Online Cheating Site AshleyMadison Hacked
krebsonsecurity.com
krebsonsecurity.com
In summary:
1. Having a session id just stored in a GET variable for (most?) pages.
2. Use of http on profile edit page.
3. Allowing password change without reauthentication
4. Storing of all passwords without any form of hashing.
5. Sending passwords over http every time the profile edit page was viewed
6. Very easy for a user to accidentally share confidential data.
All that to say, I think this is quite common. I frequently use this to my advantage to do things like remove my email address, deactivate accounts, or change the bio to "you shouldn't sleep with me, I can't even remember my own email address."
"a friend"
Second, performing your own vigilante punishment by outing people who you feel are not living up to your own personal moral standards has no place in a developed society. It is not your right to destroy a family, not to mention one where every member is a stranger to you, by outing one of its members as a cheater and at the same time putting all other members of the family on public display.
As for the "real users". I don't think the lack of sympathy stems from people's misunderstanding that extramarital affairs are not "illegal". Most marriages have an expectation of monogamy and most users of this site were doing so in order to enjoy that activity without getting caught. They were the ones who decided to engage in an activity that broke up their family and "destroyed lives". This just sped up the process of getting caught. Aside from the moral contract that was broken, the cheating spouse also exposed their partner to sexually transmitted diseases without their knowledge.
I think sites like this are despicable and people using them should expect that a site that caters to helping you "get away with things" is not a trustworthy place to do business. They actually charged $19 to have your profile "completely removed" and then didn't do what was paid for.
I don't condone "vigilante punishment" and a read of the comments seems focused more on the activities of the users than the condoning of how they were caught, but I completely understand the lack of sympathy. I doubt you'd see such a lack of sympathy if the site catered to helping individuals escape addiction or cope with mental illness -- where a similar desire for anonymity exists.
Two wrongs don't make a right, yes, but expecting the average married person to have a lot of sympathy for a site that caters to weak people who'd rather destroy their marriage than figure out how to be a good wife, husband, father or mother is a stretch. There are many corners of the internet that make a huge profit catering to vice that is not illegal but getting caught doing these things would have consequences outside of the law. Users engaged in that activity are choosing to accept the consequences and folks investing in sites like this need to fully understand that the site has a big red target on their back; it will probably be attacked successfully at some point in the future.
As an aside, why is it assumed that all cheaters are men? The "vigilantes" frustrated me most with the comment Too bad for those men, they’re cheating dirtbags and deserve no such discretion. Anecdotally, I know of several relationships broken up by infidelity. I doubt I'm alone, it seems to be the main reason that my friends' marriages end in divorce -- people don't like to be alone so rather than end their marriage, attempt to mature and figure out why they were so unhappy, they jump to another partner and start off a new relationship with no trust as the foundation. In my small dataset, almost all of the affairs were had by women.
Outing a cheater which you have no relationship with is a disgusting violation of the privacy of all parties involved, including the partner who was cheated on. It is interesting how the anonymity of the internet suddenly makes people more comfortable with shaming other people whom they have no personal relationship with.
I guess I'm just opposed to having a society where people punish strangers for not living up to their own moral codes. If we accept that someone reveals the names of cheaters on the internet, then we are accepting a society where it is okay to meddle in the most intimate parts of other peoples lives, even if their actions do not affect ourselves or society as a whole. This is wrong and disgusting in the same way as it is wrong when vigilante "sharia patrols" roam muslim neighborhoods in London, to bring up an admittedly extreme example. It is none of my business how other people lead their lives, even if I disagree with their lifestyle, as long as their actions do not harm me or the society as a whole. There is a reason we do not have a karma police.
Willful deceit and endangering your spouse is not a "lifestyle choice", it's wrong in an objective ethical sense.
Exposing your spouse to sexually transmitted diseases without their knowledge harms society as a whole. In cases where it's a wife cheating on a husband, forcing men to pay to raise children who are not their own harms society as a whole.
I'm not in favor of this kind of vigilantism either, by the way. But I think the relativism you express above, implying that cheating is a personal decision without a victim, is desperately in need of a reality check.
If people really thought that were true, it wouldn't happen. Why go to all that effort unless you really believe in your cause? The most likely outcome is that given a list of millions of names, the average person will search for public figures and people they personally know, and not give a shit about the rest.
I guess one of my email addresses is in this dump.
I could also talk about how Verizon won't stop contacting me about a wireline account in Maryland, how several banks can't be convinced I've never been their customer, how hard it is to get my email address off an eBay account I didn't create, how much trouble I went through to get my email address off a general contractor listing, how the loyalty program at {Sears, Ulta, GameStop, Kmart} is impossible to get off of, how I've been sent payroll information for an entire company, the countless slide decks marked "company confidential" from companies I've never even heard of, or maybe that one time when I got sent blue prints for a gas turbine power plant in South Africa. And how I've never had any business dealings with any of the aforementioned entities where I gave them the email address in question.
It's a real problem for me that there are tons of companies out there that do nothing to ensure the email address a user types in actually belongs to them. And for those companies that do try, they can't contemplate that their process has failed and that someone would want to get their email address off an account they never created.
How do you feel about a site such as https://www.unblock-us.com/ ?
I don't think that it matters that this is a "cheating" site, your privacy should still be guarded and it's not fair that all these people are being exposed.
