Rape threats and online harassment

I’ve linked before to accounts of how some men respond to women speaking up by the use of rape threats. This article shows online harassment is even worse than I was aware of. For example, one woman blogger and software designer made a proposal in 2007 to have moderated comments on major blogs (apparently a radical idea). The response: Death threats and rape threats. Then Andrew “weev” Auernheimer posted her address so the threateners knew where she lived (he apparently does a lot of that). It goes on from there. All ugly.
Meanwhile the WaPo reports on men who use online ads to get revenge on their exes: Posting prostitution ads giving the exes address, and in some cases listing exes’ kids as available for sex, for a price.
In some of the various cases at both links, people tried to get help from websites, police, etc. It often wasn’t forthcoming. In the case of Auernheimer, he’s been prosecuted for an unrelated case (releasing emails of 14,000 AT&T customers, which he claims was done to expose a security flaw). He’s attracted a lot more defenders in the cyber-community than any of his victims did.
This is alarming because as noted at the links it’s so easy to do it’s hard to guard against. Changes in the laws will help, but that’s not going to be easy either (some of the WaPo psychos seem pissed-off enough I’m not sure the risk of prosecution will help).
Note: While I’m largely unimpressed with Twitter so far, an NK Jemisin tweet alerted me to this stuff, so that’s something to say for it.
•And while we’re dealing with sexism, Indiana’s attorney general, Greg Zoeller, recommends all pregnant women be tested for drugs, automatically, just in case they’re taking something that hurts the baby. Won’t be intrusive at all, no sirree bob.