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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.
They paid to get screwed.
Seems they are getting their money's worth.
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...
The database can't be trusted, and I can verify this because my email address is in their database...
I know this because whoever signed up my address was able to do so without access to my email account...
Merely having an email address listed in the leaked database is not proof of anything...
How about credit card transactions? It doesn't mean a whole lot when joesmithsonnwa@gmail.com is listed as a member, but when that account is paid for by Joshua Duggar with two of his known addresses then that's a little more incriminating.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
just tell them that they want to sleep with somebody else?
Don't think my SO would care if I slept with somebody else. It's the stuff we do while awake that bothers her.
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.
Agreed, when you see addresses like the following in the DB it becomes clear how easy it was to insert records that are not indicative of actual use:
Doubly so when some addresses show up more than once:
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
https://thepiratebay.la/torren...
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
After years of union with the same person, isn't that normal to want another body? Isn't that a natural and physical need?
No, I don't think it is. At least, not from my point of view. I'm married and would never ever consider cheating.
This is a viewpoint that's very vocal but overstated. For a lot of people monogamy is secure, comfortable, and satisfies their sexual needs - particularly when the partners communicate openly about sex.
Incidentally a relationship is between two people, not society at large; if you feel you need to have sex with other people be up front about it, maybe your potential partner will be game, maybe they won't, but at least it saves the messy lying and trust violation.
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.
Way back when Heidi Fleiss got arrested for running a prostitution ring, and her list of clients fell into the hands of the police, my first thought was: if it were *me*, I'd have:
a) had a backup copy, and
b) been regularly adding high-ranking authorities (for instance: the chief of police) to the list of clients. In a diary fashion, interspersed (in the records) with the appointments of real clients.
For b) especially, having dates and times when the high-ranking official is known to be away from home, such as noon times if they have a day job, or adding verifiable corroborating information such as "and he came in soaking wet" on rainy days and such, would have gone a long way towards giving Ms. Fleiss some leverage.
Ah well... people don't think ahead in these modern times.
Apropos of nothing, I saw this on a friend's twitter feed:
ME: Hunny, did you have an Ashley Madison account?
HER: What?! No!
ME: Damn. That would have made what I'm about to say, a lot easier.
There are biological foundations to this issue. I used to work with researchers at the Yerkes Primate Center who were working on this very problem. The idea is that males want to ensure the paternity of their children if they are going to expend resources raising them. So they are protective of their sex partner. Females want to ensure that they have the help they need in providing for their offspring, so they desire a faithful partner. These needs drive the species toward monogamy.
At the same time, females want to enhance the odds of successful offspring by having more than one mating partner. (Partners who would be notoriously bad as long term spouses are particularly attractive ... the bad-boy alpha male) Males also want to enhance their chances of having successful offspring by having partners that do not require them to stay around and provide for the kids. So both genders have an incentive to secretly violate the monogamous bond.
Therefore you see a continuum of activities along these lines within and among human societies. One of the researchers reported that as many as 1/3 to 1/2 of all children in the pre-industrialized societies she examined were the result of illicit affairs. Most of these societies frowned on infidelity much more than we in the west do.
Enter game theory and genetics, which argue for a balancing act between the two competing needs, with different people taking different strategies and feeling different drives. Another researcher at Yerkes gave a talk about the "seven year itch". She had evidence that suggested a biological basis for the lagging emotions of marriages a few years along - with parallel evidence from other species. You know that "he's just not romantic any more" trope that is trotted out to explain a flagging libido and attraction to other partners? She had a theory that this was an instinctual result of changing hormones affecting the brain. The end result was to drive a woman to seek out other sex partners in order to ensure genetic diversity in her offspring.
So the answer is yes, it is complicated.
BTW, I'm in your camp. I would never consider cheating, and have a few decades of experience to back up that characterization of my own proclivities. But I do recognize that this is not everyone's experience. And I've been close enough to a few people who took a different path to know that it isn't just culture or upbringing that makes for fidelity.
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".
And even if she was, she'd be running her own e-mail server anyway.