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Ashley Madison Source Code Shows Evidence They Created Bots To Message Men
An anonymous reader writes: Gizmodo's Annalee Newitz looked through the source code contained in the recent Ashley Madison data dump and found evidence that the company created tens of thousands of bot accounts designed to spur their male users into action by sending them messages. "The code tells the story of a company trying to weave the illusion that women on the site were plentiful and eager." The evidence suggests bots sent over 20 million messages on the website, and chatted with people over 11 million times. The vast majority of fake accounts — 70,529 to 43 — pretended to be female, and the users targeted were almost entirely men. Comments left in the code indicate some of the issues Ashley Madison's engineers had to solve: "randomizing start time so engagers don't all pop up at the same time" and "for every single state that has guest males, we want to have a chat engager." The AI was unsophisticated, though one type of bot would try to convince men to pay and then pass them to a real person.
'Fraud' in one form or another (in the legal sense or otherwise) is rampant in all online dating. The fact of the matter is, any sort of 'dating' service is always going have an overabundance of male clients.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if, in the final analysis, they discover that the so-called 'data breach' was perpetrated by the owners of Ashley Madison themselves, and that it was always their plan to blackmail their clientele.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
No, before you sign up you have to agree to terms of service, and somewhere hidden deep in the fine print is some incredibly vague sentence like "all interactions between users are purely for entertainment purposes only" which, if necessary in a court of law, they can easily construe to mean that the users agreed to be lied to.
At least where I'm at, the law says that a contract unilaterally phrased by one side needs to be interpreted, in a court of law, in the way most detrimental to that side. Under those conditions, the question is not how AM can construe the phrase, but how the plaintiff can construe it.
Shachar
In the 90's I built a kind of porn version of Eliza, but I never went through with the plans to put it live, perhaps out of shame.
I wasn't going to claim they were real women, just put it on the web and sell ad space or clicks. Customers can't sue me if they didn't pay anything
The women were implied to be "foreign" via hazy decorative images, to explain their limited grasp of English. I planned to study the dialogs with customers and improve it over time, or at least mix things up to seem more organic.
I had "rule" tables with probabilities, not unlike a Markov chain, and a kind of crude conceptual model of the human body to prevent unrealistic combinations. "Silly boy, my [x] cannot reach my [y]. I'm not that rubber dummy you like so much. I taste better." I also had a phrase tracker to prevent excessive duplication. (Maybe I should've sold it to the Slashdot Dupe Story Inspection Department :-)
Table-ized A.I.
And considering the number of actual woman on the website, most men only used it for fantasy rather than actually cheating. So entertainment is what they were looking for and what they actually got.
The site that bought them, match.com, feels horribly scammy as well.
I've tried four dating websites - two paid, two free.
Paid :
* match.com - vast majority of female profiles dead (filter by last login date and the pool dries up immensely), telltale signs that many of the profiles are bots
I got dates from match, but they weren't really good matches
* elitesingles - just not enough members to justify using it, it's chosen "exclusivity" image works against it
Unpaid :
* plenty of fish - I got dates but it seems the majority of people on here are looking for hookups, not relationships
* OKCupid - the only one I recommend. I gave them money, voluntarily, because I liked their business model. I hope being owned by match.com hasn't messed with that.
I also don't know if it's a cultural thing - match.com mostly had what I'd think of as normal average people (the kind of people I met speed dating), OKCupid was either much better at matching me with people of similar temperament (nerdy girls, basically), or just attracts that kind of crowd.
Met a very lovely woman on OKC and we've been dating for nigh on 18 months now and very much in love. It took a lot of disheartening persistence and slogging though - online dating concentrates the normal feelings of social rejection into a kind of burning vitriol that eats at the soul. But when you have a personality type that's less than 1% of the population it's the smart move - there was just no way I was going to meet enough women to find someone compatible (statistically speaking) in my existing social network.
How many people do you think read all of the T&Cs? How many people do you know who have read the Facebook T&Cs, for example (I know two, but I don't know anyone who has both read them and agreed to them)?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There have been cases where EULAs that were not presented before the product was purchased were declared grounds for returning the product for a full refund. There is also a huge body of case law on contracts in general. In common law countries, the requirement for a contract to be binding is that a 'meeting of minds' has occurred and it is up to the party wishing to enforce the contract to prove this. Signatures, for example, provide strong evidence (and the backing of case law that they count as evidence), but there is very little statute law defining what makes a contract binding (though some on what makes one non-binding, such as requiring one party to break a law).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Emphasis mine in both cases. The use of the phrase "in the site" caught my attention right away. Is that a reference to their bots, who are literally in the site. "On the site" is what I usually hear, and they clearly know that version since they use it elsewhere.
It would never hold up in a UK court, I'm certain of that. T&Cs don't override a reasonable person's expectations of a service.
For example, years ago I sent a package overseas. I paid Royal Mail for tracking and insurance. The package was lost and they couldn't tell me what happened to it. They argued that the T&Cs, which were far too long to read standing at the counter in the post office and were not explained to be by their staff, stated that the tracking stops at the UK border and as such so does the insurance. The judge dismissed their argument immediately, because the service is advertised as being tracked and insured. They would have had to clearly advertise that massive gaping hole prominently if they wanted to enforce it.
I really hope someone does take them to court to get their money back.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's legal because none of the husbands trying to cheat on their wives will ever publicly complain, ever, not even now that it has been exposed, bwa ha ha ha.
If they had an affair through AM, got caught and divorced because of that, not only might they complain but they would be much more likely to.
That said, it comes back round to the fact that there were so few actual women on the site that there likely weren't many actual affairs that were arranged.
How many people do you think read all of the T&Cs? How many people do you know who have read the Facebook T&Cs, for example (I know two, but I don't know anyone who has both read them and agreed to them)?
So you're going with the "I didn't read the contract before I signed it so I'm not bound by it" defence?
Whether you read them is not very interesting legally. What matters is that you agreed to them which, if you signed up, I'm betting you must have done. Typically the only protection you have in one-sided T&Cs like these is that they're interpreted as much as possible in favour of the consumer. That's in addition to "unconscionable" clauses being void.
There really needs to be some stronger consumer protections that stop Apple et al. from having 43-page T&Cs that change every few months that nobody has time to read. Even being "plain language" doesn't help when they're that long. Is there any jurisdiction in the world with a sensible approach to fixing this?
How many people can actually understand the T&Cs? Interesting video on the subject here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The guy in the video is an academic who developed software for determining the reading ability needed to understand text. He checked the terms and conditions on many sites and services and found that often a post-graduate (Masters/PhD) level education was required just to understand them, assuming you could be bothered to even read a document longer than Hamlet and take the time to fully appreciate the ramifications of agreeing to it.
UK courts usually determine clauses that are too complex for a "reasonable person" to understand as void. It's a failure to communicate by the writer.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC