writing an article as well as this woman has.
And I'm sad there's no awesome open source version of Rez to go with her device. Probably NSFW for language and underwear photo (http://www.gamegirladvance.com/2002/10/sex-in-games-rezvibra...)
There's been open source trancevibe drivers since 2003. :)
There's 3 toys based on the protocol.
- The original Trancevibe (ebayable, surprisingly powerful)
- the Drmn trancevibe (http://tim.cexx.org/projects/vibe/), no longer sold
- This weird one: http://www.harnett-tech.com/search.php?act=search&SKU=US...
I wrote the original Second Life trancevibe control layer in 2005 (i.e. click on virtual genetalia, real vibrator vibrates), which was later integrated into in-world genetalia by one of the larger virtual sex object manufacturers. After the Drmn trancevibe went off sale, they created that last one to sell to customers.
From the site "My full name is Micah Elizabeth Scott, but I used to be Micah Dowty prior to Fall 2010. My friends call me Beth."
How can a woman who used to be a man can have a vagina? is there some kind of surgery? do you keep your sensitivity to be able to use vibrators?
If we were talking about someone with a surgically reconstructed vagina I think that would be relevant in this particular story, just because physically it won't be identical and the effect of the vibrator could be different.
The short version: They form a vagina in the pelvis and reuse the head of the penis to form a clitoris. The urethra is also rerouted. Caveat: I am nothing more than a layperson on the subject. My short version may be wrong, and there may be other surgeries available.
The longer version: Wikipedia [1] has quite a bit of information on the subject. Use incognito mode if you must; I've always found it to be a fascinating subject.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_reassignment_surgery (No images if you're worried about that.)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/micahdowty/5150806818/in/photos... http://www.flickr.com/photos/micahdowty/4698425505/in/photos... http://www.flickr.com/photos/micahdowty/4371698700/in/photos...
(Just a few self-photos from Beth's public Flickr stream; all pics are work-safe. This is an extremely cool hacking article, btw, regardless of the author's gender history.)
A sex change is hardly the only explanation, but it's a very likely one. Be honest. Let's say my name is John Leslie Roberts and for my entire life up until 2010 I was referred to as John, then I told you to start calling me Leslie from now on. I seriously doubt you would just shrug that off.
If you're wondering how others drew the correct conclusion without additional information, this is how. It's extremely common for those who have had male to female sex change to choose a female root name buried within their current name or names. It's extremely uncommon to do that for any other reason. People associate names, gender and personal identity very closely.
You change one so drastically, there is a good chance you've changed the others too. There is a lot more to that sentence than just a name change.
If it was a marriage that caused the name change, she would have just said that point-blank. No need to dance around it. From the lack of explanation it was pretty clear that it was a sex change.
Sometimes names can be different genders in different countries. I'm in Ireland, and here Rory is a male name, but apparently in USA it's a female name. The world is big and weird.
(And yes, modern surgery can create vaginas)
Yes it's call vaginoplasty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaginoplasty . There's also one for penises, phalloplasty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalloplasty
do you keep your sensitivity to be able to use vibrators?
Some trans people who get genital (or "bottom") surgery report increased sensitivity, compared to before. Modern surgery is getting better all the time.
Though it involves a sex toy, I think the build was straightforward, technical, and decidedly un-sexy. I don't know where the feather ruffling is coming from besides the discussion of the link's title.
If you trying and look for it on google all you get is shitty "tube" websites full of autoplaying livejasmin ads and links that go round in circles.
The content is terrible too, either staged "reality" BS , stuff designed to shock more than titilate, unwatchable crap made with a smartphone or weird softcore stuff that tries to be "arty" or "feminist".
I'm the founder btw. We help couples to stay intimate, even from a distance, by using mobile app and long distance vibrator. We use Bluetooth and internet. http://mashable.com/2012/10/26/vibease-sex-toy-app/
Techno-porn: how the sex industry drives mainstream technology
Star: "I don’t think most people have a clue how much life today is in debt to the porn industry. Online banking and shopping are secure because porn distributors needed to make their transactions with consumers secure."
http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/859762--techno-p...
