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The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

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Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#241

Post by humanrebar »

dagw wrote: post #238
humanrebar wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 co…

you actually take choices away from people that want a stronger marriage contract. Isn't that what prenups are for? (modulo the fact that it is sometimes difficult to enforce prenups).

The difficulty in enforcing prenups is partly the problem here, yes.

Let's say you like the marriage rules pre-1970 (no no-fault divorce). You can't write up a prenup that resembles that and have it be enforced by the government (reject applications for divorce and applications to marry someone else).

More options and freedom weren't added when each state adopted no-fault divorce. One option was taken away (pre-1970 marriage contracts) and another was picked (no-fault divorce).

Someone might not like with pre-1970 marriage contracts, but who are they to judge someone else's culture and preferences?

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#242

Post by joering2 »

> "We’re not denying this happened," Biderman said. "Like us or not, this is still a criminal act."

That's all dandy and stuff, but I imagine majority of judges are seniors with nice families, most likely no nasty habits and probably faithful to their wives who gave them wonderful children.

I'm having a hard time imagining a judge who wouldn't be biased in any court proceeding against those who trespass AM servers... that is, if they ever caught.

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#243

Post by RyanZAG »

nicolas_t wrote: post #217

What is worrying about this is that some people are in real physical danger because of this leak. It probably seemed like fun and "social justice" for the hackers but it's not. There are people who live in countries where adultery is punishable by death. Likewise for being gay. There's already one person from Saudi Arabia who expressed his concerns on Reddit but there's likely to be a lot of other people affected. An…

What is more worrying for me is that people in real physical danger would hand over that kind of information in the first place. There's very little stopping an employee at a company from selling this information to governments in these countries, or employees originating from these countries being forced to divulge the information.

The real issue is that this information was freely given up in the first place. Hacks like this might make people think twice about privacy, so maybe it's a good thing in the long run?

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#244

Post by akshatpradhan »

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…

>The people doing this aren't victimizing Avid Life Media; they're re-victimizing the real victims of what is clearly an actual crime. If it's O.K. to hack into someone else's server and mass-out people for having profiles on a dating site because you suspect most of them might be "guilty" of the crime of "marital infidelity" --- and come on, 98% of the people talking about this on Twitter barely recognize that as ethically problematic in the first place --- how do you make a case that it's unethical for dragnet traffic looking for people who want to blow up civilians with homemade bombs?

That wasn't the intent.

The true intent: "In a long manifesto posted alongside the stolen ALM data, The Impact Team said it decided to publish the information in response to alleged lies ALM told its customers about a service that allows members to completely erase their profile information for a $19 fee."

Impact Team's manifest is that AshleyMadison is fraudulent at business practices (e.g. charging people extra for profiles that were never deleted) and that's why the Impact Team is embarrassing the company.

I understand this is emotionally charging but don't twist the intent around to, "The Impact Team believes the members on Ashley Madison are guilty of the crime: marital infidelity and thats why they're leaking the 10GB Database."

Stick to the facts when opining, Thomas :).

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#245

Post by RyanZAG »

OnleMeMeMe wrote: post #109

Perhaps this - at last - leads to people only submit personal data to websites who have their data encrypted in their database and a certified to have done that.

The database may well have been encrypted, it's impossible to know. Obviously if you hack the database and content servers, you have access to the encryption key as well. So no, if the data was encrypted or not would not have made any difference in this case as the hackers had access to everything.

Security is all-in. A checkbox like 'encrypted the database' is not any additional security by itself and is not a gauge to use in who to give data to.

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#246

Post by ewzimm »

Asbostos wrote: post #234
zamalek wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I should have prefaced that whole argument with "advanced societies." It's very hard to argue these points when you have e.g. the middle east getting in the way of rational and humane thought processes. In places like that you really have no choice or autonomy and arguments such as my original one simply hold no ground.

You can't objectively label different cultures as not being advanced just because they're different. There could well be good reasons for enforcing monogamy on people that your society disregards. I'm just guessing here, but maybe no monogamy may end up with a lot of people suffering the natural human emotion of jealousy and perhaps something like most women queuing up to be with the most attractive men, leaving the…

Unfortunately, there's so much bigotry in the world that it's difficult to separate different types of criticism of large areas of the world, but it's entirely possible to be positive about Middle Eastern cultures and strongly against the power structures there. For example, they have great food and literature, but you can be whipped to death for publicly criticizing unelected rulers in places like Qatar. It's not necessarily culturally insensitive to say that's backwards policy.

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#247

Post by [deleted] »

in3d wrote: post #93

I'm not sure if people realize how significant this hack is. We just might have seen the first public hack that will cause people to die or be physically hurt. Homosexuality is illegal in certain countries (like Saudi Arabia) and this hack might expose people to harm in these countries. Some reactions of spouses might also be violent. It looks like the reaction of most commenters is very different compared to when Ga…

[deleted]

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#248

Post by Asbostos »

mryan wrote: post #193
dgfv1 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry what does that article have anything to do with anything. And if some wacko kills his family and himself how is that in any way my fault?

If "some wacko" killed his family and himself as a result of your disclosure, would you feel any culpability at all? Of course, you didn't force them to join the site, but you did make the decision to disclose the information. What if someone joined the site before they were married, but never contacted anyone? Their spouse receives your email, and confronts them. They are unable to convince their spouse that they ne…

If you spouse divorces you for irrational and unfounded reasons then anything else could trigger them too. You can't blame the messenger.

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#249

Post by antillean »

kalms wrote: post #216
antillean wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because I'm talking about intentions and motivations, not actions. I said it's reason to believe that someone has intentions/motivations to have an affair; I didn't say it's enough to believe that someone has had an affair. The reputation, marketing, and design of guns is a good bit more varied than Ashley Madison's. But yes, buying and learning to use a gun shows a certain intention or willingness to kill. It ma…

You're making a lot of false assumptions. You could be the owner of gun, intending to fire it against inanimate objects only. Like a paper target at the gun range. One could even have bought it out of simple curiosity.

Yes. And you could be a member of Ashley Madison who's just curious, or who's doing a documentary for Al Jazeera, or who's trying to see if your spouse is on it.

I was speaking generally. I said that it's reason/evidence in favour of a conclusion. I said that it isn't proof of it. Those kinds of general rules and presumptions are useful for all kinds of things and in all kinds of ways. Or do you think that our judgements should be entirely composed of perfectly comprehensive and universal rules?

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#250

Post by rayiner »

jkestner wrote: post #231
minimaxir wrote: post #44

Question: what are the legalities for downloading and performing analysis on the dataset? The Washington Post has downloaded the dataset for journalism ( https://twitter.com/pbump/status/633844944105512964 ), but I would be interested in looking at the statistics in the data for visualization purposes; however, that likely doesn't fall under journalistic shield.

Barrett Brown is a journalist and got prosecuted for downloading a database containing credit card numbers. But then, he pissed off the government.

Barrett Brown did way more than that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9024835
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