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Responding to Celeb Photo Leaks, Reddit Scotches "Fappening" Subreddit
4chan might have introduced a DMCA policy, but Reddit goes farther: VentureBeat reports that the online community known as The Fappening has been dissolved by Reddit, in response to its use in posting and sharing many of the photos leaked from dozens of celebrities.
This isn’t the first time Reddit has decided to take action to ban certain questionable communities from its site, as its previously killed other subreddits like Creepshots for similar invasions of privacy as well as banned well-known power users shown to enable such actions. ... Reddit system admin Jason Harvey (aka “alienth”) attempted to cool some of the fuss by starting that discussion about why the company decided to ban the subreddit. Most of it boils down to Reddit waiting too long to speak up about it before making the decision to ban, while assuming its users would mostly understand why it took place. ... “If Reddit is truly to be a platform that’s open in any way, it needs transparency when (heavy handed) actions such as these are taken,” said Reddit user SaidTheCanadian in response to Harvey, while also suggesting the company create a “public log” of sorts showing all banning actions as well as explanations for each instance of a banned community. “I don’t want to be part of a community where community voices are silenced without meaningful notice or explanation. (No one really does like that secret police feeling.)”
Yishan Wong, the chief executive officer of Reddit, has tried to explain why the site has not banned certain subreddits (sections of the website where users share items connected to a specific topic) despite banning the subreddit which contained the stolen pictures of nude celebrities.
In a Reddit thread under the title “Every Man Is Responsible For His Own Soul” [sic], Mr Wong wrote: “I did not say ‘we won’t ban any subreddits ever’. I said that we don’t ban subreddits for being morally bad. We do ban subreddits for breaking our rules, and one of them is repeatedly and primarily being a place where people post copyrighted material for which valid DMCA requests are being received.”
Essentially, the company refuses to ban subreddits for being “morally bad” but will if they break any laws or any of the website’s own rules.
http://i100.independent.co.uk/...
How about telling those celeb sluts to stop taking naughty selfies, or at least not uploading them all to The Cloud (tm)?
Puritanical American blaming the victims. It's the same argument as telling rape victims they shouldn't have worn short skirts.
You can probably get them easily by searching for "fappening" on a torrent tracker. But the point is this has gone way beyond news for nerds or stuff that matters. We've covered the leak before here on slashdot, and there was one interesting aspect, namely that Apple would allow brute force dictionary attacks (and claimed there was no security issue, while patching it at the same time), but covering how reddit is banning a "community" known as "The Fappening"??? What next, articles analyzing the artistic merit of the average 4chan post?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Don't wanna be strangled? Don't have a neck. Don't want your car stolen? Don't own a car. Stealing is wrong no matter the context.
How about grasping that I can do with my body whatever I want. Upload my photoes where ever I want.
But you may not download, upload my photos anywhere! You shall not hack my account! Regardless if it is my private PC at home or my cloud storage!
What about telling those people who get shot every year not to stand in front of a killer wiht a gun?
What about telling everyone who get mugged or rubbed not to have a $600 iPhone with him, or a $2000 laptop or not $1000 in cash. It is all their fault if they get deprived from their 'property'!??
You attitude likely comes from your desire to see the nude pics of those women yourself ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Your last sentence is pretty close to an ad hominem. The GP post is probably a troll. So why I'm posting here is beyond me. Maybe I'm bored.
Here's the thing. It's true that in a perfect world, you should have complete control of what happens to the stuff you post, just like you should have complete control over what happens to your body.
This isn't, unfortunately a perfect world.
Protecting yourself is a virtue, not a vice. And giving advice on how to protect yourself is not necessarily "blaming the victim".
Let me put it another way: to use some analogies that have been put forth in other comments, if there is a place in town where someone gets raped every single night, maybe two or three people, and you deliberately going to that place at night, alone... do you really think it's going to do any good to just tell whomever you encounter "don't rape me?"
When it would never have happened if you'd just not gone?
