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Here’s what Ashley Madison members have told me

troyhunt.com

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Re: Here’s what Ashley Madison members have told me

#51

Post by fab13n »

netcan wrote: post #11

What I'm curious about is future changes in user behavior in response to this kind of stuff. Private data, public data and the public-private grey areas like pseudonymous posts, access restricted (FB-like) profiles and such are getting leaked all the time. Paranoia is definitely building. Awareness of how exposed people are is building. Yet, exposure is going up not down. People are posting more stuff online. I wonde…

> maybe strict monogamy will soften as a norm.

Polygamy is already the norm in the West, only it's serial polygamy instead of parallel one, i.e. you're supposed to dump your previous partner before picking the next one. But most people enter most relationships being very open to the idea that it won't be lifelong, and that other partners will be part of their sexual, sentimental and patrimonial future: this constitutes polygamy, irrespective of the order in which you have sex with the several partners you plan to have.

Will insistance on serial polygamy soften? I'd say that the forces seem aligned for this to happen:

* reproductive control was the main reason for historical control over people's sexuality. With reliable contraception and easy paternity tests, those incentives are dramatically weakened.

* don't underestimate homo sapiens' urge to practice polygamy: historically we've had to punish adultery by gruesome death, it still routinely causes financial ruin in the US, yet people always kept committing it! They're still willing to wreck their own children's family and well-being, in exchange for some renewal in their sentimental and sensual lives! This urge seems to me at least as strong as the gluttony epidemic, which turns many Westerners into impotent, morbidly obese wrecks, one hamburger at a time.

* Exposure accelerates acceptance. Internet is bound to make affairs more and more visible, and as a result, we'll get used to them.

As for modesty, even before Internet, the list of which body parts / positions were naughty evolved fast and flexibly, within decades (think miniskirts, sleeveless tops, bikini, monokini, Frei Korper Kultur, or conversely, the comeback of islamic female garbs in middle eastern countries). With Internet as a great accelerator, we'll soon be mildly too bored to Google sextapes of our acquaintances. I known I already feel that way about celebrities. First time patrons of naturist resorts typically report nudity-induced awkwardness to last about 1/4h :-)

Re: Here’s what Ashley Madison members have told me

#52

Post by JustSomeNobody »

AlexandrB wrote: post #33
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course your prediction will come true, there's already a lot of evidence for it in the comments of most articles on the leak. Cheaters will be the victims and anyone who thinks cheating on one's spouse is bad will be considered insensitive.

> Cheaters will be the victims and anyone who thinks cheating on one's spouse is bad will be considered insensitive. How do you know the spouse's opinion on the matter? That's the only opinion that matters regarding how bad it is.

Society can deem a behavior bad even while the individual can forgive and forget.

Re: Here’s what Ashley Madison members have told me

#53

Post by tbrownaw »

DaFranker wrote: post #12
amelius wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about this a lot. But the problem is that such a service would have to violate EULAs of many popular services like facebook and twitter.

EULAs are never legally binding, and especially not for someone who is 1) not currently a consenting user, and 2) invoking a right. So in the EU, if current legislation projects bear fruit, a case could probably be made for implementing this under the protection of the right to be forgotten, and there would be very little those services could do to prevent it.

EULAs are never legally binding

And blanket statements are always false.

Re: Here’s what Ashley Madison members have told me

#54

Post by inversionOf »

transfire wrote: post #36

Anyone notice that the media is eating this up? But let me tell you the media also lent its support to this website. I was watching CNBC a few years ago and they had the CEO of Ashley Madison on and had a great time talking about their "brilliant business model", and how great the site was. No one seemed morally repulsed then. Well I was curious just from a business perspective (and curious how many people would actu…

No one seemed morally repulsed then.

The single and only reason Ashley Madison got media attention -- and they got plenty (morning radio in the Southern Ontario space just loved bringing them up) is that it was salacious: The whole premise of a site to arrange affairs is just very "click baity", and it's sure to draw attention.

Ashley Madison played those cards brilliantly, turning their entrant in a hyper competitive dating site market into a newsworthy, edgy find an affair site.

But that same gambit also means that if you fail, many want to see you fail big, exactly the same motivations drawing media.

There is no hypocrisy or dual standards here. Site is newsworthy for its market, and it's newsworthy for success, and even more for failures.

Re: Here’s what Ashley Madison members have told me

#55

Post by c_lebesgue »

Ollinson wrote: post #39
jalanco wrote: post #6

Reading this made me think about the hard problem of "removing" yourself from the internet. I don't think it is possible. But I do think there might be an opportunity for a service that creates so much conflicting and false information about a person that it is not possible to know the truth about them: false addresses, phone numbers, credit histories, you name it. Just a thought.