Secondly, I'd wager that many of the users sign up to use Ashley Madison for the thrill of the idea and probably aren't actually cheaters themselves or hooking up with other cheaters. A lot of the users are probably into the idea of roll playing or something similar.
It's just too bad because I think due to the nature of the site a lot of people's private information is going to be leaked because this hacking group thinks they are doing something righteous and justified.
I note that by its nature, it is a very attractive target for thieves as that data could be the basis for extortion. It also might be used in political campaigns or against other public figures.
But at the end of the day, it is another example of how organized crime has moved into the "net" and set up shop. Which combined with nation states using the "net" to achieve political ends, be it espionage, surveillance, or intimidation, means for those of us who remember a time before the internet, it has completely fulfilled all of the worst predictions of what would happen with it.
Now we need to fix it, and we need to keep our own nation-states from preventing us from fixing it.
Any of those actors can, will, and have used such data to meet their goals.
See, for example, the lionization of Jeremy Hammond and the fantastical elevation of Stratfor, a third-tier foreign policy pundit shop, into a shadowy global intelligence firm.
Want an uncomfortable thought to think? The breakin and doc-dump from Hacking Team: also probably immoral.
I bet most Europeans are having a chuckle at the structure of American morality in the Ashley Madison case. So much hypocrisy. Huh. Maybe both hacks will result in more realism.
However, millions and millions of people like Planned Parenthood even less than they like Hacking Team.
It's like hearing that a vicious murderous mob boss had his leg shot off. Yes, the person who took his leg ought to be sent to jail, but we might not have much sympathy for the mob boss since his terrible actions led directly to those consequences.
I know this kind of statement is viewed with distrust. And I see why this is so. But I think some moral discussion might be good (rather than just the bland 'lets not judge')
First, I am not saying that I think all marriages need to be monogamical or 'till death'. Both ideas are probably bad on average (i.e.: make the world a darker place as well, cause needless suffering). I, for one, think that promissing monogamy is a bad idea.
But to break the promice of monogamy is, indeed, bad. First, it is inherently unfair: One partner (Pa) might be resisting temptations, to the benefit of the other (Pb). Pb gets benefits from increased marriage security, increase sexual availability from Pa, increased emotional availability... But does not offer the same.
I mean, it would be clear that withdrawing all the money from a joint savings account is bad, right? That is the same thing... One side is doing a lot of effort to keep a mutual benefit working...
To cheat is a form of exploitation.
>But I think some moral discussion might be good
Let's discuss how we can keep from inflicting our own personal morals on those who do not share our moral philosophies; lest someone show up here and one-up us all with an even better morality than the one we already have.
Wow! United Saudi Arabia (USA)!
Free speech! (Until I hear something I don't like!)
Equal rights! (Except for people that are not like me!)
But hey, good luck drawing lines where you choose.
What limitations do you think should be put on the exchange of information (words, thoughts, concepts, pictures, videos, executable, etc.). For almost everyone I've ever asked, the answer was never 'none'. They may start there, but soon after I started listing more concrete examples I find one that makes them take back that 'none'.
Do you honestly believe that you are so good at guarding information that you have nothing to fear from it's free propagation? And that this is not only true for you, but for everyone?
Free Speech! (has nothing to do with government censorship or banning of speech of any kind)
Equal rights! (has nothing to do with people being granted rights equally by the government, or those rights being applied unevenly)
Is someone here promoting censorship or banning of a type of speech?
Is someone of Class B being persecuted for a crime Class A would not be persecuted for?
If the answer to both questions is no, then we are not discussing free speech or equal rights.
Having a lack of sympathy for someone who committed a crime (in this case a contract violation) is neither anti-free speech nor anti-equal rights.
Do you think it would be better for us to feel more empathy for contract breakers than for those whose marriages have been adversely affected?
Typical.
Privacy! (until people I disagree with have their privacy taken).
The Free Speech/Equal Rights remarks weren't about this case. The GP's comment was alluding to them and comparing them to Privacy, which was what was being discussed. Your remarks about Free Speech and Equal Rights are pointless and immaterial.
> Having a lack of sympathy for someone who committed a crime (in this case a contract violation)
Just curious, what crime did they commit in signing up for AM? What proof do you have that they did sign up? What proof do you have that the released data will be accurate? What contract did they violate by signing up for AM?
I'm curious to know what proof you have besides assumptions to make a bold statement that anyone mentioned in the released data is immediately guilty of something.
> Do you think it would be better for us to feel more empathy for contract breakers than for those whose marriages have been adversely affected?
Do you think it would be better for us to find people guilty until proven innocent, or innocent until proven guilty?
1. It releases the data to everyone, not just to a cheater's partner. I'll buy that a cheater deserves to be outed to their partner, but to their boss? Their psycho ex? And that's not even thinking of the person who was cheated on: do you really think you would want everyone to know that your spouse was cheating on you?
2. Not all the users of the site are cheaters. Some are just role playing, some were just curious, some were probably trying to catch their partners cheating. Ashley Madison's database doesn't make any of these distinctions: everyone gets the scarlet letter.
That said, while I can't necessarily judge any given user of the site, I'm pretty confident that the people running the site are contributing to net misery in the world. And certainly I think that it would fall within the realm of justice for them to be (at least!) forced to turn the site off.
But I don't think that's the most likely outcome.
