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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."
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.)
I bet they are.
At the company I worked for the IT department had a machine which was always on and whose only purpose was to download files like that over BitTorrent. Of course only a few people inside IT knew about this machine.
The company had about 10'000 employees. I guess a company like Intel (which has around 80'000 employees) downloading some random file over BitTorrent is absolutely nothing special.
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.
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.
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.
Do you really manage a database that large in Excel? Does your computer shit parts of its motherboard out of its optical disk drive every time you open the file?
The Scientology word for it is "Audit."
Which highlights the point that whoever is downloading the torrent at Intel must be doing so with authorization.
..." I can answer that one. Last place I worked as IT manager, but not by my choice, I wanted to lock the firewall down and block everything but web, email and a VPN port. I was overridden by the Boss, seems one of the guy in the machine shop (who also did the IT support before me, Goddess! what a mess!) had been downloading torrents of MS Office, Solidworks, MasterCam, Win XP and just about every software app they had in the office. Every time I tried to bring up the issue and try to get auth to start getting licenses I was told it would be too expensive. This was during the same time that the boss/owner took $400,000 out of the company accounts to buy a new house, he was also laying people off because their wasn't enough work for them.
As to your question of "what kind of IT department
When the employee count got down to 25 I was laid off too on the premise that they didn't think they needed a full time IT department, the guy from the machine shop was going to babysit the network again. Thing that pisses me off if as long as he doesn't fuck with it will run smoothly until a hardware failure. I had set everything up to be just about idiot proof. Makes me think I did my job too well but its the only way I know how to do things.