There's something poetic about people who use an Internet based service to commit adultery being exposed by crackers. With luck the fallout will break Ashley Madison too.
Dozens of people are going to commit suicide over this...
The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked
61–70 of 527 posts
Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked
#62This is my first time to learn about Ashley Madison. The business model actually disgusts me. I get the whole open relationship, but people who are actually married or in a committed relationship are using this site is just ridiculous. Either you break off with your current relationship, or stay loyal. BTW, those "secure" logo are just so useless I see them as sign of weakness rather than confidence. Anyone can place…
I'm curious why so many are downvoting. Do you disagree that the business model is disgusting, or just think it's inappropriate to say so about a peer's startup? I'm very curious to know what HNers think about this.
From a business point of view, and like any company, they're matching a need with a service at a profit.
But everyone has their own preferences and boundaries. Society generally frowns upon affairs, but if your own morals allow you to create that sort of business, it's your choice.
Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked
#63I have signed up with a throwaway email and user name and yet I feel really uncomfortable that I receive updates from them as though nothing has happened. No "please change your password" or anything.
Surprisingly, the passwords are probably the only thing safe. Looks like they were hashed with bcrypt.
Well some of the passwords are safe. Bcrypt doesn't offer much protection if your password is on a list of the 10,000 most-common passwords [1].
Ashley Madison's highest priority should be to tell users to change their password on the Ashley Madison website, and any other website where they have used the same password.
Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked
#64The HN change from the original title ("Was the Ashley Madison Database Leaked?") seems odd. Questions in titles are usually clickbait, but in this case it is legitimately uncertain, and the article doesn't claim an definite answer.
It's been confirmed now by multiple sources.
Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surprisingly, the passwords are probably the only thing safe. Looks like they were hashed with bcrypt.
Well some of the passwords are safe. Bcrypt doesn't offer much protection if your password is on a list of the 10,000 most-common passwords [1]. Ashley Madison's highest priority should be to tell users to change their password on the Ashley Madison website, and any other website where they have used the same password . [1] http://www.passwordrandom.com/most-popular-passwords
Were the passwords salted as well? If so, the "commonness" of the password wont matter.
Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I happen to agree that the business model is awful, but it's also sort of off-topic. The way in which I am displeased with someone who chooses to cheat on their spouse is very different from the way I am displeased with a company who makes money off of getting large numbers of people to cheat on their spouses, and this hack victimizes individuals more than the company. It's also very different from the way I am displ…
Thank you for that answer, which helped me see some larger issues at play. Edit: although I also disagree that discussions of ethics and morality are off-topic for HN.
To be clear, I think discussions of ethics and morality in company purposes are (or at least, ought to be) very much on topic for the site as a whole. I just think that discussing the morality of this particular business on this particular comment thread is likely to risk being off-topic, because it's too easy to read it as "Yeah, but they deserved it," and maybe the company did but the story is primarily about the users, not the company itself.
Here's a proposition that I think is on-topic that we can discuss: It is, IMO, clearly irresponsible and reprehensible to go around encouraging people to break their marriage vows and then not take world-class care of the database listing the people you so encouraged. If you can't find qualified people to take world-class security measures, maybe you shouldn't be running the site at all.
Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked
#67The HN change from the original title ("Was the Ashley Madison Database Leaked?") seems odd. Questions in titles are usually clickbait, but in this case it is legitimately uncertain, and the article doesn't claim an definite answer.
Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked
#68Question: 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.
(1) Lawyer. Clients. Blackmail. Panic. Strategy.
(2) Passwords+usernames repeated across websites (see adobe leak)
Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked
#69The HN change from the original title ("Was the Ashley Madison Database Leaked?") seems odd. Questions in titles are usually clickbait, but in this case it is legitimately uncertain, and the article doesn't claim an definite answer.
It's been confirmed now by multiple sources.
The original article was specifically about the lack of concrete evidence, and didn't claim a definite answer until the update a couple of hours ago. The HN submission title had been changed before I posted, but Dang's explanation of the change posted about the same time as I did. I get it now, so by all means feel free to disagree with my original point about HN title etiquette, but please don't downvote me for failing to account for a post that arrived as I was typing mine.
Re: The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked
#70There's something poetic about people who use an Internet based service to commit adultery being exposed by crackers. With luck the fallout will break Ashley Madison too.
Repost from a different, and now I think abandoned, thread: I'm curious - I keep getting downvoted whenever I criticise Ashley Madison on the grounds of morality. Why is this? This isn't a whinge about downvoting (if I didn't want to get downvoted I wouldn't keep posting about A-M), but a genuine inquiry into the reasons. Is it that people see discussions of morality as off-topic for HN? Do people disagree with my mo…
IMO, you're getting downvoted because your judgment of people on AM assumes facts not in evidence (i.e., that users of AM are there to cheat on their unknowing spouses), and then judges those people based on those facts that only exist in your head. It's self-aggrandizing, and the tone doesn't come off as participation in a discourse about morality as much as a narcissistic statement about the identity you'd like people to assign you ("wow, duncan_bayne is hardcore judgey about those AM users. He must really be against adultery.") See also [0]. Finally, it's also a derail from the reasons people are discussing the story that is more HN-relevant (technical and security aspects, user data practices, etc.).
So to answer your closing questions - 1) "no", people discuss morality all the time on HN, especially in relation to economic relations, 2) Probably "yes", because your judgment says more about what you want to say about adultery than about the actual behavior of AM users (who could have all sorts of non-adulterous reasons to be on the site), 3) clearly "no" (see (1)), but jumping to that overarching assumption that people are downvoting your comments because they just don't like morality is part of that self-aggrandizing impression I'm talking about.
If this was a dump of Petsmart's customer database, and you posted a bunch of comments judging the Petsmart customers as deserving to be exposed because they bought their pet from a puppy mill and some PETA links, people would downvote you, too--partially for the substance and partially just for derailing the conversation.