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The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

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Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#221

Post by humanrebar »

cafard wrote: post #165
varjag wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infidelity is not a private matter however: the person being cheated on has the right to know. For a million cheaters, there's a million their SOs, often living miserable lives but denied an informed choice about their future and kept at non-negligible health risk. It stops being a private matter when it trespasses into other people's life.

I can see the person cheated on having a right to know. Everybody and his dog? If I know that my neighbor Joe is running around on his wife Jane, I might be justified in telling Jane; stapling fliers announcing to the telephone poles up and down the street seems a different matter. There is also, as the top-level parent comment suggests, the point that adultery is more or less celebrated in much of popular culture. T…

> If I know that my neighbor Joe is running around on his wife Jane, I might be justified in telling Jane

The case that isn't being made is that you should be able to tell Jane about Joe in a private way. That's called discretion. And besides being the better part of valor, it is part of being a wise person.

The people who are OK with this leak should ask themselves if someone should be able to tell a wife about her cheating husband without worrying about hacking and leaks. Or even government dragnets (maybe it's a drug problem, which could be illegal).

If we make people think twice about talking to each other, there are many cases where we make them think twice about helping each other.

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#222

Post by rayiner »

camillomiller wrote: post #111
dsacco wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great comment, Thomas. I had an argument with my girlfriend about this. No matter what reasoning I used, no matter what I said, she could not agree that it was wrong that Ashley Madison (A.M.) was hacked. Her position was that marital infidelity is such a pubishable offense that the participants on A.M. deserve to be publicly outed. In her view, it was not even up for debate. She felt so powerfully about in…

The elevation of monogamy and closed relationships as the God-given natural status of a couple is the source of too many problems. Same for not living our own sexuality in the open. By acting like this (that is: like you are supposed to) you are constantly prone to blackmail. If you happen to have a wife that is entitled in her social-induced belief that even thinking about other women is good ground for the terminat…

You're barking up the wrong tree. I don't think the core demographic of AM is people who are sexually liberated and in consensual open relationships. The site bills itself as an avenue for cheating, and people find that immoral because it implies breach of a relationship expectation/agreement.

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#223

Post by humanrebar »

kalms wrote: post #174
TeMPOraL wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marriages are not just moral issues, they're also contracts between people themselves and between the couples and the government. They come with privileges and tax breaks and social status, and all of it is built upon assumption that marriages are mostly permanent. AM is explicitly attempting to attack that.

Who are you to judge how people live and should their lifes? How dull. There are so many different family structures — incl. open relationships. A family's structure and agreements is not public, nor should they be. Unless said family choose to disclose that fact by their own volition.

> Who are you to judge how people live and should their lifes?

Churches have no ability to enforce promises with violence or confiscation. And they shouldn't. So it's important for governments to establish some sort of lowest common denominator and hold people legally accountable.

I understand the impulse to be non-judgmental, but when both laws and the rest of society get out of the business of enforcing marriage contracts, you actually take choices away from people that want a stronger marriage contract. They can no longer enter an enforceable contract that requires monogamy.

We're not adding more choice for everyone that way. We're just choosing (as a society) a different lifestyle.

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#224

Post by TeMPOraL »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #148
in3d wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, this OPM hack might have a huge national security impact.

Does anybody need to restate the obvious: Go through the OPM leak and cross-check everybody with TS-SCI clearance with the AM database. Bingo-presto, big list of folks you can blackmail to do government favors. Take about 2 minutes.

Cool thing about public dump: you can't be blackmailed via something everybody knows already. If you're a victin of the AM disclosure and have TS clearance, it's in your best interest to come clean and not try to bury that information.

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#225

Post by humanrebar »

lentil_soup wrote: post #151
TeMPOraL wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, though one could argue that what AM is doing is an explicit attempt to damage the basic building block of society, i.e. family. So this becomes somewhat a matter of public interest then.

Haha, well that's stretching the argument a bit, but for the sake of conversation I would then ask for proof that family is indeed the "basic building block of society" and that what MA is doing is actually damaging it to an extent that it can be considered a public safety issue.

