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More Ashley Madison Files Published
An anonymous reader writes: A second round of Ashley Madison data was released today. The data dump was twice as large as the first time, which was bad enough for "19 Kids and Counting" star Josh Duggar, and includes some of CEO Noel Biderman's email as well. The release of the cheating sites data has spawned a small scammer industry as people scramble to find a way to have their information deleted from the leaks. Wired reports: "The new release is accompanied by the note: 'Hey Noel, you can admit it's real now.' The message is likely a response to assertions made by the company's former CTO this week, who tried hard to convince reporters after the first leak occurred that the data dump was fake."
The whole operation of Ashley Madison - at least what is described of them in wikipedia - is crooked. I have no respect for such an operation that is built on lies and deceit. However, hacking them and dumping their data publicly is illegal regardless of what they are doing (and to the best of my understanding while Ashley Madison did immoral things, they were not illegal things).
If the hackers want to shut down Ashley Madison they might accomplish that, but they have also shown in so doing that there is a market demand for the services they provided, which will just cause someone else - presumably with better network security practices - to launch an identical service.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
How many suicides and divorces and single-parent homes will this lead to...
By "this," do you mean the cheating, or the getting caught? The getting caught wouldn't have happened without the cheating...
I think the real blame lies y'know, with the people who actually used this as a vehicle to cheat on their spouses. Blaming this leak for the fallout is like blaming your spouse's friend who rats you out for cheating on them.
The thing that is really concerning about this AM hack is not the data being real. I'm sure it MOSTLY is.
The problem is that the hackers could ALSO have added a handful of entries for people they hate for whatever reason. Even if AM could verify they were not a customer, would anyone believe them?
You also have to wonder, how much did the hackers make from pre-accepting payments for deletion from the master set they are releasing...
It will be very interesting going forward who is rapidly identified as being in the database... especially political figures.
You have to wonder, how did someone find Josh Duggar in there so quickly? Were they tipped off?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I hope none. The database can't be trusted, and I can verify this because my email address is in their database despite the fact that I had never heard of Ashley Madison or Avid Life Media until the hack happened. You do not need an email verification to make an account there - again, I know this because whoever signed up my address was able to do so without access to my email account. The mix-up is likely due to the fact that my email address is a shortened version of a common first name and a common Hispanic last name (though I didn't realize this when I made the account, oddly enough). I would post my email address here so people could verify, but I'd rather not so that I don't inadvertently attract people to whoever the poor bastard was that made the account using my email.. and also to avoid spam.
Merely having an email address listed in the leaked database is not proof of anything, and I would hope that any spouses who see their partner's email on that database get independent verification first before accusing them of anything. I know I would hate to have a significant other see that and assume I was trying to cheat on them, even though I'd never attempted anything of the sort.
On top of this, there's the problem of computer-assisted reporters (most of whom are preparing numbers-based stories about things like how many people in the Canadian government had emails in the database) using this database for stories that may not reflect the reality of what's going on.
About the infidelity? I agree, that's dumb.
About the hypocrisy of duggar? Yeah, it is pretty pointless, his politics are stupid even if he were to have abided by them.
About the security breach and responses to it? You're on the wrong website.
One thing to consider is that you don't know that that wasn't the case for at least some of the people on AM. AM is a way to find other people, it doesn't help you cheat per se'. I could easily see a case where someone is on AM with full knowledge of their partner, but on the proviso that they were discrete. Once that information is in the public discrete has gone out the window.
America has very puritanical views on sex, if you were to look at France as a comparison though extra-marital affairs are much more common and are often ok as long as partner is not exposed to it in public.
Given that the customer list is 95% male, I'd rephrase that to "attempted" cheating.
I'd put money on number of guys that actually got lucky as a direct result of the site being no more than a rounding error compared to the total.
Now.... If you find your wife on there...
I don't think it's wrong to care bout the hypocrisy of people like Mr. Duggar, especially when such individuals attempt to change the law to criminalize behavior in the name of views that they themselves espouse but personally won't even try to live-up to. Make no mistake, this is not a case of someone struggling with infidelity because of temptation around him, this someone that has gone out of his way to pay in-advance for the chance to be unfaithful, and actively maintained the accounts established in early 2013 while accepting an executive position about four months later with an organization whose goals are completely contrary to his actions.
If someone not only takes but advocates a strong position in the culture wars and then themselves violates that view, they deserve to be ridiculed for it. The view or position also deserves to be ridiculed.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Yeah, even if the actual published numbers are real accounts and not catfish accounts to help draw more men in (which would put the women-members at 15%) the odds that most men using the service actually had an affair as a result of the service are pretty small. On the other hand, a married person that takes the steps in-advance and at personal cost to open themselves up to infidelity very well could mean they've already been unfaithful or are looking for such partners through other avenues too.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The view or position also deserves to be ridiculed.
I was right with you up to this statement. You are welcome to ridicule the position, as you are entitled to your opinion, however the phenomenon of hypocrisy and people behaving like jerks is orthogonal to the correctness or incorrectness of the position they postured themselves as upholding. If you will allow me a quote from the Bible, "Put not your trust in princes," meaning even the (alleged) best specimens of humanity will let you down. This is true of views you may cherish as well -- so you find public environmentalists who privately show they really don't care, etc.
If you will allow me a quote from the Bible, "Put not your trust in princes," ...
And "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." As in, human beings are imperfect creatures, and you'll find many of them that haven't perfectly obeyed every principle they value.
Except the perfect people on /. who ridicule not only the imperfect people who can't manage perfection in following a moral standard, but the moral standard as well because it is followed by those imperfect people.
I'm pretty sure most dashslot readers have not even been accused of "molesting five children, including his own sisters", become addicted to pornography, AND been unfaithful to their spouse and parent of their children.
I've managed to avoid all of that, and I imagine that most here have managed to avoid most of that.
That's basically the reason that we can't have an honest conversation about these things. Social norms are apparently perpetuated by the people least interested in preserving them, under some sort of pretense that they feel they need to show, due to those norms.
The very people who most want or need to change society feel compelled to vocally oppose that change. It was easy when we could point to race or gender as being obviously different, but you can't get a gay Republican to say "I'm gay, and you guys like me, so let's just drop it." Okay, maybe 3.
Can you get someone to stand up and say "I think it's normal to molest children, so let's just decriminalize it"? No, and it's really unlikely to happen for a lot of reasons unrelated to culture. But acceptance of infidelity and homosexuality is culture specific.
Let's ridicule everyone who professes one life and lives another, because they should have done more to stand up for their true beliefs. Not just for themselves, but for everyone like them.
That's so much more like the Golden Rule, and the Jesus part of the Bible, as opposed to the Angry God part of the Bible, which Jesus specifically waved aside in several specific areas, your example being one.
"Do unto others" does not mean "persecute those who actually follow the lifestyle you want to have".