I think that story was about either the Atlantic in general, or Florida in particular. A hurricane hasn't made landfall in Florida in something like a decade now, which was pretty similar to the entire east coast. When Sandy hit it was not classified as a hurricane. I heard a climatologist on NPR mentioning how hurricanes don't care about what happened the previous year.
One CAN determine to an extent their level of engagement. Never checking the inbox, or sending messages tells us a LOT.
The data does not indicate whether or not a message was sent at all.
based on the strong evidence of a total lack of engagement with the site from the overwhelming majority of female accounts
Again, the data simply does not show that. You're looking at a single metric or two (inbox opened, messages replied to) and trying to extrapolate additional information that is simply not there.
I consider the paid deletes to be something of an outlier; and don't see any evidence to support an assumption that men and women would pay to delete in the same proportion.
I don't see any evidence to suggest that they wouldn't. Hence an upper bound and not an absolute number. I would find it unlikely that the number of actual women would be near the upper bound. It's probably in the middle.
Further I am more specifically interested in female accounts that are ENGAGED with the site
Then you're looking at the wrong data set, because it doesn't contain the information necessary to estimate that. At best you can only estimate the minimum, which you have apparently pegged at "less than 10,000" and assume that to also be the maximum due to a lack of data, which is not even included in the data set we have. You interpret the fact that we don't have that data as assuming that the data simply does not exist. I haven't downloaded the entire leaked data, but it sounded like it contained messages sent between users. That list of messages is the data you're actually looking for, so feel free to set up a database, import the data set, and analyze it. A single field in the table full of users is not a meaningful substitute for that data.
But lets say I'm wrong and they were created by 'real women'... so what? they weren't checking or responding to messages.
So what? Maybe they were sending messages. Women I know enjoy using dating sites like window shopping. They look at men and message the ones they are interested in. Why wouldn't they try to take that conversation off the site using a burner email account? That way it looks like they're checking email instead of using a dating site. Your only 2 data points are checking the inbox and responding to messages they get. You don't have any data that shows how many profiles they looked at or how many messages they send, and again, you're interpreting the lack of that data to assume that the data does not exist and setting your maximum accordingly. I'm not making that assumption.
Similarly, AM was charging money to send messages to millions of women on their site, while they had actual knowledge that only a few thousand were actually even looking at messages... that's fraud in my eyes.
They were charging men to be able to read the messages they received from women. If an actual woman sent a message to a man and he paid to be able to read it then that is not fraud. And, for the hundredth time, the data that we are looking at, and the data that Gizmodo analyzed, does not contain that information. It is not possible to claim with even any degree of reasonable certainty that the maximum number of women on the site is the low tens of thousands. That is the lower bound, not the upper bound. We can only determine a reasonable lower bound, and then try to extrapolate an upper bound based on what we know and assume about the men. That's exactly what I did with my calculations above, and the upper bound I reached was 2.1 million. That still leaves well over 10 million total users of the site, or around a third, that probably didn't do anything except look around. That sounds reasonable to me. It sounds ridiculous to assume that a site with that much marketing had no more than 15,000 or so women actually using it. That claim does not pas
First, no. I think "responded to at least one message" is FAR more telling.
You think it's more likely that a fake account will pay to delete their information than sending messages? I don't agree with that. Why would a fake account pay to delete anything? It's fake. Only a real account would bother to pay to have their information deleted.
but the fact that it is SO RIDICULOUSLY LOW tells us that they weren't
No, the number doesn't reveal anything like that.
and it tells us that however many women joined only an insigifcant number deleted.
Although that number is more significant than the number sending messages.
I think women may have been significantly more inclined to use the paid delete option then men for a variety of reasons.
The percent of female accounts that paid to delete is a little less than half of the male accounts who paid to delete, whatever that means. And it doesn't really matter what you think, I'm looking for what the data can point to instead of opinions.
Further it evidently counts women who created an account only to lurk or see if their husband joined. Even if you want to count them as "members", the fact that they weren't responding to any messages at all is material evidence that even though they joined they simply weren't engaging in the site.
