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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/...
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
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
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."
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.
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?
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