We will see if haptic sex toys become mainstream. I didn't even know they existed in the first place!
It seems like a real innovation!
That isn't all that happens, as you can see from the comments like "Oh, yes, men have it so hard" whenever a situation that favors females over males is brought up.
It's part of a culture, one men perpetrate just as much as women if not more, that says "women are the only victims of sexism." If that statement doesn't seem immediately idiotic to you, the best I can offer right now is this:
http://www.alternet.org/story/156194/what_about_the_men_why_...
Reverse discrimination sucks for whites, maybe I should question every submission that is authored by someone who isn't white?
You'll note that I address male taboos about sex in other posts, but ironically it's probably not what you want or what you're really getting at without being explicit about.
Do you understand that "any female-positive topic" -> "what about the menz" is exactly the problem with this attitude?
It would be nice if "gender equality topics" weren't exclusively "female-positive topics", and that the topics about how men get the bad end of sexism weren't immediately met with sarcasm and derision.
I believe the world will be a better place when women can have orgasm as much as men do.
My startup, www.vibease.com, is helping couples to stay intimate even from a distance. We have a mobile App with long distance vibrator. We use Bluetooth and internet connection. Currenlty we are taking pre-order. We try to bring it to mainstream market and it's not easy: http://tech.co/vibease-vibrator-app-2012-11
This is not out of prurient interest. I just can't understand the engineering without understanding the use case. Maybe you have to be female to get this?
The feedback is important also. I fly rc helis and once you get used to using the sticks and the channels on a traditional radio using the iphone (say on an ardrone) and tilting to do the same (for me at least) is not as satisfying. It doesn't feel real or challenging.
One vibrator that uses a smartphone: http://www.vibease.com
I'm the founder btw. We help couples to stay intimate, even from a distance, by using mobile app and long distance vibrator. We use Bluetooth and internet. http://mashable.com/2012/10/26/vibease-sex-toy-app/
- BodyHeat, by OhMiBod/PerfectPlum: http://www.ohmibod.com/app/
- Closer ToGetHer - http://www.getclosertogether.com/
Any takers to found a startup in order to dive in and disrupt the sex toy industry with some cutting edge innovation? Imagine the millions you'd rake in if you re-invent sex.
I'm looking forward to at least one ero-toy applicant in the next round of YC apps.
I nearly applied with one this year. I came up with a technique to "3d print" custom sex toys a while back and have been iterating on the idea slowly, but it's not far enough along to throw my weight behind it as a real business.
I'm Vibease co-founder. We tried and we keep trying. So far no luck.
This is our pitch: Vibease helps couples to stay intimate, even from a distance. It's a mobile app for couples with personal massager integration.
Note, we didn't even put the word "vibrator". The rest of the story you can find it from here: http://tech.co/vibease-vibrator-app-2012-11
Some unsolicited advice from someone who's just heard about your product for the first time :)
* Avoiding the word "vibrator" is a good thought (sadly it has too many negative connotations), but I'd recommend never shying away from discussing the underlying problem you are trying to solve because it's both serious and real. ie: "People are busier than ever and are spending increasing amounts of time apart. We're taking steps forward to helping couples maintain a level of intimacy and connection in our dynamic world."
* Alternative language to just talking about "intimacy" can be a focus on the positive side-effects of intimacy, such as: happier lives, higher level of trust, and greater relationship satisfaction.
* The settings screen in your screenshot has a lot of sliders. I hope there will be some good presets for those who would otherwise get overwhelmed by the number of choices.
* Similarly, fingers crossed for a PC/Mac client (or otherwise the ability to video-chat over Skype) since holding two small devices (a phone and the massager) can get tricky.
As for the pitch, maybe a tongue-in-cheek: "Vibease lets you reach out to your partner and maintain intimacy from across the room... or across the world."