That is not even relevant. It also doesn't factor the number of men who signed up only to look for their wife, so what? We can't even guess what those numbers are. Maybe it's 100%. Who the hell knows? Neither of us, and the data doesn't provide any evidence either way. I'm specifically trying to determine the number of actual women on the site as opposed to fake accounts. I'm not interested in, and cannot guess, their motivations for being there. The data does not provide a way to estimate that and, again, I'm less interested in opinions than statistical evidence.
Look at "responded to at least one message" and "checked inbox".
Look at "sent a message". Wait, you can't, because that's not in the data set. What about someone sending messages to other users telling them to respond via email or phone? That user would never need to check their inbox or respond to any unsolicited messages. That could very well be a large number of people (especially women), and we have no way to know that. We do know the number of people who paid to have their information deleted though.
You can't tell me there 2 million women on the site, when fewer than 10k ever responded to a single message or checked their inbox or enaged in chat.
Actually it's not that difficult, here let me try: There very well might have been 2 million women on that site, actively sending messages to men telling them to respond via email. There, that wasn't that hard. You cannot point to a single piece of evidence which would definitively and unambiguously refute that claim, either.
I admit I'm speculating here.
You are speculating with virtually all of your conclusions. So am I, which is why my range of 12,000 to 2.1 million women is so broad. Here's a question - if Ashley Madison can get men to sign up by operating 10,000 accounts to chat with the men, then why are there 5.5 million accounts marked as female? They don't need 5.5 million accounts, they need 10,000, so where did those other 99.998% of accounts come from? Are you trying to suggest that the database for female accounts contains 10,000 accounts either operated by Ashley Madison or actual women, with millions of women just trying to check on their husband? Now they are claiming that hundreds of thousands of new accounts have been created, including (at least) 87,596 female ac
I read that article the other day, that's where I got my numbers from.
The truth is probably somewhere below 15,000 'real' members, and probably much lower, like 1000.
If 12,108 accounts marked as female paid to delete their information, it is highly unlikely that there were fewer actual female users than that. 12,108 is the minimum. The paid delete functionality is the one good indication that an account was genuine, and those numbers were 12,108 for women and around 173,000 for men, like I said above.
31,343,429 male accounts 173,838 men paid to delete 0.55462342...% of men 12,108 women paid to delete If the same percentage of women paid to delete, then there were 2,183,102 actual women
Hence my claim that the real number is probably somewhere between 12,000 and 2.1 million, which is less than the 5.5 million total female accounts and far less than the advertised 70/30 ratio. That's what I see from the data.
I don't think the site even credibly had even 1000 active women on it at any one time.
I'm not talking about "at any one time". We can't draw any conclusions about that from the data, I'm talking total numbers. Dating sites do not advertise who is online "at any one time", they show total accounts.
He decided he 'wanted to spend more time with his mistress... err, wife.'
I had to look it up to confirm, but yes, apparently Noel Biderman did in fact find the most gullible woman in the world to marry him. He's also admitted to multiple affairs.
Shit I'm sorry, I should have started this post with a warning to get your fainting couch ready. Hopefully I didn't harm anyone with these stunning revelations.
What was the point of that post? Are you suggesting that the hackers are some sort of vigilante activist group out to stomp out infidelity or immorality in general? Is that what you think this is about?
From the first statements by the hackers it seemed pretty obvious that this was personal, an attack against that specific company (and the CEO personally) for fraud, personal enough that it sounds like the hackers got burned by the company at some point. I don't see any crusade against immorality here. The hackers were taunting the CEO personally, even while apologizing to some of the security people at the company.
The hackers knew that company, almost as if they had worked there at some point... maybe like that Thadeus Zu character, who claims he spent a year living in Canada. Guess where Avid Life Media is based.
Fewer than 15,000 vs millions of clearly fake profiles
We'll never know exactly how many women were actually using the site. 12,000 seems awfully low, frankly. That number only comes from the number of female accounts who paid to have their information deleted, which is the single best indicator that an account belonged to an actual person. On the men's side, only around 173,000 thousand men (out of over 31 million accounts) paid to have their information deleted. If the same proportion of men and women paid to have their accounts deleted then that would indicate over 2.1 million actual women using the site.
Like I said, I doubt we'll ever know the exact number, but the truth is probably somewhere between 12,000 and 2.1 million.