I wonder if making your social media account mimic a spam bot would get it flagged for deeper deletion on the host servers.

I do not think spam accounts are ever deleted, just flagged. Maybe those created in some absurd numbers. After all they make a valuable training data for spam detection algorithms.

Re: Here’s what Ashley Madison members have told me

#56

Post by bradleyankrom »

burnburnburn wrote: post #46
transfire wrote: post #36

Anyone notice that the media is eating this up? But let me tell you the media also lent its support to this website. I was watching CNBC a few years ago and they had the CEO of Ashley Madison on and had a great time talking about their "brilliant business model", and how great the site was. No one seemed morally repulsed then. Well I was curious just from a business perspective (and curious how many people would actu…

The immoral business behavior seems to be the hackers' motivation, based on what they've written. They sought out to destroy the business. I'm guessing they'll succeed in that.

I know the sample Troy showed may not be representative of the whole, but I think there are a lot of users, outside of tech, that aren't aware of the breach.

There is a comment somewhere -- maybe it's from the article, I can't remember -- expressing surprise that the AM home page doesn't acknowledge the breach at all. I would imagine that they are still receiving signups from folks who aren't following this story.

Re: Here’s what Ashley Madison members have told me

#57

Post by inversionOf »

formichunter wrote: post #2

In northern virginia, fairfaxunderground website, was nice enough to parse only information pertinent to this area. Now, everybody and their friends have searched through it looking for people they know. My wife actually found a good friend's dad listed twice...and he's still married. So, now all those facebook connection have this awkward knowledge and no one will tell the friend.

There has been a surprising hesitation by many in making the data searchable.

I mean, it's straight up mySQL dumps. You don't even have to do any complex ETL. Making that geographically and attribute searchable is remarkably easy. Like four hour project easy. Mapping everyone on OSM would be trivial.

Yet very few such apps have appeared. I suspect because of the privacy implications, coupled with the fuzzy legal area of the data -- I might have it, but I'm not going to announce to the world that I do.

Re: Here’s what Ashley Madison members have told me

#58

Post by c_lebesgue »

buro9 wrote: post #50
jacquesm wrote: post #15

Think about how easy it would be to ruin someones reputation by signing them up for all kinds of shady services and then waiting for the (inevitable) breach. Of course that possibility will not stop the witchhunt but I'm fairly sure that at least a small percentage of the people in that database have no idea they're even in it.

Or, run an internet forum and wait a while. I've been signed up to so much over the years that I mostly ignore it now, just unsub from the things I can and mark as spam everything else. BTW, if anyone implements a "Thank you for signing up" email, please please please put the original IP address used to sign up in the email along with the "If this is not you". The few services that have done this have enabled me to i…

The original IP address can also speed up the prosecution process, at least in Europe, where many privacy violations are a criminal offense.

Re: Here’s what Ashley Madison members have told me

#59

Post by transfire »

mayaross wrote: post #34

One thing that struck me about this is that all the messages from people worried their data are from men. Troy even states that explicitly: "very close to 100% of the emails I got were about men having accounts on the site". Why is that? Is it because men are more likely to cheat, or because men are more likely to need the help of online services to do so? I suspect both are true, but can say with confidence that the…

You don't understand what it is like to be a man then. It has nothing to do with "inequality". When it comes to sex it is woman that hold most of the cards. For a man, unless they are handsome, wealthy and well endowed (i.e. perfect) then they are at the mercy of women. Which means they have two choices, they either "beg" for it or try to "take" it. Both come in a variety of subtle and overt forms. In either case it is a very insecure state for a single man. And ironically woman can sense that. Woman are always more interested in the taken man because that insecurity is no longer present. So in a cruel twist of fate, a taken man who struggled to woo his current mate discovers now he has many more options for the taking.

Re: Here’s what Ashley Madison members have told me

#60

Post by bradleyankrom »

buro9 wrote: post #50
jacquesm wrote: post #15

Think about how easy it would be to ruin someones reputation by signing them up for all kinds of shady services and then waiting for the (inevitable) breach. Of course that possibility will not stop the witchhunt but I'm fairly sure that at least a small percentage of the people in that database have no idea they're even in it.

Or, run an internet forum and wait a while. I've been signed up to so much over the years that I mostly ignore it now, just unsub from the things I can and mark as spam everything else. BTW, if anyone implements a "Thank you for signing up" email, please please please put the original IP address used to sign up in the email along with the "If this is not you". The few services that have done this have enabled me to i…

> BTW, if anyone implements a "Thank you for signing up" email, please please please put the original IP address used to sign up in the email along with the "If this is not you".

+1; doing a macro-level lookup of the IP address's location would be useful, too, for less tech-savvy consumers.

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