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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/...
Most of the celebs listed already been seen naked..
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*
What about telling those people who get shot every year not to stand in front of a killer wiht a gun?
Quite frankly - if someone is getting shot every year, I would have no problem telling him he's probably not making the best choices.
#DeleteChrome
Unfortunately, you live in the real world where your laptop is going to be stolen out of your car if you leave it visible on the front passenger seat while you go shopping in the mall. The thief is responsible for committing the crime and you didn't deserve to be the victim of that crime, but you *are* responsible for the circumstances which made it possible by not taking reasonable precautions like keeping your laptop out of site (or out of your car entirely).
Passwords, door locks, security systems, and safes exist for a reason.
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
No, it's the same argument as telling people that if you want something to remain private and within your control, don't stick it on the internet. Believe it or not, you can be *both* the victim of something *and* an idiot for not taking better precautions to protect yourself from being the victim of it.
We are talking about victims of crime here, not victims of accidents.
False equivalence. Minus 50 points for slytherin.
It's more like blaming somebody who was killed in a car accident that was somebody else's fault after they chose to wear their seatbelt, but design flaw they weren't aware of made it ineffective.
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."
Unfortunately me and you are of a tiny minority. Reddit should not have been suspired by its users comments because the vast majority were victim blamers not victim supporters. IMO Reddit took way too long to act, you don't need a reason or excuse to do the right thing.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Maybe the victim is a cat.
#DeleteChrome
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.
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.
Then I hope you backup your phone locally, and realise that if you have a house fire you may lose all your photos and other data.
Uh, GP didn't say he never uploaded photos to iCloud. He said he does NOT upload photos he doesn't "want distributed widely" to iCloud.
Basically, it's a good piece of advice generally: if you have very sensitive data that you'd like to keep private (whether it's financial data, passwords, nudie photos, whatever), it's probably best to keep your own control over that data. Devices that are attached the internet and which randomly transmit your data to other computers there are NOT guaranteed to be secure.
Which if you are a parent with photos of the kids would be adding one tragedy to another.
The ONLY place you have your photos of your kids is on your phone and on iCloud? I have electronic copies of photos I care about shared via a syncing utility (not based on commercial servers or services) on at least four different computers, with at least two different computers in different locations running backups daily.
There is not the slightest bit of emotion in my argument. It's perfectly rational. The criminal is 100% responsible for the crimes they chose to commit. And thus there in no percentage points available for allocating to the victim.
I probably shouldn't get involved in this discussion either, but I'm pretty sure that GP is NOT placing any blame on the victim, especially since he explicitly said that.
In case you've never thought about this, it is in fact possible for a number of factors to be preconditions to a criminal act without all of them being "responsible" for the criminal act. (You might consider reading some philosophy on the nature of causality here.)
Or, to take this to a less controversial topic, let's say that I observe that you keep arriving at work on rainy days with your clothes soaked. I carry an umbrella in my bag every day, just in case.
If I told you that I found things worked out better for me in terms of not having wet clothes when I get to work by carrying an umbrella with me, would you conclude that I've "allocated responsibility" for the weather to you? Of course not! That's preposterous. The weather is the weather, and you're not somehow "responsible" for causing the rain if it rains on you and soaks your clothes.
But carrying an umbrella might help. Suggesting that you could carry an umbrella is not "blaming the victim" of the rain -- it's pointing out that reasonable precautions can sometimes help to avoid bad situations.
I know that if I were a famous actress or something, and I knew that nude photos of me would be desireable by some sick hackers out there, I'd take extra precautions. That's not "blaming the victim." That's recognizing that evil people are in the world, and that's crap, and those evil people are 100% to blame for their stupid actions... but sometimes it's a rainy day, so preparation could help. I frankly feel very bad for those women whose privacy was violated here -- and I think it's really, REALLY important to talk about how to prevent such things in the future, which includes education about how to perhaps avoid dealing with these bad guys in the first place.
I absolutely get why the OP who started this thread sounded offensive by saying this was "overblown" or something. I do NOT get why you feel the need to attack someone (GP) who is talking about reasonable precautions to take to avoid being taken advantage of evil people in the world. In an ideal world, those evil people wouldn't exist... and I could let my doors open at night, post my financial passwords and data on a public website, and store my stash of cash on my front porch. But we all recognize that bad people will take advantage of situations like that. We all take precautions. Observing what sort of precautions might be helpful in certain circumstances is not "blaming the victim."
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.
Then when is the appropriate time to raise it?
After that hacking incidents in 2012 when Blake Lively, Scarlett Johansson, and other actresses found their private naked pictures redistributed?