We are so fucking sick of being called out as racists or mean or anti-woman or anti-science or whatever sanctimonious bullshit phrase you want to throw at us.
So stop being racist, mean, anti-woman, anti-science sanctimonious bullshit?
In all seriousness though, this article has an interesting take on Trump:
Otherwise, I would guess various stock photography sites, or even just paying people for pictures. If they paid people to write profiles they could also pay models for pictures. It's already known that Ashley Madison purchases pictures of models for advertising, they might as well do it for profiles also.
That's an interesting concept of morality you have. You're saying it's "tragic" that the guys seeking affairs probably weren't able to have one because there were so few women, but also that those guys are innocent of any wrongdoing specifically because they couldn't find anyone to have an affair with. Not that they didn't try. For many of them, Ashley Madison was probably only one way to have an affair, I'm sure they also tried to find women in bars or other dating sites or whatever else. The presence of an Ashley Madison account means that, if they were married, then they were probably interested in having an affair, and if they were interested they probably also pursued other means to do that. Any many of them probably succeeded.
So, based on your first post, where you said it makes the hackers "even more evil." If there were plenty of women on the site, you would say that the actions of the hackers are less evil? Your sense of morality is pretty fluid.
I seriously doubt this is limited to Ashley Madison, I would be interested to see the numbers from other sites. Not one of them publishes data like this though. Every woman I know who signs up for a site gets crushed by the number of messages she gets. The raw numbers of an 86/14 ratio are probably fairly in line with other sites, but if a large number of those female profiles aren't even real then it seems like a bunch of horny dudes just hanging out together. Probably not all that unlike Slashdot, actually.
Within 10 minutes of signing up to the site, I received one message from another user, but Ashley Madison demanded money from me to read it. I suppose it is how the scam, if there is one, works.
That is specifically how it works, yeah. I read an article where they interviewed a guy on a team of 28 people working for a dating site creating female profiles to chat with men. So that might have even been a dude who sent the message. The public statements of Ashley Madison claimed a 70/30 ratio, far better than the 86/14 which is actually in the database accounts, and considering that most of those female accounts are fake I would imagine that they can be sued just for those false claims.
Something like 30% of people on Tinder have gonorrhea. If you wanted a quickie and wanted to make sure your partner was clean, wouldn't a site for married people make sense?
Stupid anti-science people also have enough money to fund presidential campaigns, influence elections, buy laws, and build mega-churches. It's nothing new.
"The community printer". Because when a bunch of people making a dollar a day pool their resources, they decide to buy a 3D printer. What about the materials to make things, how much do the refills go for?
I don't even know how that statement applies to the discussion. You're talking about helping people hurt their spouses. That is not always the case. I would even suggest that there are situations where cheating could be considered the moral course of action.
My point to all of this is that morality is not as universal as you seem to assume.
Marriages, to many people, are fundamental relationships where people define their lives, have children, and place a great deal of trust in the strength and honesty of that relationship.
And what does it say when one or both of the partners in that relationship decides to break that trust? People get married for the wrong reasons all the time. People who have no business being married decide that they should because that's what society expects of them. But you don't sound like you're casting your moral judgment on people who get married for the wrong reasons.
But hey -- if you don't mind potentially ripping people's lives apart, I guess that's okay for you then.
Obviously a lot of people don't mind, because it's not their life. If you haven't noticed there are a lot of selfish people around. Thankfully they have you to remind them what universal morality means.
Not if the spouse never finds out. Or not if the person doing the cheating is in an abusive relationship too scared to leave but still needs actual love. There are any number of reasons why claiming some absolute sense of morality doesn't hold up.
Here's a hint about trademarks and how they apply.
One More Thing
Just Do It
I'm Lovin' It
Think Different
This post has not violated any trademark law, and I am not legally liable for any kind of trademark infringement. Trademark law does not mean that "anyone" saying or using a trademarked phrase owes royalties.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that story was about either the Atlantic in general, or Florida in particular. A hurricane hasn't made landfall in Florida in something like a decade now, which was pretty similar to the entire east coast. When Sandy hit it was not classified as a hurricane. I heard a climatologist on NPR mentioning how hurricanes don't care about what happened the previous year.