For some, it's libertarian kind of liberalism where people should be left to make their won economic decisions. For others its the social liberalism kind where people should be allowed to decide for themselves what is a valid marriage, or what drugs they will or won't put in their bodies.
Most flavors of liberalism have at their heart the idea that "The State" is neither competent nor qualified to intervene in everything or make all decisions on behalf of its citizens. The State is usually the belligerent, but you could equally say "society" or a body like a twitter mob or a hacker group.
We don't need to collectively decide whether or not this site should exist. People should make their own choices.
There are a lot of things I think people shouldn't do and other people that help them do that. I don't think people should join churches. But, the only way I want to see churches close down is when people no longer choose to be members.
This is a freedom issue, like speech. You don't look inside to make your judgement. There is a right and a wrong here. The wrong is not the site.
Most liberals are not anti state, but pro freedom as long as it doesn't affect anyone else's life.
So then the question becomes, how much wrong/harm can a site promote before it is shut down?
What about an anti-vaxxer site that is leading parents to make choices that will kill some number of children?
What about a website hosting all the leaked data from this hack?
What about a site promoting self harm directed towards children who are most vulnerable to such promotions?
What about recent Tor sites that were taken down?
Most flavors of liberalism have at their heart the idea that "The State" is neither competent nor qualified to intervene in everything or make all decisions on behalf of its citizens.
For Republicans, that means the State should stay out of the economy. For Democrats (and some flavors of Libertarians), that means the State should stay out of people's personal lives, but it can very much get its fingers in the economy, and provide a safety net when citizens make poor choices.
The State is usually the belligerent
I agree, but I would perhaps say it a different way: the State is always looking to shore up its power. To do this, citizens must be coerced, sometimes through violence.
Put I would not mind a law that forces AM to search and notify the spouses of their users (and that would certainly bring the site down)
To be perfectly, bluntly clear- There isn't actually any suffering (and in some cases, still almost none) until the secret gets out.
By that definition (which to me is entirely obvious, but clearly not to others), OUTING all of these people is what will cause tremendous suffering.
I don't agree with these blanket "everyone who does this is bad" statements. (I think there's a lot of people who have been cheated on out there and their latent scorn always comes out in these things. Rationality goes out the window when personal feelings are involved.) It's awfully judgmental and sandblasts out all the fine details. What of the man who wants to stay married to his invalid wife but still needs to "get off" at times, and neither wants to break her heart nor can he longer function rationally without? What of the good husband and father who is hiding his bi-ness and therefore takes a man now and then on the side? (What of the woman in the same position?) What of the member of the church demanding absolute celibacy who has invested his life into it but realizes he simply can't function without sexual human contact now and then?
Do you seriously expect the amount of upheaval that would result from "outing everyone" to be LESS pain overall than the current situation?
> I didn't make any blanket "everyone who does this is bad" statements
Yet you said that site's existence was a "net negative" for happiness in the world, which (unless I'm not being logical) implies that, on average, the actions of the people on that site are negative, i.e., "bad."
Deciding a service people chose to use is causing increased suffering is a great example of something that isn't our problem to solve. They chose that path for themselves and their partners chose the path to be with someone who made those choices. It's not on you, or me, or anyone else to reduce their suffering.
That said, people choosing to use a centralized shared store of information for their sensitive data can quickly put them in cognitive dissonance when combining the expectations that the provider will keep their data safe and secure with the desire to achieve the results promised by said site.
The real reason we should be satisfied that AM got hacked was not because affairs are immoral. It's that AM was entrusted with sensitive data about it's users that it failed to protect. If a company stores someone's sensitive data in a centralized way with their software, and fails to protect it, they are just as bad as AM.
Edit: Added some thoughts and removed a blaming statement.
I'm pretty libertarian. I'll basically stand by the right of anyone to do something that makes themselves desperately unhappy because they're adults and can make their own choices. I don't think it should be illegal to cheat on your spouse, and if people want to marry people who are clearly making them unhappy -- even hurting them -- then the most I'll do is strongly suggest they reconsider their choices.
But it's a whole different matter to set up a service dedicated to profiting from enabling behavior that's making other people miserable. That's shitty. It shouldn't be illegal, its users should still have privacy, but I'll shed no tears if the proprietors of said service get forced to shut it down.
Adults are free to fuck: they are happier for doing it.
Despite what you said, Ashley Madison doesn't facilitate relations between "consenting" adults, because in an affair, 1 or 2 people didn't consent: the spouses being cheated on.
The jilted spouses weren't involved in the sex. Betrayal only occurred within a personal relationship, and the resolution of betrayal can only be handled within that relationship. For an Internet vigilante mob to throw what is entirely a private matter into a public light is irresponsible in the extreme, and tangentially is probably harmful to the spouses being cheated on as well.
And, in fact, married people are (typically) not "free to fuck," and when they do fuck extramaritally, they are (typically) not happier for doing it, and their spouses are (even more typically) not happier for them doing it.
This is a descriptive statement, not a prescriptive one.
And that is a very poor benchmark for establishing one's own morals. Let's not forget that until very recently, "the rest of society" didn't agree that homosexuals should be allowed to marry.
In the not too distant past, the "rest of society" didn't agree that women should be allowed to vote, that interracial couples should be allowed to marry, and that blacks weren't considered whole people.