> I would then ask for proof that family is indeed the "basic building block of society"

I think the burden of proof goes the other way, considering marriage laws (including those that punish infidelity) have been part of common law for hundreds of years.

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#226

Post by TeMPOraL »

kalms wrote: post #220
TeMPOraL wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not judging. People may live however they want. Institution of marriage is one of the choices, that is established in the society and carries with it some particular set of features. In particular, joining in marriage is somewhat public, even if it's much less public than it used to be. Also marriage comes with explicit (even if not legally binding) expectation you don't cheat. If you don't like those aspects, do…

Maybe you have that expectation about marriage, but that doesn't mean your expectations are shared by every married couple. You're forcing your point-of-view upon others.

I'm not forcing my POV on anyone, I'm just stating what is the generally accepted POV in the western society. You may share it or not, but you ignore it at your own peril.

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#227

Post by camillomiller »

zamalek wrote: post #206
camillomiller wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So far as advanced societies go, believing in higher power(s) is a choice. Is it? That must be the reason why all recent U.S. Presidents were all fervent atheists... Is it a choice in a society where swearing on a religious tome is still considered a rational way to induce people to tell the truth in court? I know that's just theater (otherwise perjury would not be a felony). Still, I think it's a telling detail of…

We've gone from a data breach, to swearing on a Bible in courts. It's an interesting discussion but this is not the place to have it.

Why not? Tout se tient :)

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#228

Post by astrashe »

yummybear wrote: post #120
tptacek wrote: post #2

The response to this this on Twitter would be beyond fucked- up if it weren't so completely predictable. People are posting direct links to the dump, screenshots of lists of emails, and statistics for classes of domains. The general reaction to the availability of the dump is reasonably characterized as "glee". But no matter what you think about Ashley Madison --- and I think A.M. is so comically scummy that I had tr…

Most people in here (I assume) think Snowden's leaks were ethic, though illegal. The reaction to The Fappening was likewise equal parts glee and disgust. Almost nobody would blink an eye at revealing a doxxing dump from a terrorist sympathizer or CP forum. Ethics are a subjective thing, and lines are hard to place.

If Snowden had just taken the documents and posted them online without any filtering, it would have been extremely unethical. It would have gotten people killed. But that's not what he did -- he enlisted reputable journalists to process the documents and make decisions about what was safe to release and what wasn't.

Let's say the hackers in this situation wanted to prove that Avid Life Media was acting unethically -- that they had lied about wiping old customer data. They could have worked with journalists to demonstrate that without actually leaking personal information to the world at large.

Snowden's critics have claimed that he's put people in danger, but they've never been able to back that claim up with actual examples. And honestly, since they've lied about every aspect of that situation over and over again, while Snowden has always told the truth, it's hard to believe them.

In this case, it seems very likely that people are going to get divorced, and that kids are going to go through the shredder over this.

Maybe you have to be middle aged to know this, but you hit a stage in life when people start having these incredibly hostile divorces, with really intense hatred on both sides. And that is terrible for kids. This is going to create that situation in lots of families. It's not cool. It's punching down, it's hurting people who had nothing to do with anything in order to get at some people who seem to be genuinely slimy (Avid Life).

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#229

Post by lordsper »

technomancy wrote: post #112
geofft wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I happen to agree that the business model is awful, but it's also sort of off-topic. The way in which I am displeased with someone who chooses to cheat on their spouse is very different from the way I am displeased with a company who makes money off of getting large numbers of people to cheat on their spouses, and this hack victimizes individuals more than the company. It's also very different from the way I am displ…

> this hack victimizes individuals more than the company Hm; do you really think there's a chance the company will survive this? It seems unlikely.

Not under the same name, but they might just survive if they go for a (more subtle) rebrand.

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#230

Post by taytus »

tptacek wrote: post #2

The response to this this on Twitter would be beyond fucked- up if it weren't so completely predictable. People are posting direct links to the dump, screenshots of lists of emails, and statistics for classes of domains. The general reaction to the availability of the dump is reasonably characterized as "glee". But no matter what you think about Ashley Madison --- and I think A.M. is so comically scummy that I had tr…

Are "---" the new "(" ?
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