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Hack Exposes Pirate Bay User Data
tsu doh nimh writes "A group of hackers from Argentina recently broke into the database for thepiratebay.org, the Internet's largest torrent search engine, exposing user names, Internet addresses, and (MD5) hashed password data on more than 4 million users, according to Brian Krebs. He interviewed the leader of the group, Ch Russo, who said they briefly considered what the information would be worth to the RIAA and MPAA before going public with the breach. From the story: 'Probably these groups would be very interested in this information, but we are not [trying] to sell it,' Russo said. 'Instead we wanted to tell people that their information may not be so well protected.'"
MOD UP PARENT.
Explain how this post get hit with troll pts.
UGH.
I wonder how many instant enemies these guys have made overnight?
Since when does The Pirate Bay have a policy of only distributing "publicly available information?" Pprivate information has been distributed via Pirate Bay before, such as the leaked Half-Life 2 source code or Paris Hilton's hacked cell phone pictures. Why should this information be any different?
If a torrent for the users' info appeared on the site and the admins ignored a community demand to take it down, you bet that community would ditch the site and TPB would die. It's in TPB's best interest to keep user information secret; I do not understand why this is hard to grasp.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
> THOSE are data sets that need to be freed
Arrrgh...
Perhaps it should be expressed instead as "information tends towards the public domain".
The meaning of IWTBF is the antonym of what you stated; instead of having to "be freed" by some liberator, information *will free itself* if constraints to its movement *are not applied*.
The activity is on the part of the anthropomorphic information itself.
That is: passwords, secrets and proprietary information will gradually drift towards becoming public knowledge unless an entity spends time, money and resources in stemming that movement. For information to become free, no-one has to do anything. It will gradually happen as an aspect of daily human interaction.
One solution is to have people enter their e-mail address when they want to change their password. If the MD5 or SHA1 has of the entered address matches the hash of the e-mail address on file, then send out the e-mail. If it does not, then that's not the right person. Then you don't need the actual address on file at all.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)