In determining the validity of one's vitriol towards another people, there are far better metrics for determining the extent than whether or not the "rest of society" agrees with me. I, personally, am not comfortable with our society's complete ban on polygamy. Even though "the rest of society" seems perfectly fine to impose their morality upon the polygamists, I am uncomfortable joining in.
I don't doubt the claim, but evidence would be appreciated.
For everyone who identifies as some sort of Poly or other group it is probably painful to have members of other groups, which are unfortunately still discriminated against, view their differences from the accepted moral norm in a negative light like this. People in general want to be accepted for who they are, and ideally judged by a moral code similar to the one they themselves hold.
At least that is my view on the situation. I realize cheating is often not a mutual agreement between all parties, and in those cases a person is being harmed and there is reason for society to view it negatively, however that is not always the situation, and in these cases I think other groups who have been discriminated against recognizing the similarity would be valuable to humanity in general.
What about those Tor sites that were recently busted. Yes, the content was far worse, but if we argue that usage of a site can be bad enough to warrant a loss in deserving your privacy protected, the difference between the two becomes only a difference in determining what is 'bad enough' and the argument you presented, that it doesn't matter since privacy should be protected anyways, no longer applies (as the people who are arguing it 'serves them right' are disagreeing with you only in terms that the content of this site is bad enough to warrant the same loss of any rights to site usage privacy).
Please note I am not saying the content of the two sites are equal. I am only saying that the wrongness/harmfulness of the content (which is clearly different) isn't taken into account by the point presented here.
Also, the argument presented does not make a distinction between legal and illegal usage.
In reality, almost nobody who thinks they believe in an absolute right to privacy really believes that.
That's exactly what the 4th is meant to draw a line around: If you can't detect the crime without building a pervasive surveillance state, it probably shouldn't be a crime and we're going to make it hard to detect and prosecute. "Private criminality" is an oxymoron.
Making abortion illegal is way into the territory of the criminalization of supposedly "private criminality." So would be the outlawing of encryption without back doors.
This makes no sense to me at all. It is, for instance, incredibly difficult to track and prosecute child pornographers.
Are you referring to the buy-side of CP? Yes, that's hard. But those are also the low-value targets. They would mostly get rolled-up once a producer of CP is caught, no?
Well, on the face of the statutes, yes, but unlike statutes criminalizing adultery, those criminalizing consensual sodomy have been pretty clearly struck down as unconstitutional, so the fact that they remain "on the books" does not actually mean that they are criminal, since the law purporting to make them so is itself invalid.
(There's some debate about the Constitutional status of adultery statutes, but AFAIK no federal court has yet stuck them down for violating the federal Constitution.)
More importantly, I wanted to reframe your comment in a way that was productive. Instead of "Nobody has a right to private criminality.", it seems more conversational to say "Nobody has a right to private amorality."
The site charges money to use most of its features. The people who just signed up out of sheer curiosity and have no interest in using it probably aren't paying customers, and as such, don't need to provide personal information.
I think people need to really stop it with the revenge fantasies for behaviors they dislike. If anything, AM reflects something that might change in society, namely if life-long monogamy makes sense. Many would argue that of course it does, but not too long ago these were the same people calling homosexually immoral as well.
Personally, I find monogamy questionable and from the few discussions I've had on this subject, many feel obligated to be monogamous only because of social convention. Considering the divorce rate, it seems to be the idea of marriage as this lifelong romantic bond may not be compatible with a modern lifestyle. Some of the happiest and most fulfilled people I know are on their second or third marriage or have non-traditional lifestyles in regards to the social contract they have with their SO(s).
Frankly, its none of our business is someone is cheating. Why do we suddenly feel the need to be busybodies in that regard? There's this sad kind of "I can fuck with you with my hax0r skills and report this to your wife" neckbeardism at play here. I wish we lived in a society where people minded their own business. Funny how HN's libertarianism takes a backseat to its largely Christian-Judeo moral roots. I don't see how cheating must compel someone to whistleblow. It just seems like a nerd powertrip to me.
My only issue here is that sex work is somehow still illegal and that means the ladies on AM can be, and probably are, victimized by pimps, human trafficking, etc. Shame that this narrative won't make the press but "OMG CHEATERS" will.
The time for that discussion is long before one decides of their own free will to take part in life-long monogamy. Once you've made that promise, and then renege on it (a harmful act in of itself), there is a second person in that equation who is being harmed.
Are innocent people likely to be harmed by this? Of course. But AM's entire reason for existing is perpetuation of marital infidelity. Given that AM's advertising emphasizes the "go have an affair!" business, we can reasonably assume that most of this company's clientele are people who are in committed relationships.
I find it very hard to be bothered by the fact that the majority of that site's customer base will be called to account for grave lies to their spouse.
(I was going to make an admonishment to stop downvoting the guy above me, but then they added the completely unwarranted "neckbeardism" remark.. knock yourselves out, I guess)
(And then they added the further completely unwarranted remark about "judeo-christian" values... jeez dude...)
Not that you are completely wrong, but just to note, AM also exists for people who are married but separated or getting divorced :)
Most, if not all states in the US have waiting periods of 6 months to 2 years once you file for divorce before you can be legally divorced (even if you are already divorced according to your religion or whatever). Adultery is not really a crime anymore (most criminal adultery statues are now unconstitutional), but this would be considered adultery (whether you did it on AM or elsewhere)
Certainly not their main use case, but there is a "morally blameless" portion of their user base.