How about when Vanessa Hudgens' photos and Hayley Williams' photos were redistributed before that?
How about when Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian had video of them having sex released prior to that?
Be they technological faults or human failings that led to the information getting out, there's an established pattern that large portions of the public want to see this stuff, and that some who are motivated will go through significant amounts of effort to make it happen. If it exists it's at risk of being exposed. The only certain way to prevent it from being released is to not create it in the first place. The only close-to-acceptable way to create it and not have it be at risk is to not use a digital means.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
How about at a time when you are not attaching it to a particular victim or victims, in order to allocate blame to them.
The only close-to-acceptable way to create it and not have it be at risk is to not use a digital means.
The only close to acceptable way to protect yourself from being mugged is not to carry any money or valuables. Do you carry them?
I've got three girls. I don't have a life anymore if I can't live with the fact that girls are human beings with sexuality being a part of it.
Instilling shame is not helping my wife and me in trying to give them other goals in life because shame is the one thing that heightens sexual connotation.
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?
And I was making 1 million trillion billion dollars a year until September 1st as well. Because once something is posted to slashdot, it must be true ... and nothing posted to slashdot never gets thoroughly debunked ... ever ...
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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).
Yes, it was a brute force attack. Apples now trying to cover it up by claiming "If only you had a better password." Which may be true, if their passwords had been 50 characters long it would have taken the brute force attack a lot long to complete. But the fact of the matter is, Apple forgot to put in an X number of wrong attempts = account locked, procedure in... or it wasn't working properly and people exploited it.
In cryptography, a brute-force attack means that you don't know anything about the password, but just try all the billions of possibilities. Assuming that a password character can only be a-z, A-Z, 0-9, and 10 other characters, and assuming that a password has exactly 6 characters, you would have to try on average (72^6)/2=69657034752 passwords. Assuming you can do 100 tries per second, that would still take more than 8062 days, or more than 22 years on average. Note that I'm being very generous in my assumptions here.
In other words, unless there was another weakness, a brute-force attack was impractical, even without any limit on the number of attempts.
What probably happened was that the passwords were indeed weak. If you know your victim has a dog called 'fido', you can try if she used that name in her password, and in my example you only have to guess two more characters. That only takes seconds or minutes. The attackers may call this brute force, but that's misleading.
"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
in which copying IS stealing in some contexts whether you think it's right or wrong
No, it's not.
It's copyright infringement.
Unless you're talking about trade secrets.
Which is again not stealing. It might be trademark or patent infringement though.
Calling any of that stealing is like calling drawing blood, or any other easily renewable bodily fluid, murder.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
That's not Apple shilling. The brute force vulnerability was there, but it's worth pointing out that there is not evidence that was what was used. So there may be another vulnerability for Apple (and iPhone users) to worry about. That's the opposite of shilling for Apple.
Don't care how many celebrities got their nude selfies exposed, nor various websites' responses, nor that at least 1 celebretard was underage when she took her pix.
If the person who coined 'fappening' comes to San Diego and drops me a line, you get 1 free beer.
That one that might of been underage when the pic was taken, claimed that it wasn't a picture of her. So if that is not a pic of her, and thus could not of been when she was under 18, how is that child pornography?
Be seeing you...
Because people lie?
"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.
[snipped]
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.
How the hell did this get modded insightful? No one is victim blaming - if a girl gets blackout-drunk at a private party with people she doesn't know very well then she isn't guilty of being raped, she's guilty of being stupid. The rapist still get's 100% "at fault" for rape. The victim get's $SOME% "at fault" for being stupid.
You're making a silly claim - that people should be absolved of all responsibility even when they take risks. Sorry, no. While the criminal is still 100% to be blamed for the crime, that doesn't prevent us from saying "what a stupid twit " for the victim taking unnecessary risks.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
4chan: Art for Fuck's sake.
If your goal is to prevent someone you love from getting into that situation, recommending that they not wear a short skirt and walk through a bad part of the city at night wouldnt be "blaming the victim". It would be pointing out that there are unwise things you can do that are liable to get you into trouble.
Blame isnt this binary thing where only one person can have done something wrong. If I walk through the Bronx in expensive close flashing a wallet full of money, I havent done anything illegal or wrong, but Im going to get mugged and a small part of the fault lies with me for making bad choices. That doesnt mean the mugger isnt at fault, just that I bear a little responsibility for making poor choices.
So, you can live in a fantasy world and pretend that anything you do thats legal, you should be able to do. Or, you can engage with reality and realize that some things that you do will create problems for you.
Did you just call me politically correct? You've gone too far mate...