Protect yourself. Don't do stupid stuff. At the end of the day, you do have *some* control over your circumstances. Don't give up that control just because someone else does something stupid too.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
Uploading nude selfies to the cloud is stupid and naive.
It's not like they actively did so. It's simply an online backup, which is enabled when setting up the phone. You can opt out, but of course backing up is the recommended action. And quite rightly so. There is more chance of people being harmed by losing all the photos of the kids when a phone dies than there is of the account being hacked and photos being taken.
Consider also that the technicalities of a backup are beyond most non-technical consumers. Which is the group most people, including celebrities, fall in to.
Again, blaming the victims is just wrong.
What next, articles analyzing the artistic merit of the average 4chan post?
Since most 4chan posts are done for neither fame, nor money, I would argue that they are the only true form of art.
*ducks*
I completely disagree with you. Particularly the last sentence, which, again, is coming close to an ad hominem. I didn't make that argument and I wasn't going to.
I don't upload photos that I don't want distributed widely to iCloud. I figure if I do that I'm just asking for whatever happens. And that is the way *I* look at it when it comes to my own business, so I won't listen to anyone telling me I'm wrong.
I'm done here. One can never win this kind of argument because there is never any rationality to it. It's all emotional.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
We are talking about victims of crime here, not victims of accidents.
This was more the case of "Don't want your car stolen? Don't leave the windows down and doors unlocked". The thief still has to hot wire the car, and he/she still takes the lion's share of the blame, but it doesn't detract from the fact that it is really stupid to leave your car out like that.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Is it wrong to cite the bad choices that a rape victim may have made, in a specific circumstance, like getting blackout-drunk in a semi-private party while surrounded by people that the victim might not know very well, when the nature gathering itself has helped whip up those in attendance into a higher state of sexual interest?
In that kind of circumstance the rapist is 100% at fault for his actions, but that doesn't mean that one can't cite additional responsibility on the part of those that took away their own self-control. The expression, "boys will be boys," is misinterpreted. It's not an excuse, it's a warning. The only behavior that one can control is one's own. Regardless of how illegal, unethical, or immoral an act by another may be, their behavior is not something that you can control. If you don't want to be a victim, don't make it easy to become a victim, as the law will only serve to prosecute afterward, not to protect in advance.
In these circumstances, the very existence of the profession paparazzi combined with all of the tabloids that have significant circulation should already be a warning that like it or not, as far as the public's concerned their bodies are not off-limits. Add in previous incidents where private photos have been published and redistributed, and you already have a known threat. Throw in lessons that we're taught as children about the inherent untrustworthiness of others, the lack of knowledge and understanding of the technology that they're using, and the flaws in that technology that aren't even understood by those that developed the tech, and you've got the recipe for what happened. And while it's wrong, while it's immoral, unethical, and probably illegal, it will continue to happen as long as people want to see these stars without their clothes on. There's no excuse to make one's self vulnerable to this, and unfortunately without an understanding of the technology and vigilance with regard to it for as long as the images exist, this kind of thing will always be a risk.
In short, don't take naked pictures if you're not comfortable with them being exposed at some point. You cannot truly protect yourself from them being redistributed.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
All this fuss, because the victims were famous. If someone posted naked pictures of any of us on the internet, the police would laugh at us. Would the FBI get involved? Would subreddits get deleted? Hell no... If there's any great tragedy in this whole mess, it's that it highlights the class divide in this country. If you're famous, you get more rights than the rest of us.
Thousands of people have their nude photos leaked to the net every day. Reddits FULL of them. Suddenly now it's a big deal. I've no sympathy for these people, not because it's their fault, but because this is just a small dose of what it's like to be normal. Cry me a river.
In that kind of circumstance the rapist is 100% at fault for his actions, but that doesn't mean that one can't cite additional responsibility on the part of those that took away their own self-control.
"Responsibility" implies that you are at fault if you don't do a thing. And you've already allocated 100% of the "at fault" to the rapist. So there's a logical fault there.