(My ex was a family lawyer, and AM seemed to get used as a discreet place for those getting divorced to do things without it getting noticed by the other side)
Basically, there are a few truths we know about users of the site: 1. They are in a committed relationship (or seeking someone who is) 2. They are unfulfilled. 3. Those in a committed relationship do not want their partner to know about their activities (because it would hurt them)
It is the 3rd item that changes things a bit with this specific site. The unaware partners should be valued as much as the users of the site, but the site enables its users to put themselves above their partners in a way.
It is perfectly valid to criticize monogamy or to support equal treatment for people in different types of relationships, but Ashley Madison is built to help people indulge at the expense of another "innocent" person, and I think that makes it not okay. I don't necessarily think the hackers are "justified," but I do think it is understandable to feel less sympathy for the victims in this case.
Zero sympathy. I have zero sympathy for both this site and for the users whose information was stolen. You all deserve it, for being selfish, amoral animals.
I'm curious as to how the ashley madison admins are killing these links? DMCA takedowns? What's the mechanism for this?
There are certainly a lot of karma coming to a lot of people who deserve it, but there's also a lot of hurt coming to people who probably don't.
An unrelated thought: I can only imagine how giddy the staff over at Gawker must be right now. This is like the David Geithner story times 37 million.
If my friend's dad hates gays, I tell him his son is gay knowing it's likely to cause violence, then the father and I are both total pieces of shit. His guilt does not absolve me in the least.
"You look like an asshole pointing out that somebody else is an asshole."
Improperly applied, this could be as damaging as membership on the sex offenders' list for public urination. The fact that the people passing judgment are the ones imputing harm doesn't really change the fact that there are people whose lives will be damaged disproportionate to their crime, and I think that's extremely unfortunate.
Edit: I can't recommend it as a literary work, but the themes and lessons of Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" are directly and immediately relevant here.
That's an extremely judgmental comment.
If an HN mod sees this, could you anonymize that for me? The comment is no longer editable.
Or just ask for a divorce.
Also what about the people who are in a relationship and they enjoy finding other people to perform sexual acts with? They may be on the site looking for someone else but not necessarily to cheat.
There are still innocent people on the site, and do they deserve to have this exposed? Have everyone, parents, bosses, etc... thinking they are a dirty cheater? No, that really isn't fair.
You can't assume that the target audience of this site is the ONLY audience simply because they advertise to "cheaters".
I've never done it but my last long term relationship ended with her doing it, things hadn't been good for a while.
Ironically a year out I think her cheating made things easier for me (knowing there was zero way back makes a clean break simpler).
I'd never cheat on anyone, I'd end things first no matter the circumstances.
>If you're going to cheat
Given that you are going to cheat, no, "don't cheat" is not an option.
In a sense that's all you can do.
Lindsay: Well, did it work for those people?
Tobias: No, it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but ... But it might work for us.
"But in our case...i think it might!"
Also, I find interesting the survivorship (or perhaps anti-survivorship?) bias in a marital counselor talking about how a certain arrangement doesn't work.. what about all those people who never sought counseling because their relationships are happy?
Typically, one of them will come out and begin transition, but the other is 100% straight. They don't want to divorce, since they're still in love, but one of them isn't going to be attracted to the other anymore, so they agree to an open relationship so they can continue to be sexually satisfied while still remaining a couple.
(Dan Savage, Colbert Report)
All in all, I don't know why people cheat if they are happily married and their spouses are great. Seems to me the risks far outweigh the rewards. Then again, I don't understand why people get married in the first place.
I don't know how to implement such a thing, but failing to protect people's information seems like it should be prosecutable. Maybe it's an impossibility but I don't know how else to make people care about protecting private information.
In this case, if discovery and release of the data would be something you don't think you could recover from, I think that is a good indication that maybe the data is associated with something that isn't worth doing.
Do you know what data AM had on its users? Do you think it's even remotely close to the data the Feds had on every single public sector employee in the US? Should the US be prosecuted for losing that data? Should I be prosecuted because my site got hacked through a 0-day?
Should KVM be sued for a bug that allowed for that hack? Should Linode since they're the data center?
No, no one should be sued. If you want people to wake up about their private information, then prosecuting the sites is in no way going to achieve that. How about people themselves are the ones in the wrong for cheating, and not a website that makes it easier. This is akin to blaming and banning alcohol because someone drove drunk.
It's interesting to try to guess how these factions, each occupying some point on the political/idealogical grid, are going to look like in 10 years. My guess would be that we begin to see more competition between them as well as an increase in internal organizational structure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....
UK Law: "original non-literary written work, eg software, web content and databases"
Seems like the BT phone directory isn't protected however the database of yellow pages is still protected.
Should we just trust the government to prosecute who they say committed a crime when you and I cannot verify that the government is in the right in arresting that person?
How do we know a crime was committed if it's illegal to examine the evidence?
Would you like to be accused of a crime where no one can examine the evidence and help prove you innocent? Should your whole family just trust that the government isn't lying while the judge assures people he's seen the evidence and it's true you're a criminal, but no one else can see it?
Governments love this stuff.
It happens all the time, except that the defense is allowed to see the information.
