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Here’s what Ashley Madison members have told me

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

#81

Post by cousin_it »

acqq wrote: post #77
cousin_it wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sounds like you're pretty bitter about something or other. I think you should make more friends That's a pretty unkind thing to say to a stranger on the internet. I lose a bit of faith in humanity every time I see such things.

I don't see that mean, it matches the impression I have from transfire's comment. Nobody is saying that transfire's comment fully reflects the person who made it, but based only on the comment, it is an appropriate response, as far as I see it.

Something can be both accurate and mean at the same time. Example: "hey, you're fat". I feel that "hey, you're bitter and need to get some friends" is about the same ballpark. Maybe other people have a thicker skin, though.

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

#82

Post by acqq »

cousin_it wrote: post #81
acqq wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see that mean, it matches the impression I have from transfire's comment. Nobody is saying that transfire's comment fully reflects the person who made it, but based only on the comment, it is an appropriate response, as far as I see it.

Something can be both accurate and mean at the same time. Example: "hey, you're fat". I feel that "hey, you're bitter and need to get some friends" is about the same ballpark. Maybe other people have a thicker skin, though.

So how would you write that message? The big part of the statement was skipped by you:

> I think you should make more friends that are women so that you can talk to them about the way they view relationships.

Which definitely doesn't sound near to "hey, you're fat."

And that "fat-like" part is also in fact different:

"It sounds like you're pretty bitter (...)" -- note that it discusses the impression of the written comment not the person.

Btw I don't think it's OK to remove your claim that roymurdock's response was "mean" as the responses then lose the context, maybe deleting the comment would be more appropriate?

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

#83

Post by roymurdock »

cousin_it wrote: post #72
roymurdock wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you that women (and men for that matter) find confidence attractive. You don't have to be in a relationship to be confident. I would be careful of conflating the two. From my experience, most women are not interested in holding sex as a trump card. Like you and I, they are simply looking for companionship - for someone they can count on for support and non-judgement during times of crisis, but who will a…

> It sounds like you're pretty bitter about something or other. I think you should make more friends That's a pretty unkind thing to say to a stranger on the internet. I lose a bit of faith in humanity every time I see such things.

I'm not trying to be mean. I'm pushing OP to reflect on why he holds some of the viewpoints that he does.

I'm also not trying to imply that OP does not have enough friends. Just that he might get a broader picture of women in general if he had more female friends.

I read your edited comment about how that made you sad. A lot of things on HN make me sad - there are many unnecessarily mean, rude, snarky comments posted here with amazing regularity. I try to make helpful comments without putting others down. I'm sorry if my comment came off in a negative manner. I'm not trying to add to the general negativity of the site.

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

#84

Post by sp332 »

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…

And the media right now seems to be focused on the contents of the dump instead of the hackers who dumped it, or the ethics of dumping it, or the trouble of AM having all this data in the first place let alone unsecured.

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

#85

Post by VLM »

JupiterMoon wrote: post #21
DaFranker wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Violation will certainly give the social media cite grounds and desire to delete the false profiles though.

Aren't their financial valuations based on account numbers and made up metrics like that?

So deleting this fraudulent account will cause a measurable, definable, actionable, $0.0001 decrease in shareholder value, ignoring it will have no effect on shareholder value, what is my fiduciary responsibility here?

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

#86

Post by smtddr »

sp332 wrote: post #84
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…

And the media right now seems to be focused on the contents of the dump instead of the hackers who dumped it, or the ethics of dumping it, or the trouble of AM having all this data in the first place let alone unsecured.

The scandals this data leakage reveal are way too tantalizing for anyone to care how it all happened to begin with. Most of the twitter posts have applied their morals/ethics/whatever, replaced the word "hackers" with "karma" and are happy this happened.

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

#87

Post by balabaster »

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…

Or perhaps there are alternative explanations(?): Women don't care enough to check if they were exposed; less women are aware of the breach; men aren't paranoid enough to check up on their women; men don't care as much that their wife/spouse/gf may or may not have been on there at some point (or currently) and could have been/is cheating; perhaps there were even some couples that were into that together. [Not saying that I believe any of these are true statements, just that one could draw some odd conclusions from what isn't being said, just as easily as what is being said]

It's funny that there seems to be an assumption that most were either men checking about themselves or paranoid/untrusting spouses checking on the status of their men. From the information that's being reported, there seems to be remarkably few men checking up on their women...

Not sure if that's a valid observation, but it's an interesting one that is telling of the mental/emotional differences between men and women on the whole.

Who knows, people are a weird bunch. The more you know about them, the more you realize that all this shit that goes on behind closed doors that people judge in public eventually leaks and then when you analyze enough data about the state of humanity, appears to be "completely normal behaviour"... Then when everyone realizes it's completely normal behaviour they're like "okay then, perhaps we should just change the rules so that we can all stop hiding and be publically equal and love who we are in public again."

We're all human, we all fuck up from time to time and we all get caught in embarrassing moments where we hope the ground would open up and swallow us occasionally. Perhaps not in ways that get leaked all over the internet, or to be used as blackmail against us, but it happens.

Given the few women on there (by all accounts), one would have to wonder how many men could actually have ended up cheating with anyone... from the sound of things, all the female accounts were either fake or sex professionals... so who were all these millions of men cheating with?

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

#88

Post by dhimes »

lolo_ wrote: post #25
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.

I really think you (or a mod) should edit this to not mention the site name. Regardless of what these people have done (or tried to do) let's not spread the misery further by making it easier for people to find this information.

I understand your point, and I may disagree (not really sure). This is misery, and it sucks for all involved. However, the meta-issue is privacy, how we are being eaten alive by a tragedy-of-the-commons situation where so very many people will allow our privacy erosion by simply thinking it doesn't affect them (the "Well, I've got nothing to hide" excuse).

The one thing that resonates with nearly everybody, however, is sex. Sex hits most of the 'bell curve' (to put it crassly).

So, part of me says that all of this information should be exposed, so that people start to 'get it.'

I don't know- I'm on the fence here.

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

#89

Post by Pyrodogg »

benevol wrote: post #5
danso wrote: post #3

The section about how confused the layperson is about technical details, e.g. what a database is and how the Internet generally works, makes me think that this data release is going to exacerbate paranoia about data and the Internet in general, rather than lead to a general awareness of better security precautions. I think as more fallout happens, there will be an increased sentiment in favor of such things as "right…

> is going to exacerbate paranoia about data and the Internet in general Which seems rather appropriate given the extremely sick facts delivered to us by Snowden on a silver plate and the absence of change of course of society.

You don't even have to get to the dump itself to see expressions of extreme paranoia. See anyone in the media simply at a loss about 'the darkweb' and it being so full of unknown things by its nature.

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

#90

Post by smtddr »

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…

>>I went to delete my account only to discover they wanted $80 to do so. Well, I discovered their brilliant business model.

Hmm, so... did you pay? And if you did, have you verified your data is _not_ in the torrent dumps? It's been said that AM wasn't deleting as promised, even after paying, and that's a key part of a pending class-action-lawsuit.

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