One CAN determine to an extent their level of engagement. Never checking the inbox, or sending messages tells us a LOT.
The data does not indicate whether or not a message was sent at all.
based on the strong evidence of a total lack of engagement with the site from the overwhelming majority of female accounts
Again, the data simply does not show that. You're looking at a single metric or two (inbox opened, messages replied to) and trying to extrapolate additional information that is simply not there.
I consider the paid deletes to be something of an outlier; and don't see any evidence to support an assumption that men and women would pay to delete in the same proportion.
I don't see any evidence to suggest that they wouldn't. Hence an upper bound and not an absolute number. I would find it unlikely that the number of actual women would be near the upper bound. It's probably in the middle.
Further I am more specifically interested in female accounts that are ENGAGED with the site
Then you're looking at the wrong data set, because it doesn't contain the information necessary to estimate that. At best you can only estimate the minimum, which you have apparently pegged at "less than 10,000" and assume that to also be the maximum due to a lack of data, which is not even included in the data set we have. You interpret the fact that we don't have that data as assuming that the data simply does not exist. I haven't downloaded the entire leaked data, but it sounded like it contained messages sent between users. That list of messages is the data you're actually looking for, so feel free to set up a database, import the data set, and analyze it. A single field in the table full of users is not a meaningful substitute for that data.
But lets say I'm wrong and they were created by 'real women'... so what? they weren't checking or responding to messages.
So what? Maybe they were sending messages. Women I know enjoy using dating sites like window shopping. They look at men and message the ones they are interested in. Why wouldn't they try to take that conversation off the site using a burner email account? That way it looks like they're checking email instead of using a dating site. Your only 2 data points are checking the inbox and responding to messages they get. You don't have any data that shows how many profiles they looked at or how many messages they send, and again, you're interpreting the lack of that data to assume that the data does not exist and setting your maximum accordingly. I'm not making that assumption.
Similarly, AM was charging money to send messages to millions of women on their site, while they had actual knowledge that only a few thousand were actually even looking at messages... that's fraud in my eyes.
They were charging men to be able to read the messages they received from women. If an actual woman sent a message to a man and he paid to be able to read it then that is not fraud. And, for the hundredth time, the data that we are looking at, and the data that Gizmodo analyzed, does not contain that information. It is not possible to claim with even any degree of reasonable certainty that the maximum number of women on the site is the low tens of thousands. That is the lower bound, not the upper bound. We can only determine a reasonable lower bound, and then try to extrapolate an upper bound based on what we know and assume about the men. That's exactly what I did with my calculations above, and the upper bound I reached was 2.1 million. That still leaves well over 10 million total users of the site, or around a third, that probably didn't do anything except look around. That sounds reasonable to me. It sounds ridiculous to assume that a site with that much marketing had no more than 15,000 or so women actually using it. That claim does not pas
First, no. I think "responded to at least one message" is FAR more telling.
You think it's more likely that a fake account will pay to delete their information than sending messages? I don't agree with that. Why would a fake account pay to delete anything? It's fake. Only a real account would bother to pay to have their information deleted.
but the fact that it is SO RIDICULOUSLY LOW tells us that they weren't
No, the number doesn't reveal anything like that.
and it tells us that however many women joined only an insigifcant number deleted.
Although that number is more significant than the number sending messages.
I think women may have been significantly more inclined to use the paid delete option then men for a variety of reasons.
The percent of female accounts that paid to delete is a little less than half of the male accounts who paid to delete, whatever that means. And it doesn't really matter what you think, I'm looking for what the data can point to instead of opinions.
Further it evidently counts women who created an account only to lurk or see if their husband joined. Even if you want to count them as "members", the fact that they weren't responding to any messages at all is material evidence that even though they joined they simply weren't engaging in the site.
That is not even relevant. It also doesn't factor the number of men who signed up only to look for their wife, so what? We can't even guess what those numbers are. Maybe it's 100%. Who the hell knows? Neither of us, and the data doesn't provide any evidence either way. I'm specifically trying to determine the number of actual women on the site as opposed to fake accounts. I'm not interested in, and cannot guess, their motivations for being there. The data does not provide a way to estimate that and, again, I'm less interested in opinions than statistical evidence.