> Do you know what some men do when they find out their wives have been cheating? They beat them. They kill them. They don't just leave. Also, users of Ashley Madison could lose their jobs. You know, their support system that allows them to take care of their kids. Millions of people being revealed for committing adultery isn't anything to rejoice about. This is not the way to handle such a situation.
1. Millions of people being revealed for committing
adultery isn't anything to rejoice about.
2. This is not the way to handle such a situation.
EDIT: Spelling
(Sidenote: If you're ever dumb enough to try to commit worker's comp fraud, you'd better keep up the act everywhere. Don't limp pathetically to and from your car at the doctor's office, then get home and work on your car or jump on the trampoline you have in your backyard. True story.)
By the time the PI is involved, the insurance company is already ready to sue, they just want extra evidence to solidify their case. They're nearly all acute injury cases - "I slipped and fell at work, and now my back's out and I can't work for six months" and they hobble their way into the doctor's office leaning on a cane when less than an hour ago they were doing heavy yard work (or jumping on said trampoline!) with no difficulty.
Believe me, I have sympathy for people with chronic pain/invisible illnesses. I have fibromyalgia, my mom has myasthenia gravis. We are not the kind of people that wind up with PIs following them around with a camera.
I have the impression that you can get away with anything, except sex. You can get away with incompetence, dilapidating tax payers' money, corruption, invasion of privacy, aggression on sovereign countries, authorizing torture, brutality, injustice. Big deal. Few care, and if they do, there are no consequences and no appologies. But God help you if your sex life is slightly different than what people say should someone's sex life be, it's the end of the world.
I found the whole Tiger Woods thing to be incredibly stupid. Appologizing to people you don't know because you slept with someone else than your wife. How exactly did several million people became part of the family?
I don't know why, but sex seems to be such a big deal in the U.S. media. You can shift the country's attention from something really important because the President enjoyed oral sex. Nevermind recording a conversation you're having with your friend.
Really.. How important is it to the nation which person is the President having sex with? It puts important things (like "Is he doing his job well?") to the background. "He's utterly incompetent, but he's never cheated on his wife and he's good people". Why would I care if he's having orgies if he's doing the job he was elected to do: doing everything for the interest of the people and the country.
Petraeus comes to mind, too. I mean a four-star General. Highly decorated. Going down for an extra-marrital affair. Seriously? Everything else he's done has the same weight and importance as "this"? The only thing it should have impact on is his family life, why should his career and public image suffer? Isn't this invasion of privacy from the public? And if we can tolerate this, shouldn't we tolerate that the Government spies on us and exposes what we do, in the media. Your dirtiest little secrets.
How come this phoniness and hypocrisy goes accepted? Politicians boasting "family values" shaming others for cheating while they themselves cheat. Boasting "family values" as an argument against same-sex marriage while you cheat on your husband/wife?. People pulling religion and abstinence stunts only to be discovered to be human after all and enjoying someone's body from time to time...
Why can this be used as ammunition by people who do it themselves, and how can the public opinion fall for these shaming campaigns by people who aren't clean from them.
How come whenever it's about cheating, it's mostly the men politician? Do you mean women don't cheat?
I simply don't understand how a country as developed as the U.S. can have the priorities organized in such an interesting way: 1- What X's sex life. 2-Everything else. Is it normal that people behave like 5 year olds seeing a vagina for the first time.
Many of the other things you listed - corruption, incompetence, invasion of privacy, aggression on other countries, torture, brutality, injustice - are all potentially explainable as at least well-intentioned or misunderstood or justified by the ends. Violation of marriage vows, on the other hand, doesn't have a lot of wiggle room.
In a lot of cases, the arrangement is tacit and implicit. They simply don't talk about it. Call it denial if you will, the same denial a heavy drinker getting home smelling alcohol doesn't trigger the "Have you been drinking?" question from their partner or family member. Now, the drinker might truly think the others don't know, or he might be aware that they know but simply choose not to address the issue. So nobody talks about it.
And then there's the explicit arrangement where the one who's "cheated on" tells the one going around that the only think that would be embarrassing would be people knowing he's cheating on her. In other words: Don't put me in the cuckold position in the eyes of society. It's not the thing that's the issue, it's the PR of the thing that is.
This is the same thing as Kevin Costner in 13 days telling the pilot not to get shot, because if he is shot, the President must do something because the people would all look at him and expect him to do something.
In other words, what the cheated on is looking for is plausible deniability. "I don't care what you do as long as I'm not in the position of people waiting for me to act". If they don't, they'll be the parter tolerating their husband/wife cheating, and they'll be shamed, ridiculed, etc.
The attacker is well aware of these dynamics when he exploits this to destabilize his opponent. He's exploiting and using the cheated on as a means to an end. Again, my point being that we give these people an audience to make the argument they present pertinent ones.
As an example, it used to be that someone who was "exposed" as gay would see his career ended. He'd be done. It is much harder today. There's still much to do because it's not all pretty and equal in the real world, but I don't hear any politician saying "Well let me tell you a secret about Mr. Smith.. He is a sodomite!" and the audience going "Oooh!".
It worked when the audience went "Oooh!". It works less well when the audience says "Meh.".
An argument is only as powerful as its pertinence to the target audience. We are the problem.
Culture is self-reinforcing, but you didn't explain why those standards exist, you've just shown how they get perpetuated from person to person.
