The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked • Hacker News Board

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#491

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 10:20 PM UTC

tlb wrote: post #490

TeMPOraL wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen a society of random people who don't have long-term relationships? A country which laws don't treat family as a basic concept, and third of which is not built around it? That family is a fundamental unit in human societies is a pretty much self-evident thing at this point. The burden of proof lies squarely on those who disagree with observable reality.

Malinowski [0] describes a highly functional such society. Instead of paternity and monogamy, they had a similarly complex but different set of taboos. Reading it will help you realize what a cultural bubble we all live in, and that there are completely different configurations of society that also work. [0] http://www.amazon.com/Sexual-Savages-Argonauts-Western-Pacif...

Never heard of it before, thanks!

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#492

Post by nkurz » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 10:21 PM UTC

jamiek88 wrote: post #273

nkurz wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Avid Life Media" is gross and creepy, and apparently totally incompetent. People (and organizations) have competence in different areas. I was genuinely impressed (in a dark patterns way) by the deftness with which they handle new signups: http://www.useronboard.com/how-ashleymadison-onboards-new-us...

87 part slide show? You must love the dark patterns to bother with that.

I presume this is an attempt at humor rather than just a snide comment, but as a humorless engineer I'll ignore that and respond sincerely. It's a well put together presentation based on adding graphics and text blurbs on top of screen shots. You can read through the whole thing using the right arrow key in well under 5 minutes, likely under 2.

I much preferred it to a video presentation, which even if viewed at 2x speed would have been much longer. And since it's based on showing screen shots, plain text isn't a good option. I have no particularly strong interest in dark patterns (and in fact have extreme distaste for them) but I found their mastery of the craft to be extraordinary, and the presentation to be well worth my time.

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#493

Post by gnaritas » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 10:31 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #489

gnaritas wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The burden of proof is upon the one who makes the claim, so no it isn't the other way around.

Have you seen a society of random people who don't have long-term relationships? A country which laws don't treat family as a basic concept, and third of which is not built around it? That family is a fundamental unit in human societies is a pretty much self-evident thing at this point. The burden of proof lies squarely on those who disagree with observable reality.

Families exist regardless of marriage, marriage != family, so to claim that attacking marriage tears at the foundations of society and then to move the goal post and say they're attacking families, your must first demonstrate what you're saying is true. Marriages don't make families, loved ones do.

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#494

Post by zeendo » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 11:17 PM UTC

danvideo wrote: post #450

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…

I think your explanation about why the twitter crusade feels so despicable is right on, dsacco and Thomas. Yet I'm struggling with why I (and much of the tech community) was OK and frankly downright gleeful at publicizing the Hacking Team hack - their data was exposed illegally and were engaged in immoral behavior re: working with various abusive governments (and had previously denied these facts). If I'm OK with peo…

Umm. Shit.

If you come up with a resolution to the cognitive dissonance you just exposed then please let me know.

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#495

Post by daemin » Thu, Aug 20, 2015, 12:35 AM UTC

joaq wrote: post #388

tomjen3 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but there are plenty of idiots everywhere, including in government.

The real question is, do they require e-mail verification after signup? If they do, the list is a lot more valuable.

They do, I read somewhere that out of 35 million addresses in the system, only 24 million are verified. Still, I imagine that there would be false positives in the verified emails list (for instance someone clicked on it by accident or without reading it as they were signing up for something else, etc).

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#496

Post by ZoFreX » Thu, Aug 20, 2015, 12:55 AM UTC

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #291

ZoFreX wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this poster: https://www.reddit.com/r/lgbt/comments/3ebzzj/i_may_get_ston... there is not a requirement to be in a relationship to use the site. And now he might die, because of the leak.

>And now he might die, because of the leak. Isn't this akin to blaming Snowden/Manning for diplomatic fallout instead of blaming those who were engaging in the wrongful practices that led to the fallout.

Well, there's plenty of blame to go around. For me it serves as a reminder that the right to privacy exists for many reasons, and that some of our users are more in need of security and protection than others - for some of them, digital security really is a matter of life and death.

It reminds me that we should be careful with security, and also honest about what we can and can't do. Ashley Madison promised emails would _never_ be exposed - a promise they were either not willing or not able to keep.

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#497

Post by differentView » Thu, Aug 20, 2015, 12:56 AM UTC

brightball wrote: post #319

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…

Honestly, I'm more concerned about how easy it would be for the hackers to inject virtually anybody they wanted into the middle of this data to publicly smear them. With the public in a general froth over the whole episode, dropping in a celebrity, politician, preacher, etc would be child's play. I don't like anything about that site and I have a really hard time feeling sorry for people getting "outed" by it, but yo…

>Honestly, I'm more concerned about how easy it would be for the hackers to inject virtually anybody they wanted into the middle of this data to publicly smear them. With the public in a general froth over the whole episode, dropping in a celebrity, politician, preacher, etc would be child's play.

