Slashdot Mirror
Ashley Madison Blackmail Letter Revealed (grahamcluley.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Security researcher Graham Cluley says he has been forwarded a blackmail letter, sent to a member of the controversial Ashley Madison adultery website. In the letter the blackmailer says that unless $2,000 worth of bitcoin is paid within 10 days, the recipient's wife, friends and colleagues will be informed of his misdemeanors. In a threatening twist, the letter goes on to give personal details of another victim who refused to pay the blackmailers, and how his personal life and work were targeted as a result. Cluley's advice to recipients is not to pay the blackmailers, but to tell the U.S. Postal Inspectors Service.
So, you consider it "rape" when the man goes on a website whose express purpose is to get him laid... a woman also goes on the website whose purpose, again, is to get her laid... and the woman opens up enough details about herself to the man in order for them to meet in order to have sex?
Man: Let's do it.
Woman: OK.
(both get naked and start fooling around)
Woman: RAPE!!!!
Is this what you consider "Rape Culture"? That's what I'm getting from it.
It's better for people who are not lawyers too, because the terms are well advertised and understood.
At least it seems so when you first decide you want to do it. But if things should go sideways, you then find out you are at the mercy of a family law system that has a lot of rules that you never knew about before you tied the knot.
Marriage is perceived as basically fair, and in most developed nations it more or less objectively is
I'll grant you that it tries to be. But talk to a few people who have been through divorces, or better yet, a family law lawyer or two, and you will be astonished at just how often it fails.
Here's the very short version of how I learned that lesson the hard way.
I was a thirtysomething sysadmin, met a cute twentysomething masters' student in late '06 who was applying to go to medical school. She moved in with me in early '07 and when things were looking serious, she hinted that she would not have time to handle a wedding once she was in her med degree, so we got hitched the summer of '08 and she started school right after the honeymoon. I live in Canada; medical school is not as expensive as in the States but still relatively pricey - about $20K a year for four years. I supported her while she was studying, and in '09 bought a $322K house right next to the medical school so she would have a short commute. She had a medical student line of credit, so kicked in a bit on the down payment, since I was pretty tapped out from paying her tuition along with all of our living expenses. Unfortunately, the stress of med school, and being disillusioned that marriage was not living up to her Disney ideal, combined with a few other issues, strained our marriage starting in mid-2010. I lost my job in the summer of '11, but still made her last tuition payment in December. In January 2012 she told me that she wanted to stay with her parents for a while - which ended up being the last words she ever spoke to me. Eleven days later, she sent me an email talking about dividing assets, and shortly after that got a lawyer.
Her entire financial contribution to the marriage came from her line of credit, which had a balance of $60K when she walked out. Her tuition alone cost $80K.
In a few months she would start as a medical resident, with a base salary of $50K/yr that would go up dramatically over the years. I was unemployed. Care to guess what the laws of Ontario considered a "basically fair" resolution of that situation would be?
I learned, to my horror, that the courts had decided that it was too hard to determine the value of an educational credential like an M.D. - so in order to make their own lives easier, they just arbitrarily set the value of all education to zero. But they sure did recognize her $60K debt when calculating our net worths. Even better - there's also a fun surprise in Ontario family law that any house you live in while married is automatically jointly owned by both spouses, so she owned half my house, despite having not contributed a dime to it. So I was going to end up owing her a bunch of money for her "contribution" to the marriage. And three different family law lawyers told me that family courts have an overt gender bias that dramatically favours women, so challenging this ridiculous outcome in court had slim chances of success (and was certain to cost a fortune that I didn't have.) All these fun little details they don't tell you about when you're picking out flowers and planning seating arrangements! The end of my story was that my ex-golddigger offered to settle, and my lawyer strongly advised me to take anything she offered, so I had to re-mortgage my house to give her a $35K parting gift plus a bunch of legal costs, some of them hers.
Now I'm a bitter cynical childless forty-something. Learn from my mistake. Read the Family Law Act of Ontario, or equivalent legislation where you live, BEFORE you get married. Maybe the court transcripts of some divorces