---
Breaking marriage vows is only a extremely clear-cut example only because the massive weight Americans put on marriage vows in the first pace. The society could put less weight on them and look at cheating in a "don't be nosey, they could have an open relationship" sort of way.
Sounds crazy right? But this is closer to the level you have to look at these things.
How did American society get so there was wiggle room around torture and other war crimes? Certainly those could be a "known or should have known" attitude towards prosecuting government officials, or at least becoming a disgrace with no option but to resign. We use "wiggle room" to accept a level of criminality in the politically connected class that would give a district attorney a field day if it were committed by everyday street gangs.
Maybe there should be. I think the world would be a happier place if people who aren't naturally monogamous didn't have to pretend to be - to themselves, or to anyone else.
The space in that place is a natural sticky area for sociopaths who enjoy lying and hurting people. Making "poly" an explicit orientation would make that space smaller and save everyone a lot of confusion.
But marriage is as much about property, taxes, and inheritance as it is about sex. That's the real reason it's a binary in/out yes/no state. And it's difficult to make those elements work when there are multiple people involved.
That aside - yes, it definitely is weird that starting wars and torturing people gets by with a nod and a wink, but infidelity brings out the howler monkeys. I think the reason is because virtue in America is defined by heroic force projection, greedy accumulation of resources, and dominance over enemies and the weak.
If you look like you're doing that, it's all fine. Having sex with people you aren't married to doesn't fit into that, so it gets big downvotes for weak self-indulgence, and - most of all - for leaving you vulnerable to a counterattack on your status and reputation.
Can you tell me which law an open relationship would be breaking in the state of Oregon?
The same way Europeans and the rest of the whole world justify that sort of stuff.
"They are terrorists, who cares."
If a leading general cheats on his wife, foreign security agencies know about it if they're doing a good job. Or they hired that mistress in the first place. Given that you wouldn't accept a cheating significant other in any culture, that can be seriously damaging to the country you work for.
It's not restricted to those jobs too. If two of the biggest companies you can think of compete for a contract, evidence a cheating CEO does not want to reach his wife could easily affect the outcome. That particular extra martial affair is no longer your own private matter, no matter how you try to frame it.
They will blur images in medical training videos if they contain genitals.
They will also blur images of artificial insemination of animals. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-3360...
After various french and Italian prime ministers and even princess d. It's a bit hard to claim it's a us issue...
French public has traditionally not cared about the private lives of their politicians, although that may be changing.
A lot of people in the US proclaim some sort of moral purity and or authority. Others, do not.
This breaks down roughly along party lines, with one party running on moral purity and or authority and the other running on a more general concept of social justice and equality. And that's just for visualizing how it works. There are strong purity factions everywhere.
When the purity people get caught out as unpure the shit hits the fan! When others get caught out, the purity people go nuts, others may or may not have cause to comment, depending on how they evaluate the scenario.
President Bill Clinton is an example of the not running on purity person getting caught in some sex. The purity crowd moved to impeach and we spent a lot of money. In the end, he was not impeached, and the real judgement from the non-purity crowd was he was stupid, got caught, and his wife didn't deserve any of the shit that came of it.
The purity crowd declared him impure, and deserving of the worst.
Wide stance Senator Stevens, "the series of tubes guy" is an example of the purity gone bad. He, along with others, have run on an anti-gay platform, more generally "family values" and got caught soliciting gay sex. Of course the purity crowd went nuts, and so did a lot of the nation on that one.
Reason: Claiming purity while failing to say what one does and doing what one says. Hypocrite was the judgement from the non-purity crowd, and impure, deserving of the worst was the judgement from the purity crowd.
It's important to see that dynamic to understand how bizzare the USA is about sex and related things.
The majority of us are more sensitive to hypocrisy than we are any violations of purity, and the worst is generally to claim high purity, then not actually demonstrate it in how one lives their life.
It's a wonder we got the gay marriage progress we did!
But there is something instructive there. Don't lie about your own moral sensibilities. It's better to be impure and honest than present as pure and not be. Much better.
As more Americans work through this, we see more honesty regarding sex and with that, less overall insanity.
But it's going to be a long while for that to play out more favorably in our society. It may never actually, and that's due to religion. It's not a particular sect or faith. It's just that our First Amendment has the effect of amplifying religion. Given there is no State sanctioned one, religious people see the USA as a free state, ready to be claimed, or saved, or some other thing.
Or, if it's not that, there is just a lot of freedom to get the word out, and so there are a lot of people getting that word out.
The media will play to this because eyeballs mean revenue.
And perhaps that is the last thing I would say. Most Americans aren't so wound up on sex. Enough of us are to present that way in media, because it makes money.
Er, yes he was? He wasn't removed from office.
Five weeks later, on February 12, the Senate voted on whether to remove Clinton from office. The president was acquitted on both articles of impeachment. The prosecution needed a two-thirds majority to convict but failed to achieve even a bare majority. Rejecting the first charge of perjury, 45 Democrats and 10 Republicans voted “not guilty,” and on the charge of obstruction of justice the Senate was split 50-50. After the trial concluded, President Clinton said he was “profoundly sorry” for the burden his behavior imposed on Congress and the American people.
*Yes, he did go through impeachment proceedings, but was acquitted on the articles of impeachment.
