Hacked Adult FriendFinder database reveals extramarital affairs of millions
thestack.com
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Everybody knew what was happening but was looking away as long as the money was good, even MasterCard. Internally the code names we used for them was "online gaming" or "innovative business models". Whenever an executive used these words you knew he meant them. There are acquirers that specialize in merchants with high cb rates. But they go kicked even from there (after MasterCard intervened). I have no idea where they are now.
The main problems seem to be:
1) The sites only work once you have enough users to make them work, but you can't get more users until the site works.
2) People use them for sex, which is off-putting to large numbers of users.
OKC should probably set up some kind of meet-friends-in-groups thing.
I've considered going to a computer / technology / entrepreneurship club, but haven't yet. They also have local groups for dog owners, walking/fitness/specialty (ballet, dance), FPV drone flyers, sports groups, and almost anything else I could think of they had a group already started for it in my city.
Some have memberships fees (completely optional when setting up a new group, afaik) and some have more strict requirements when joining (a potential problem but I haven't heard of it being abused).
This seems like something that would be in a David Letterman "Top 10 list of things to consider for your new website".
Althought it sounds a bit sparse at the moment.
I also didn't realize this site was already out there, but if it was dating/sex related by that time, I wouldn't have known it could be used for that.
FWIW, there's another site I think similary created for meeting people nearby as friends (Meetme.com) that has also turned into a sex/hookup app.
Her response rate was about 40%. I cried a little.
On the other hand, two guys or two girls going out on a date is not as big a deal. The perception is that it's safer. There is of course a lot to worry about, but the playing field is usually a lot more level. This of course is offset by the fact that on most dating sites your pool of gay or lesbian candidates is smaller, but your chances of them responding will generally be higher.
OkCupid, at least when I signed up 10+ years ago, allowed you to specify that you were interested in platonic activity partners, and would show both a match rating and friend rating.
The female he was talking to may or may not be real... But, if you wanted to get inside information on a bunch of companies, it would be a great way to do it (and i'm sure it's happening as we speak).
I guess it's the universe rewarding him for his good intentions.
Eventually we gave the adult content its own space on the site and charged for access to that portion and this was the financial cork that kept the whole thing afloat during many years.
See also:
http://jacquesmattheij.com/content/story-behind-wwcom-camara...
I've always resisted the pressure to either partner with a porn company or to let the inmates run the asylum but plenty of porn companies licensed the software and quite a few of those then pushed the envelope in terms of development often with lucrative deals as the result.
You wouldn't be the first to get support from a source you're conflicted with to do what you actually wish to accomplish. If you would decide to walk away, well, then you wouldn't be the first to do that as well.
This could work well for scheduled events as well as your weekend fishing example.
Does something like this already exist, anyone (I'm googling and not yet finding anything)?
In part this is because of the nature of the businesses, they're borderline and tend to have operators that try to find out just where that border lies in terms of cost savings, outsourcing and the quality of the employees they hire (so slipshod work is the norm rather than the exception, and quite a few operators built scam sites, the employees of which are likely not amongst the most ethical characters to begin with), in part it is because their systems tend to hold juicy data and make very fat targets for hackers, either external or from the ranks of the employees.
If you do use such a service I'd strongly advise you to use only pseudonymous and throw away data and to make sure that if you pay by credit card that you are talking to some highly reputed processor and not to any of the servers operated by the company directly. That's a huge risk (it is a huge risk in any e-commerce environment but with adult the risk is definitely elevated).
Adult companies have done their bit when it comes to innovation, but when it comes to security most of them are well behind the times.
That tidbit gets bandied around a lot. I've especially seen it lately. I'd be interested in seeing real data on this. I recall years ago seeing blog posts from media industry experts saying the idea is an urban myth.
But the heydays are definitely over and now innovation comes from many other corners and adult companies are no longer in any way near the frontiers.
And I'm happy that pornhub has their act together (you're on the hook for that one ;)).
But there are many more companies out there than pornhub and quite a few of those have serious security issues.
Maybe this is because quite a few porn companies still operate on software that is rather long in the tooth.
My rationale is that, at every VR meetup I end up going to, some jackwad wants to turn it into an opportunity to skeeve the hell out of any of the women who happen to be attending by forcing the conversation to porn. He argues it's "legitimate" because "porn drives innovation". And my understanding is that that has almost never been true enough to make a meme out of it.
> Is there a list of patents?
No, I never took out a single patent for the stuff I built, though that didn't stop the patent trolls from doing just that and trying to sue me - and my customers - after the fact, some of those have been fairly high profile cases, and some of those trolls are still at it today.
Hence my long standing offer to aid companies (porn or not makes not difference to me) that are sued by patent trolls in the video/interaction/pay-per-view/payment realm.
Specialty processors take care of the issues in such a way that the risk becomes tolerable. Another reason is pressure from the big card companies not to accept such clients even when the processors would accept them otherwise.
Hence the prevalence of adult customers with CCBill, Epoch, VXS and several others.
So how many times higher a cut do the CCBill, Epochs, VXS and others take compared to... what a retail store would pay?
Solutions such as VBV and meticulous logging can take care of this but are hard to implement in a bullet proof way to stand up in case of a dispute. The processors do a good job of this and in general are the more solid component of the eco-system.
The only time the costs are excessive is when a processor goes belly-up, which has happened twice for a large enough processor that it affected thousands of merchants.
Retail stores are at a huge advantage here because they have inherent address verification and a signature upon delivery, whereas most - if not all - adult sites operate entirely in the virtual domain. That does make it much easier for them to absorb the extra costs.
Inevitably there would be fraudulent chargebacks against the site when someones partner would read the credit card statement at the end of the month ("No honey, why would I use that site? Our credit card has been hacked!"). There was a team of people who would prepare reports of usage to fax to the banks to challenge the chargebacks.
You want someone at a bank to get a faxed copy of naked pics? Upload them to the site and then deny the charges. Easy!
http://www.cio.com/article/2925874/leaked-database-of-adult-...
Adult Friend Finder, one of the largest online dating sites, may have been breached more than two months ago, and the sensitive files—include names, ages, email addresses, zip codes and more—are apparently still online....
Bev Robb, who does malware and dark Web research, came across the Adult Friend Finder files in March. She said she held off on publicizing the information for a few weeks before contacting two security experts.
Possibly an extortion / non-payment issue:
https://teksecurityblog.com/blog/2015/04/13/hacked-how-safe-...
During a fit of rage, a pissed off hacker (going by the handle ROR[RG]) posted 15 downloadable spreadsheets (in zipped file format with credit card data stripped) to a week-old Darknet forum stating that he had rooted the adult site database. Why? Because they owed his guy approximately $248,000 USD. He bragged that the company and law enforcement could not touch him because he was based in Thailand. His ransom demand was set at $100,000 (50G to begin and 50G to end).
Seems about the same as bars, clubs, and most of our working environments.
Working environments - certainly.
95% of these "females" are likely spammers, escorts or someone you don't want to meet in a dark alley.
We are much more inline with open relationships than we think.
Further reading: Sex at Dawn Further watching: Polyamory (HBO)
Given those numbers and that Adult Friend Finder is not specifically just for people in bad relationships, I would say that the evidence suggest strongly that we are predominately a monogamous species.
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/family-demography/families-and...
Edit: Worth it.
I learned that lesson 20 years or so ago. Unique passwords for every site now.
There are a lot of people who use these sites. The spreadsheets possibly only represent a fraction of the data appropriated.
This event is making news, many don't. Including other dating services, or non-dating services with online data.
Really: you simply don't know where, when, or how your data might get caught up in a system such as this.
Don't be so smug.