Sounds like you'll have a ton of (challenging, unique) fun with this product. Good luck!
Why?
And yes, certain demographics turn the equation on its head. As expected of economics.
I would disagree with at least the strong form of that assertion, on the grounds that evolution actually does stuff. Males and females have very different genetic payoffs for having lots of sexual partners versus holding out for a high quality mate.
See her resume at http://scanlime.org/resume/
http://www.gamegirladvance.com/2002/10/sex-in-games-rezvibra...
I think there's a lot of hacking potential. I think it would be cool to have a back room in a club where you have Rez on a game console on a big HD screen with a nice sound system. One could also implement a wireless protocol for the trance vibe info and publish the protocol, so spectators would casually walk in and wirelessly experience the "synaesthesia."
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
The actual best thing about this post being in first place on Hacker News is not that it's a woman posting but that she has a Y chromosome and most people don't realize it.
It's like her recently-acquired vagina is a new laptop to be hacked. It's still objectification of women if you try to turn into one and then objectify yourself.
The real goal of this post is to get a bunch of men to fantasize about "her" and glorify how cool "she" is for being a geeky hacker.
Not all trans(vestite|gender|sexual) people are like this.
Also she's queer, so the idea that she's doing it for male attention is pretty funny really.
This is a great post with so many neat hacks along the way--when she started talking about modeling and 3D printing the enclosure I was thinking "Wow, this is a true renaissance hacker."
The world needs more blog posts like this.
(But also it's a neat hack, she powers the microcontroller via the I/O pins and just attaches the vcc and ground pins to a capacitor.)
Your good fortune, mankind's loss:
https://plus.google.com/photos/107665675896730237663/albums/...
I don't buy in to the equivalence of building a better vibrator and objectifying women.
Whether she is trans* or not has nothing to do with this writeup. Why belittle her accomplishments? This is an innovative idea, and it will get people thinking about different ways to please themselves or their lovers.
If the article had been open about scanlime's transexuality it wouldn't have irritated me nearly as much, but my interpretation was that it was (unconsciously, perhaps) designed to validate that she really is a woman. No, you cannot actually change sex, modulo some crazy gene therapy.
I know I was kind of unfair in my original comment. I think it was really me whinging that the HN crowd wouldn't be gushing like this if they all knew that scanlime was trans, and then me also getting annoyed at my guess that scanlime was complicit in this. I feel like I need to say sorry. Sorry. But I'm about to undo my apology :/
In general, I get really annoyed by queer people making a point about their sexuality (e.g. gay men who lisp), and in my mind this article counts as such. They annoy me as much as frat boys and drunk girls in skimpy clothes and people wearing leather collars. I basically think our society is hypersexualized and that this is bad.
I don't know if trans women are objectifying women merely by existing. Most men do this, so it's highly likely. My most heinous viewpoint is that queer/fetish sexuality is likely to be some kind of psychological defense mechanism against childhood trauma, and while good and perfectly acceptable if it works and life is functional, it's important to keep the source of it in mind. Oh and finally I'm very likely not a radical feminist because I don't believe in equality between men and women but rather a kind of complementarity. (Yes, universal suffrage is good, and woman should be allowed to have jobs, etc.)
Then, you say you're annoyed by "queer people making a point about their sexuality". Now, the OP did not make a point about her sexuality in the blog post (1). You complained that she didn't. And then she did anyway? And that annoyed you?
Really, you can be a transphobe all you want and make an idiot of yourself that way, but this is HN, at least think about what you write.
(1) And, by the way, being trans has little to do with sexuality, but ok.
This is not meant to excuse hatred, but there should be some tolerance for confusion due to unfamiliarity. It's simply not something that most people have spent a lot of time thinking about.
I think what you read as "masculine tech writing" is just competence. True, there are a lot of incompetent female tech people who write, but 3-7x more incompetent men who write (due to overall prevalence of men in tech).
