Slightly off topic, but does anyone know why this is so low on HN? It has more votes and is more recent than anything except the "How I didn't make a billion dollar company" post, but is at rank 11. https://imgur.com/a/bifDABu
The title isn't something that I would have had any idea what it was about or why I should read it if I hadn't been linked here from a comment thread with a more informative title.
Yep. I don't read medium posts as a general principle, and the title meant nothing to me so I skipped right over it. Only saw it in another thread.
Having read the whole thing, man Jeff Bezos has a great deal of courage. It helps to be backed by untold wealth but here is a guy who stands tall in the face of ghastly behaviour and in the face of deep personal embarrassment. +1 Bezos.
I'm going to push back against this characterization as "ghastly personal behavior". For one, it's not clear if he and his wife were already separated, at least at a personal level, before this affair. But this general idea that it's somehow "ghastly" to send a paramour love notes and sexually suggestive pictures is a sad remnant of our puritanical history, and the sooner we rid ourselves of this notion, the better.
The ghastly behaviour is a description of the extorters, surely?!
I think another interesting thing about these times, compared to when such things may have happened 20+ years ago, is that the photos they've described would cause rather little outrage or attract much beyond a few giggles from the public. Especially if released after their existence is already known about. I think the iCloud leaks of 2014 severely tempered society's salacious demand for more pictures of this nature.
Probably more to do with the fact that there's so much high quality porn on the internet that we're honestly desensitized to amateur quality celeb nudes. Briefly intriguing, but overall rather "meh?" Granted, I could just be projecting, but I don't think I'm alone here.
Well, it's sort of weird because I think at one time the thought was that "serious people" would never take a nude of themselves or have affairs, that this kind of action was somehow "beyond the pale" and an action only a few outliers engage in. Nowadays, everyone seems to have decided that these activities are actually very common, though likely still in the minority (I think??)
If you ever find yourself with scandalous or incriminating material on someone remember this: Blackmail will always fail in the long run. It's commonnly known in espionage tradecraft that it's an absolute last resort or totally off limits tool. The risk you take with coercive trade craft are insanely high. As proven here.
And if you are going to do it. For fucks sake, do not put it in writing...
Are there any repercussions for accredited lawyers involved in this? Or are they safe if they act purely at the discretion of a client?
Regardless of what you've typed, at least don't outright lie and completely expose your troll. A fundamental truth is 2+2=4, and the speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s. What is typed above is not.
You're really calling a user who joined in 2008 with 12k karma a troll? I think it's nonsense that parent's opinion against Bezos was flagged, instead of the erudite references to Batman and The Wire in these comments.
Yes, karma doesn’t preclude someone from being incendiary or a troll.
Regardless of what you've typed, at least don't outright lie and completely expose your troll. A fundamental truth is 2+2=4, and the speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s. What is typed above is not.
You're really calling a user who joined in 2008 with 12k karma a troll? I think it's nonsense that parent's opinion against Bezos was flagged, instead of the erudite references to Batman and The Wire in these comments.
The user’s tirade was beyond misplaced and off-topic.
> However I fail to see any mistakes of his threatened to be revealed. Cheating on his wife?
During what appears to be an amicable divorce? With an age-appropriate woman? I'm not sure that rises to the level of "mistake," and certainly not to blackmailable acts. AMI way overplayed their hand here, and we may yet find that they had gone all-in.
So let me get this straight.. the owner(s) of the National Enquirer are doing this.. because they're worried about what, their journalistic credibility? Seriously? After having published the Enquirer for decades already?
Alternately, maybe some people just like to be bullies.
Whatever you think about Jeff, this is the correct way to handle such things. We should all have the same character in such a situation (despite how the situation arose; in this case via an affair). Jeff has MANY other issues of moral disfortitude (we all do to some degree, though not at these scales). However, this particular event is to be applauded and emulated.
Amazon could pull a CloudFlare and knock them off the internet as nationalenquirer.com seems to be hosted on AWS. My guess is Amazon/Bezos already has multiple backups of the Enquirer's digital assets for forensic purposes.