This is similar to my view on the death penalty. While most people debate over the morality (Is it right to murder a murderer? Is it right to out a cheater?), I am more concerned about the "facts" (Was a person wrongfully convicted? Is the data correct?).

In the case of the Ashley Madison data dump, there are at least a few points where it could be manipulated. It could have been done to the original data dump, copies of said dump floating around (since the average person wouldn't know which one is the original), and sites that have popped up allowing searching of email addresses (since really, the average person wouldn't know how to download and search the data dump).

Even if all those weren't manipulated, someone's email address could appear because someone else used it. I randomly searched for case@aol.com and obama@whitehouse.gov on one of the email search sites and both showed as hits.

I can easily see someone inserting fake data just for the lulz or for ideological reasons.

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#498

Post by the_af » Thu, Aug 20, 2015, 1:09 AM UTC

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #480

the_af wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that lying about having a vasectomy is seriously wrong, and probably (but I'm not a lawyer) you can get sued for this in some countries. However, in which country is this considered rape? It's consensual sex between people of legal age, only that one of them is a lying, amoral bastard, and the act can lead to serious long-term consequences like an unwanted pregnancy. But rape ? Seriously? Also, while lying ab…

>Also, while lying about safe sex is certainly a despicable and immoral act, it's still a private matter between two people. Why is it automatically a private matter? Perhaps you think it should be a private matter, but someone else may think it shouldn't be, and thus the morality of something like cheating may be to them much worse than it is to you, thus morally justifying more extreme actions to be taken to expose…

Sex is a private matter by definition, between two or (ahem) more people. What you or other people think about it is mostly irrelevant, as long as the people engaged in the sex act are not doing something outrageously against social conventions, such as having sex right in front of you in a public space.

> Perhaps you think it should be a private matter, but someone else may think it shouldn't be, and thus the morality of something like cheating may be to them much worse than it is to you, thus morally justifying more extreme actions to be taken to expose cheating.

Sorry, I find this position totally unacceptable. Yes, we were always talking about people's moral opinions, which are subjective by definition, and everyone has one. People who are morally outraged about what other consenting adults do with their private lives are despicable (way more despicable to me than cheaters that keep their opinions to themselves) and they have no right to harm other people because of their own morals. Exactly how some religious fundamentalists have no right to publicly shame gay people, or some other religious people think it's their right to stone adulterous women to death.

This argument that some people care so deeply about what strangers do with their private lives that they are entitled to take "extreme actions" just doesn't fly.

PS: in which country is lying about a vasectomy exactly the same as rape then?

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#499

Post by mikeash » Thu, Aug 20, 2015, 2:00 AM UTC

RyanZAG wrote: post #464

mikeash wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hack itself is worrying. The fact that people will give information out to third parties, in a manner that is potentially life threatening, in order to satisfy their sex drive isn't worrying to me, because it's an inherent part of human nature.

Ah interesting! The hack itself does not worry me at all - I fully expect it and many subsequent hacks on most or all privately held data. A data breach requires a single slipup by any one of thousands of people - it's inevitable in my opinion and does not really worry me. That people will give information that will cause them harm does worry me though. So we're worried by the opposite things here! Also a good lesson…

Here's my thinking.

The fact that people can get killed for their sexuality is the worst bit, and also the one most amenable to change. There are many societies where being outed like this wouldn't be a life-threatening situation, so it can be done. Of course, turning a place like Saudi Arabia into one of those societies is somewhat difficult, but it's a worthy goal.

Hacking a company's computers and exposing people's private data is also bad, but much harder to change. I'm not sure we'll ever achieve decent computer security. Stopping attacks on the other side, by convincing people not to try, is probably also not feasible. So stuff like this will probably keep happening.

Then we come to the other end of the private info, where people give it away. I'm skeptical about ever changing this too, but I think the particular case of homosexuals in places like Saudi Arabia isn't very instructive. That a person will risk their life by giving their potentially life-threatening private info to a company in order to gratify their sexuality is predictable, and doesn't really say anything about the possibility of convincing people to be more careful with their info in general.

Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

#500

Post by tronreg » Thu, Aug 20, 2015, 2:01 AM UTC

This is hacker news bitches, y'all should be into this shit. "Ashley Madison" is a company dedicated to profiting from people lying to their spouses. Lighten up on the data privacy aspect and cheer your anonymous bros for bringing some justice.