Look at "responded to at least one message" and "checked inbox".
Look at "sent a message". Wait, you can't, because that's not in the data set. What about someone sending messages to other users telling them to respond via email or phone? That user would never need to check their inbox or respond to any unsolicited messages. That could very well be a large number of people (especially women), and we have no way to know that. We do know the number of people who paid to have their information deleted though.
You can't tell me there 2 million women on the site, when fewer than 10k ever responded to a single message or checked their inbox or enaged in chat.
Actually it's not that difficult, here let me try: There very well might have been 2 million women on that site, actively sending messages to men telling them to respond via email. There, that wasn't that hard. You cannot point to a single piece of evidence which would definitively and unambiguously refute that claim, either.
I admit I'm speculating here.
You are speculating with virtually all of your conclusions. So am I, which is why my range of 12,000 to 2.1 million women is so broad. Here's a question - if Ashley Madison can get men to sign up by operating 10,000 accounts to chat with the men, then why are there 5.5 million accounts marked as female? They don't need 5.5 million accounts, they need 10,000, so where did those other 99.998% of accounts come from? Are you trying to suggest that the database for female accounts contains 10,000 accounts either operated by Ashley Madison or actual women, with millions of women just trying to check on their husband? Now they are claiming that hundreds of thousands of new accounts have been created, including (at least) 87,596 female ac
I read that article the other day, that's where I got my numbers from.
The truth is probably somewhere below 15,000 'real' members, and probably much lower, like 1000.
If 12,108 accounts marked as female paid to delete their information, it is highly unlikely that there were fewer actual female users than that. 12,108 is the minimum. The paid delete functionality is the one good indication that an account was genuine, and those numbers were 12,108 for women and around 173,000 for men, like I said above.
31,343,429 male accounts
173,838 men paid to delete
0.55462342...% of men
12,108 women paid to delete
If the same percentage of women paid to delete, then there were 2,183,102 actual women
Hence my claim that the real number is probably somewhere between 12,000 and 2.1 million, which is less than the 5.5 million total female accounts and far less than the advertised 70/30 ratio. That's what I see from the data.
I don't think the site even credibly had even 1000 active women on it at any one time.
I'm not talking about "at any one time". We can't draw any conclusions about that from the data, I'm talking total numbers. Dating sites do not advertise who is online "at any one time", they show total accounts.
For example, recall Aaron Barr
After he shot Hamilton he did just kind of fade into obscurity.
He decided he 'wanted to spend more time with his mistress... err, wife.'
I had to look it up to confirm, but yes, apparently Noel Biderman did in fact find the most gullible woman in the world to marry him. He's also admitted to multiple affairs.
Shit I'm sorry, I should have started this post with a warning to get your fainting couch ready. Hopefully I didn't harm anyone with these stunning revelations.
What was the point of that post? Are you suggesting that the hackers are some sort of vigilante activist group out to stomp out infidelity or immorality in general? Is that what you think this is about?
From the first statements by the hackers it seemed pretty obvious that this was personal, an attack against that specific company (and the CEO personally) for fraud, personal enough that it sounds like the hackers got burned by the company at some point. I don't see any crusade against immorality here. The hackers were taunting the CEO personally, even while apologizing to some of the security people at the company.
The hackers knew that company, almost as if they had worked there at some point... maybe like that Thadeus Zu character, who claims he spent a year living in Canada. Guess where Avid Life Media is based.
Fewer than 15,000 vs millions of clearly fake profiles
We'll never know exactly how many women were actually using the site. 12,000 seems awfully low, frankly. That number only comes from the number of female accounts who paid to have their information deleted, which is the single best indicator that an account belonged to an actual person. On the men's side, only around 173,000 thousand men (out of over 31 million accounts) paid to have their information deleted. If the same proportion of men and women paid to have their accounts deleted then that would indicate over 2.1 million actual women using the site.
Like I said, I doubt we'll ever know the exact number, but the truth is probably somewhere between 12,000 and 2.1 million.
We are so fucking sick of being called out as racists or mean or anti-woman or anti-science or whatever sanctimonious bullshit phrase you want to throw at us.