It might be the case that this strikes me as a man's writing just because there are more men in tech, but I don't know that it's the incompetence per se. It's sentences like, "Often in this situation I’ll break out something like the Saxo board, with an FPGA and a thick USB 2.0 pipe," that I just have a very hard time imagining a woman writing. In the same way that a woman couldn't have written Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. I think it's the implied, "I'm so cool because of all my techno whizbangs." But it's even in the non-tech writing: "In other words, I wanted to hack something I actually use: my vagina." is so horrid that I have to believe that even the bona fide female Xeni Jardin, lover of techno whizbangs, would have a hard time accepting it as... womanly... to talk about "using her vagina".
My girlfriend has screamed at me more than once over the futility of sharing my thoughts with "you people" who "will never understand [my] perspective", but at least a few here are kind, even if I'm not, and for that I'm grateful.
Could you be being any more blatantly transphobic? You're literally just inventing and projecting nonsense.
"[the] sex which produces eggs and which has XX chromosomes"
She doesn't produce eggs and she doesn't have XX chromosomes, so if you follow the strict definition she isn't female either.
That's not the definition of female either I (and others) use, and it's also not the definition of female used by modern society.
Hardly anyone knows what their chromosomes actually are, since people rarely get them tested (do you know yours? did you get them tested?), there are numerous biological conditions where people-commonly-treated-by-society-as-female do not have XX chromosomes, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity... and all the other "intersex" conditions. Likewise some people-commonly-treated-by-society-as-male do not have XY chromosomes. Phenotypically female does not always imply genetically XX. Many people only discover their genetic gender if they go to a fertility treatment (since many of these conditions affect fertility), sometimes the genetic gender is not their gender.
There are also lots of people-commonly-treated-by-society-as-female who do not (or cannot) produce eggs. Pre-pubescent girls, post-menopausal women, women after a hysterectomy, women on the contraceptive pill, etc. Likewise there are many people-commonly-treated-by-society-as-male who cannot produce sperm, sterile men, men after testicular cancer etc.
Regardless, some regions (e.g. UK), have law that allows a person to change their gender (they are treated as that gender "for all purposes"), and get a new birth cert in that gender, and makes revealing the previous gender a criminal offence. ( http://www.yourrights.org.uk/yourrights/right-to-receive-equ... ). That's another definition of gender right there.
Sorry, but the world/people/biology are complex and does not fit your simple definitions.
wiktionary...
I see you wikitionary and raise you wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender
"The sex of most mammals, including humans, is genetically determined by the XY sex-determination system where males have X and Y (as opposed to X and X) sex chromosomes."
I think the correct term for the author's sex is "Trans woman": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_woman
The sexual content (in a place like HN) made me uncomfortable; if it had been a post of normal quality I would have flagged it.
The genital surgery is, in itself, a hack. And not really a very elegant one - you go it with a knife, cut bits up and move them around, then sit back and wait for it to heal and hope the nerves hook up in a timely fashion so you can have a good time.
So hacking it some more? Sure. Why not? You've already started.
I'm a trans woman, and I think this is pretty cool, though I can't read the article because the host is down.
> If you're outside the US, we're sorting out a system for international payouts, and have to ask you to be patient while we get that put in place.
Easily one of the smartest things I've read in quite a while, and much of the hardware stuff is over my head but wow, color me extremely impressed.
Going a step further would be to give the vibrator some AI. There is of course some need to monitor pleasure, I dont know if that is easily possible but one could implment some kind of AI that would to that.
The next step would be to sell it to millions of woman and analysie all the data. Would be intressting what could be figured out that way.
However, I couldn't help being reminded of this comic: http://xkcd.com/196/ I feel like there's a lot of social factors that would make using an invention like this a little awkward. Maybe that's just me?
Target customers: long distance couples, virtual sex business. Taking it further: build a Airtime like social network around it.
Revenue stream: from selling the hardware, membership.
Nerds have their own weaknesses
Sincerely, Never Touched A Boob
Best linkbait title ever?