FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Racial Segregation for Websites Is 'Very Easy,' Stunt Coder Says

‘Just took a few hours of coding.'
Image: Flickr/jeff_golden

Earlier this week, an anonymous developer released an open source program called "Genetic Access Control" that can restrict access to sites based on a user's ethnicity.

The code for Genetic Access Control was uploaded to GitHub on July 20th by someone calling themselves "offensive-computing." The program uses a third party authentication tool called OAuth2 to get basic permissions from the user in order to call up genetic information from the database maintained by genetic testing company 23andMe. It's basically like when you give a third party app access to your Twitter account.

Advertisement

When visiting a website, the program was meant to grant or restricted access based on a user's ethnicity. Offensive-computing used genetic data provided by 23andMe's developer API, which is easy to sign up for and free to use.

"Took just a few hours of coding. Very easy"

Although only three people actually used the program before offensive-computing's access to the API was cut off, as 23andMe told Wired UK, it nonetheless raises questions about the dark side what can be done with genetic information when it's made publicly available. Just imagine if the Chimpire, a rabidly white supremacist group of subreddits on Reddit, got a hold of such software, for example. Not enough European ancestry in your genes? Access to subreddit denied.

When I emailed offensive-computing to ask about the program, the anonymous developer stressed how easy the whole thing was.

"Took just a few hours of coding. Very easy. Only thing limiting me is the API key," the developer wrote. As for the prospect of others picking up where the coder left off, offensive-computing wrote that it would not be difficult. "They just need to convince 23andme to not yank their API access. Shouldn't be hard to do—I intentionally wasn't very subtle. Just make it look less obviously offensive," the developer said.

Screengrab: GitHub

As for why offensive-computing created the program in the first place, the coder's answer was less bombastic than you'd expect. "They have a very useful and interesting API so gaining some experience with it seemed like a good idea. The best way to learn a new piece of technology is to try building a small project."

Advertisement

On the GitHub page for Genetic Access Control, offensive-computing notes that the program could be used by groups wishing to cordon themselves off based on genetics for reasons other than racism. A "women-only" online community is listed on the GitHub as a possible use case, but here you see an obvious problem with delineating groups solely on genetics: presumably a trans woman trying to access the site would be banned.

"Doing something like that for the lolz isn't activism, it's sociopathy"

When I asked what offensive-computing thought of people characterizing Genetic Access Control as dangerous or deeply offensive, the developer referred to the ability to build programs easily with a database of genetic data as a "double-edged sword." In terms of regulation, the developer wrote, scrutiny should be laid on individuals making the decision to use a technology in a certain way, "not a 100-line Python script."

Not everyone saw Genetic Access Control merely as a cheeky way to raise a discussion about how genetic data is used by programmers. Russell Neches, a doctoral student in microbiology and population biology at UC Davis, created a fork of the repository in order to submit a pull request, which means that his changes would be adopted by the main repository if accepted by offensive-computing. He deleted everything.

Watch more from Motherboard: Buying Guns and Drugs on the Dark Web

"It's like discovering a way to break into people's email accounts, and then posting the proof-of-concept code on Pastebin," Neches wrote me in an email. "Doing something like that for the lolz isn't activism, it's sociopathy. There aren't any lolz for the people affected."

According to offensive-computing, the goal—beyond sparking a discussion—was to encourage others to contribute to the "Offensive Application Programming Initiative."

It's not clear if anyone is really a part of this "initiative" besides offensive-computing, but the developer characterized it as "an organization where people can contribute artistic and functional open source code that sparks debate about the ethical implications of software that hurts people's feelings."

Here, offensive-computing is just another run of the mill "PC culture has gone too far!" troll—someone who believes that race-based discrimination is really just a case of hurt feelings, after all. Regardless, offensive-computing's creation is still out in the wild, albeit without API access.