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Who Is Downloading the Torrented Facebook Files?
eldavojohn writes "Gizmodo's got an interesting scoop on a list of IPs acquired from Peer Block revealing who is downloading the Facebook user data torrented this week: Apple, the Church of Scientology, Disney, Intel, IBM and several major government contractors just to name a few. The article notes that this doesn't mean it's sanctioned by these companies or even known to be happening, but the IP addresses of requests coming to one of the users' machines match to lists of IP blocks for each company."
On an average popular torrent, are these companies also listed?
Looking over the long list of companies, you see what amounts to a list of large employers. Since we can't know if the downloading was an individual or a company decision, this tells us exactly nothing. There's no story here because there's no useful information.
Heck, if I were a company that wanted that torrent, I'd get someone to download it at home and walk it in to our office. Companies aren't always that foresighted, of course, but they're also not generally stupid if they're successful.
(It's like noting that an IP from the NSA checks Slashdot. It could be Slashdot being monitored or, more likely, it could be a random employee just posting.)
Most of the traffic PeerBlock blocks is false positives. It blocks huge ranges of IP addresses, YOU could be on one of their lists. The Gizmodo article says "it should be mostly accurate". Lol.
It used to be called PeerGuardian, remember? The "lucky talisman" app that stops teh RIAA catching you? What a load of balls.
shin phantomflanflinger
See the thing is the profiles were all public someone just made a web crawler to create it then put it up as a torrent download. No privacy was violated that wouldn't be with a normal search.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The profiles are NOT private, nor there is anything "hacked" here.
This archive contains only the information that users made publicly available (consciously or not) - this stuff was just crawled from the web and put together in one large file.
There is no news here... if I were Apple or Cisco, I would crawl this public info myself, rather than relying on some dude that posted it on a torrent...
"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong." (Oscar Wilde)
I wonder what they want with Facebook info? I hope it isn't to harass people.
I'm sure they have a more palatable word for it. Perhaps "save", "convert", "assist", etc.
I would question whether many people other than a major corp have the resources to work with that large a data set. It's not like Joe Schmoe can open that in Excel. Even if Joe could get it open, running any kind of query, even on indexed fields, would take forever. It can take up to 20 minutes for my quadcore to do a sort on our 300k record 200 field database.
Corporations seem like a much more likely consumer of this data than anyone else. I'm thinking about downloading it just to see... I'll let you know how the sort time goes....
What is a tormented Facebook file??
I would not be terribly surprised if the organizations that were listed had instructed their employees to download this torrent.
If a company sanctioned it (and that is purely an assumption) they could be looking for info on their own employees.
When they pull crap like "we just reset/changed/added some protection settings, everything you had guarded is now wide open, kthxbye!", especially when it is a blatant attempt to further their own business plan, and then someone sucks all the data off and makes it available like this entity did?
The old "permission change without warning" has happened with Yahoo and FB that I know of.
YA, TOS probably state they can do whatever they want, but with TOS like that there has to be a fine line crossed somewhere eventually that lands them in hot water.
Heck, if I were a company that wanted that torrent, I'd get someone to download it at home and walk it in to our office. .
Why? There's nothing wrong with what they're doing.
People put their lives up for public view. And if you made you profile private or whatever, then that's an issue with FB and not with these companies.
This is not different than reading someone's published autobiography.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Actually, the profiles were all private, and then facebook changed the default privacy settings to make them public and 100 million chumps didn't know/care enough about their privacy to change things.
You can be assured that if they find their own MEMBERS acting out in unapproved ways, those members will be disciplined. The rest of the data? Maybe they'll sift through it, looking for potential rich converts. They can't rest on their laurels, after all. They need to continue bilking wealthy people out of their money!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The Scientology word for it is "Audit."
I just downloaded this package, and all it has a lists of names and URLs to Facebook profiles. If they users made their profile private, you're not going to get anything more than their name.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
No, they are completely different - one is a bunch of rich religious zealots trying to force their opinions on everyone else, the other was founded by L. Ron Hubbard.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.