There's nothing wrong with advice to people about what ways they can minimise risk. But the time for that is before the crime, and the people to do that to are people that are in danger. Raising it after the crime, amongst a group of people who are not renowned for having photogenic bodies, reveals that it is just reducing the blame allocated to the criminals, and that's wrong.
These people had no responsibility not to take nude pictures; no responsibility not to have them backed up on line, and bear no part of the blame for the crime of them being hacked.
Which is not the same thing as it being less risky not to do those things.
You know it would be less risky if I didn't carry cash in my wallet. But that doesn't make me even slightly responsible or to blame if I get mugged.
From what I've been reading, some of the models were under 18 when the photos were taken, which makes those photos child pornography. Hosting, linking to, uploading, distributing, possessing, or downloading those particular pics is illegal. "Child pornography" is a whole other level of illegality to "stolen pics," with much heavier penalties.
As far as the argument that "Nobody cares until it happens to a celebrity," sometimes a famous case that happens to a celebrity is what people need to get them to start caring about an issue. A lot of people started caring more about AIDS once Rock Hudson and Freddie Mercury died. Nobody really knew what ALS was until Lou Gehrig got it, and it ended his baseball career and then his life. While the events themselves are regrettable, I think it's great that this has started a dialog about stolen pics and revenge porn. Look, there are plenty of people who willingly place themselves on display. Why fap/shlik it to stuff that was posted nonconsensually?
Uploading nude selfies to the cloud is stupid and naive.
[...]
Again, blaming the victims is just wrong.
I would not call it "stupid and naive", but perhaps "imprudent" for people (and celebrities in particular) to (a) have these types of photos, and (b) have them uploaded anywhere. The main problem is (a) though.
And saying that that it was unwise to create these types of photos (especially if you're famous) is not blaming them.
None of these celebrities did anything wrong, and none of them probably deserved for this to happen for them. But they did increase their risks. At least for me, that is what I mean by "imprudent" in having these types of pictures. I often go by the saying "three may keep a secret if two are dead" which is why I'm generally OCD about having my name entered into a database.
And it does not even have to be malicious people that would lead to these types of photos to leak: just ask Hayley Williams of the group Paramore about posting to Twitter.
Seriously: if you're going to don't want the data to spread, don't generate it. And if you are going to generate such types of bytes, at least make sure it's deniable (e.g., masks/no faces in photos).
"Responsibility" implies that you are at fault if you don't do a thing. And you've already allocated 100% of the "at fault" to the rapist.
No it does not.
You are conflating responsibility, blame and fault into one and single thing. Which is not the case.
That is why a statutory rape charge is not a possible charge if both persons who are engaged in consensual sex are adults.
Responsibility means that one is responsible for one's own actions.
And yes, if one's actions endanger others they ARE responsible for the results of those actions.
Like someone going out to sea in a storm, falling overboard and causing millions in damage to haul their ass out of the water.
The fault is not implied in one's responsibility, but in the results of their actions for which they are responsible.
In the case of pictures and reddit and the deletes, celebrities have a responsibility to act like responsible adults.
Responsible adults don't leave their naked pictures online. Period.
BUT!
The burden of their fault there is suffered solely by their reputation and their "good name".
Which is why they are making demands on account of this being "a copyright issue" and not something else, like invasion of privacy.
The responsibility for breaking into their accounts and taking and sharing those photos on the other hand belongs solely to those who did the breaking in/stealing/sharing.
And so does the fault. For every one of those acts.
The responsibility for them being ABLE to do that rests on the host service which the celebrities in this case were using.
Same as the responsibility of reddit for providing their users with tools and ability to share those images.
After all, if there was no responsibility there, celebs would have no one to ask to pull down those photos, but the people who actively share them on reddit.
And, we are back to celebs and their responsibility for demanding that reddit removes those images - causing reddit to remove entire subreddits, thus encroaching on freedom of speech of EVERYONE using those subreddits.
More responsibility and more fault for both.
There are various responsibilities, various faults and none of them are a zero sum game.
Some are a matter for the legal courts to determine the blame, some are judged in the court of public opinion, some will not be judged at all.
But there is plenty of responsibility and fault to go around.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens