What us worry? Ashley Madison says it added over 100K users last week | Hacker News Reader

What us worry? Ashley Madison says it added over 100K users last week

arstechnica.com

29 pointspmcpinto41 comments

If I had to guess, an overwhelming bulk of the signups must be by people who heard about this thorough the negative publicity. They're going to sign up and log in because it's mandatory to view the content. Once they're in, they will search for their friends, colleges and significant other... and then they will never use it again.

I'd like to know how many of those are paid vs un-paid accounts.

>I'd like to know how many of those are paid vs un-paid accounts.

As I understand it, accounts are 'free', you pay to send messages. That's how the bot-scam works...they generate fake messages to the users and the users spend money to reply.

Noel Biderman and his gang of fraudsters should be arrested and spend the next few decades in prison.

I think this is the most obvious conclusion to gather, I had never heard of the service until the hack. While it's true that most people don't think as much about security as they should; the media has done a fairly good job at convening everyone that this hack could ruin the lives of anyone on the site. I'd say their service is dead, unless they do some major rebranding.

I could be wrong but I'm 99% sure you can't just search an individual by logging in.

But there's only one way to be completely sure, right? And that's probably the source of a lot of these signups.

Or they're searching within a general proximity of their location just to see who's on.

But how many people know that ahead of time?

It is not a public company. So basically, they can say what they like. There is no need for them to prove their numbers (as long it is not advertisement). They probably also lied about their numbers on female members.

There's also no reason to think that the 100,000 new accounts are any more real or sex-balanced than the previously existing ones. For all we know, they're telling the truth about their membership numbers but it's the memberships themselves that are fabrications.

There's also the fact that accounts never get deleted, so the number of members can only ever increase regardless of whether actual use of the site's facilities is increasing or not.

So many ways to game the system, so little time.

If they ever said that fewer than 95% of female "members" were really prostitutes who wanted to advertise online, then yes, they lied about numbers on female members. It's easier for a website to stay open when claiming to cater to "cheating" than when truthfully admitting to cater to prostitution.

> They probably also lied about their numbers on female members.

A friend of a friend said (read: no resource to back this claim up) that someone dug into the data and found a vanishing small amount of real women. Leads me to ask:

> Ashley Madison says it added over 100K users last week

Do they mean that they added 100K users, or did 100K users sign up?

  that someone dug into the data and found a vanishing small 
  amount of real women.

That was a Gawker article: http://gizmodo.com/almost-none-of-the-women-in-the-ashley-ma...

Most relevant graph: https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/1410188302...

11,030,920 to 2,409

that is quite the assumption considering that there are already many large sites to find escorts on for free.

Which of them match AM in terms of users, revenue, or ad spend?

Craigslist had to change "erotic services" to "casual encounters", which ISTM is exactly what I'm talking about.

Being privately held doesn't mean you can defraud customers.

Indeed, but if I claim that such company defrauds their customers, I am the one who has to prove it - at least in the beginning, so that some district attorney can pickup the ball.

A good starting point would be the "Over 40,330,000 anonymous members!" claim on their home page. A good 30+ million of those aren't anonymous anymore.

Haha, you're right.

The problem is, they were making noise about going public. In doing so, presumably people are looking very deeply into their books & numbers.

But until they file IPO papers, they can still say anything.

They added "87,596 women". Now, if you look at that number, does anything feel unnatural and made up about it? 56789.

I could easily believe a large number of women signing up if the vast majority of them are either:

* people signing up with fake details to look for people they know (their friends/colleagues, local politicians, their own spouse, etc)

* sex workers who heard on the news about a great site to advertise their availability on that they were previously unaware of

Just because the integers in that number happen to be consecutive if you reorder them doesn't mean they aren't "natural" (whatever that means). For example, a random number generator is exactly as likely to generate 12345 as it is 00000 or 92834 (for five digits). That doesn't mean any of those options is more "natural" or "random" than any other just because it doesn't "look random enough".

I'd hazard a guess that, if true in any way (ludicrously unlikely), 99% of these allegedly female accounts might be wives looking for their husbands.

Are you saying men cheat more than women?

Studies report the answer is yes:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18233843

"... although Ars has no way of confirming any of the numbers provided."

Just wait a couple of weeks, and we'll all be able to confirm the numbers.

Should we take 100k new users to mean 100 new Ashley Madison employees generating 1,000 fake accounts each?

http://abovethelaw.com/2013/11/ashley-madison-should-take-be...

Since there are 90+% female accounts are fake, and their "delete-all-your-info" premium service is also phony, should I really trust the statement "100k new users" over last week?

After all the site is sort of about cheating in relationship, so fake/phony might be the norm, to some extent.

I find it hilarious that anyone is signing up, man or woman, after finding out that there were so many "bots" there talking to people. If this company has ambitions of being public (or being a company at all) then the bots shouldn't be a thing. That's just straight up defrauding users.

The problem with the site in general is that (relatively speaking) there aren't a lot of people looking SPECIFICALLY for affairs. No doubt SOME, but not a LOT. I think that the reason is that affairs work that way. I don't think people wake up, sigh deeply, and say "I think I'll have an affair today". It comes from a relationship that is broken (actually, 2 relationships that are broken), and an opportunity (finding that second person).

It tells me two things :

1) there a lot of people out there who use the internet and NOT read or tune into TV or any internet news.

2) RIP my future career in computer security. It seems users do not care about security as much as I though.

Or a company that has dishonesty baked into its product and its culture, continues to lie about its user metrics.

That's what I was thinking as well. This whole thing could be just a PR move full of lies.

In case this news is genuine...I guess it's true that any publicity is good publicity.

This is the aspect that absolutely boggles -- the company has provably lied time and time again. They've lied about markets, metrics, and the composition of their userbase.

There is no honor among thieves, the saying goes, and you can't expect an adultery site to show great morals.

Yet it keeps getting reported as if it were truth. There was one single news group that actually basically said "Yeah...sure...", but everyone else just went with it as a statement of fact.

The company has no credibility at all.

I think it really just means that people are curious about one of the largest and most well known hack in years and are making accounts just out of curiosity. I would wager that many of the accounts were made with fake details just to scope out the website and see for themselves.

I think for #2, you mean in computer privacy. "security" is still alive and well: but it's only half-heartedly implemented to protect privacy.

Learn how to hack drones and robots. You'll have a career.

Make that 100K + 1. Now that I know they can't be trusted with their data and that there's the potential to completely destroy my marriage and my family how could I pass that up?

"We have people in the back room creating new profiles as we speak."

99,500 of them men. Or fake.

Or prostitutes.

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