Sorry, should have been more clear. It was just an example anyway. Didn't mean to endorse, or imply anything about Clinton, just to show how the two coarse factions I mentioned in my comment differ and impact how sex related things very often plays out.
Deleted comment
TL;DR: Hackers took basically all data from cheating site AshleyMadison.com and what the hackers claim is a human trafficing/prostitution site EstablishedMen.com, have released some of real names/addresses/photos/profiles, and are threatening to release all 37 million personal records if the company doesn't take both sites offline.
It's recently been updated with a statement by ALM.
Anyone who creates a site specifically to encourage and facilitate adultery deserves everything he or she gets.
But they deserve being hunted down by lynch mob of defrauded cheaters for that removal fee extortion.
Murder is rights violation - you are in 'contract' by being human in society - you always can be culpable
If you encourage someone to commit adultery, you are morally culpable, just as if you encourage someone to commit murder, you are morally culpable. The only difference is that, in the case of murder, you are also legally culpable.
>If you encourage someone to commit adultery, you are morally culpable
Apparently we just happen to have different views. For me, adultery encouragement is unsympathetic act, but does not fit criteria for being amoral.
My wish was granted!
I feel a class action law suit on its way...
I would guess that of those 40m members only a small handful have ever engaged in an affair through the site.
It is a long chain in which every single link has shown to be weak so far.
1. Encrypt all database data, decrypt in application.
2. If you only do perimeter defense, you're doing it wrong.
2. You can use key distribution schemes to the app servers.
3. If you need to 'live' search in personal data you're doing it wrong. You can move search to a fulltext engine for the stuff you really need, which is more difficult to dump and reassemble. E.g. if you search for city, you only have primary keys and cities in one system.
4. You should also not keep profiles, personal data and other data on one server. Compromising one of the access paths will compromise all your data.
I don't think the CEO understands how extortion works on the internet. If anything, their failure to protect it's users will result in a lot of divorces and sad kids. Even people who probably signed up out of curiosity is going to have a tough time explaining it to their spouses. The only option here is to shut down AM, but that seems unlikely given their history.
CEO thinks it's an inside job boy we've heard this line over and over after a massive leak. Hacking Team used it. Sony used it. It's not even taken seriously anymore. If a former employer is being scapegoated, he's about to make serious bank by suing his employer. There's no way to prove or even attempting to question him would immediately be liable for defamation.
If it is true that "powerful and rich people" are now going to have to divorce, give up have of their wealth to their spouse, I think ALM has bigger things to worry about in the form of class action lawsuits. The only outcome that makes sense is for AM to shut down.
They also aren't guided by morals at all. Anyone with half a brain can figure out that releasing this data would have massive life-ruining repercussions for both good and bad people. Applauding the hackers is incredibly naive, unfortunately that seems to be the theme of this thread.
If you allow individuals to take the law into their own hands, without counsel maybe one time in 100 you'll get an Edward Snowden, the other 99 will be the kind of people who beat up trans kids.
The article also gives the reason that they apparently falsely sold customers a "delete your information" fee without actually deleting it. That kind of fraud can only really be exposed by hacking or whistleblowing.
Cheating, morally reprehensible as it may be, is not in the same ballpark.
Regarding the "delete your information" fee, I am quite confidant that the lawyers made sure that the service sold was the deletion of your application profile, not the wiping of all traces that you ever did business with the company. To call it fraud is probably premature.
http://www.theweek.co.uk/62723/adultery-laws-where-is-cheati...
> In most states, including New York, cheating on your spouse is considered only a misdemeanour. However, in others like Idaho, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma and Wisconsin, it is a felony crime. Prosecutions are rare, but they do occur and punishments can range from a $10 fine in Maryland to life imprisonment in Michigan, according to Mother Jones.
> http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/11/is-adultery-illegal-...
Who else would use a site like that? People who are comfortable lying (e.g. "cheaters") probably just fake a profile on a regular site, and lie to their date as well.
Yes, maybe they should approach things differently ... but let's not pretend that everyone is perfect. If people didn't have flaws, I can think of dozens of industries that would vanish overnight.
Um... cheating is by no means a requirement for ending a relationship. You can simply say, "This relationship is over."
Cheating is extremely harmful, and on top of that often unnecessary. Couples should discuss and explore open relationships, and if they are not open to that, end the relationship.
In virtually all cases, cheating is a totally unnecessary harm.
http://www.theweek.co.uk/62723/adultery-laws-where-is-cheati...
I agree with sibling replies - the illegality of an action is unimportant when looking at the morality of it.
Also, while the morals may not be agreed upon by all parties, I think that the people who are hiding it from their spouses are not hiding it because they expect the spouse to agree. There are, after all, significantly more honest ways to handle that sort of thing than going behind your spouse's back. I had never heard of this site until now, but from what little I've seen, it appears to cater to those who are not at all honest about what they're doing.
I certainly agree that no one should be going around dispensing vigilante justice or encouraging the same, as well as with the cautions that someone could easily ruin the wrong people with that kind of information, but it's hard not to think that some will end up reaping what they have sowed after this.
Nothing about that is metadata.
Moreover, the article states "the company didn’t provide information on how much data might have been compromised." Where did you get the info that private pictures and messages are available?
(but i'm still hoping they go bankrupt too)
I /certainly/ am not sure that I disagree!
I think the question of whether the hacking done was ethical is probably nontrivial.