So stop being racist, mean, anti-woman, anti-science sanctimonious bullshit?
In all seriousness though, this article has an interesting take on Trump:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Well, who says they use the pictures legally?
Otherwise, I would guess various stock photography sites, or even just paying people for pictures. If they paid people to write profiles they could also pay models for pictures. It's already known that Ashley Madison purchases pictures of models for advertising, they might as well do it for profiles also.
That's an interesting concept of morality you have. You're saying it's "tragic" that the guys seeking affairs probably weren't able to have one because there were so few women, but also that those guys are innocent of any wrongdoing specifically because they couldn't find anyone to have an affair with. Not that they didn't try. For many of them, Ashley Madison was probably only one way to have an affair, I'm sure they also tried to find women in bars or other dating sites or whatever else. The presence of an Ashley Madison account means that, if they were married, then they were probably interested in having an affair, and if they were interested they probably also pursued other means to do that. Any many of them probably succeeded.
So, based on your first post, where you said it makes the hackers "even more evil." If there were plenty of women on the site, you would say that the actions of the hackers are less evil? Your sense of morality is pretty fluid.
Hold on, out of all of the players in this thing the hackers are the real bad guys?
With all the advertising that AM has done
They weren't advertising to women...
And who wants to prove that they did not have an affair?
I seriously doubt this is limited to Ashley Madison, I would be interested to see the numbers from other sites. Not one of them publishes data like this though. Every woman I know who signs up for a site gets crushed by the number of messages she gets. The raw numbers of an 86/14 ratio are probably fairly in line with other sites, but if a large number of those female profiles aren't even real then it seems like a bunch of horny dudes just hanging out together. Probably not all that unlike Slashdot, actually.
Within 10 minutes of signing up to the site, I received one message from another user, but Ashley Madison demanded money from me to read it. I suppose it is how the scam, if there is one, works.
That is specifically how it works, yeah. I read an article where they interviewed a guy on a team of 28 people working for a dating site creating female profiles to chat with men. So that might have even been a dude who sent the message. The public statements of Ashley Madison claimed a 70/30 ratio, far better than the 86/14 which is actually in the database accounts, and considering that most of those female accounts are fake I would imagine that they can be sued just for those false claims.
Something like 30% of people on Tinder have gonorrhea. If you wanted a quickie and wanted to make sure your partner was clean, wouldn't a site for married people make sense?
Stupid anti-science people also have enough money to fund presidential campaigns, influence elections, buy laws, and build mega-churches. It's nothing new.
"The community printer". Because when a bunch of people making a dollar a day pool their resources, they decide to buy a 3D printer. What about the materials to make things, how much do the refills go for?
It doesn't bother to mention that the plugin in question is Team Viewer, which apparently comes pre-installed on some phones.
I don't even know how that statement applies to the discussion. You're talking about helping people hurt their spouses. That is not always the case. I would even suggest that there are situations where cheating could be considered the moral course of action.
My point to all of this is that morality is not as universal as you seem to assume.
Marriages, to many people, are fundamental relationships where people define their lives, have children, and place a great deal of trust in the strength and honesty of that relationship.
And what does it say when one or both of the partners in that relationship decides to break that trust? People get married for the wrong reasons all the time. People who have no business being married decide that they should because that's what society expects of them. But you don't sound like you're casting your moral judgment on people who get married for the wrong reasons.
But hey -- if you don't mind potentially ripping people's lives apart, I guess that's okay for you then.
Obviously a lot of people don't mind, because it's not their life. If you haven't noticed there are a lot of selfish people around. Thankfully they have you to remind them what universal morality means.
You are helping them hurt their spouse.
Not if the spouse never finds out. Or not if the person doing the cheating is in an abusive relationship too scared to leave but still needs actual love. There are any number of reasons why claiming some absolute sense of morality doesn't hold up.
Here's a hint about trademarks and how they apply.
One More Thing
Just Do It
I'm Lovin' It
Think Different
This post has not violated any trademark law, and I am not legally liable for any kind of trademark infringement. Trademark law does not mean that "anyone" saying or using a trademarked phrase owes royalties.
Anyone trying to use this extremely common words combination will have to pay royalties?
You seriously have absolutely no idea how trademarks work?