Really interesting stuff in this Ashley Madison hack about how the site's founders named it that because "it just sounds like a sex name."
— David Roth (@david_j_roth) August 19, 2015
The old saw is that men don’t pay hookers for the sex, they pay them to go away after the sex. If the green-mailers/8chan-lulz-seekers who dumped all those Ashley Madison files are correct, Avid Life Media’s most reliable source of income was not introducing lonely guys to suspiciously compliant young ladies, it was assuring those guys that the details of their online fantasies could be wiped clean from the internet afterwards. Welcome to the new age of no privacy, dudes!
As explained at NYMag‘s ladyblog, The Cut:
… On Tuesday a group calling itself Impact Team made good on its promise to release a huge cache of customer data stolen from Ashley Madison, a website for people looking to cheat on their spouses that claims to have 37 million members. Parent company Avid Life Media was hacked last month, and the New York Times reports that 9.7 gigabytes of data has been posted, including log-in details, email addresses, payment details, and encrypted passwords for members of Ashley Madison and its companion site Established Men. (A third site, Cougar Life, was hacked as well, but data on ladies seeking younger men was not included in the dump — so thank you, Impact Team?) The information first appeared on the dark web, which means its beyond the scope of your typical internet browser, but searchable databases have appeared online and are currently being combed for famous names.
Of course, the hackers argue their theft and privacy breach is completely justified. Impact Team demanded that Ashley Madison and Established Men be taken offline permanently, and the group objected in its initial statement to ALM’s claim that customers could have their profile erased completely. ALM charged $19 for the service, but it allegedly kept the customer information on file. “Too bad for those men, they’re cheating dirtbags and deserve no such discretion,” the hackers wrote last month. “Too bad for ALM, you promised secrecy but didn’t deliver.”…
Forget Ashley Madison, for a moment, and replace it with: medical records. Your full income tax returns. Your inbox.
— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) August 19, 2015
The Washington Post‘s techno-blog helpfully explains “How to search the Ashley Madison leak” (until Avid Life Media can get the info taken down, at least). But a different Post reporter warns us, “Don’t gloat… It’s about way more than infidelity“:
… Within minutes of the alleged leak, people began combing the data for information and posting their findings. Journalists and security experts quickly noted that there were 15,000 .mil or .gov e-mail addresses among those used for the site.
Under military rules, philanderers can be punished by a year in confinement and a dishonorable discharge, which means losing their pension, Slate reported…
But the Internet soon turned its ire on other suspected Ashley Madison members, such as university professors and other “SJWs,” a derogatory acronym for “social justice warriors,” or people who speak out publicly against discrimination…
Computer security expert Graham Cluley quickly warned…
“… if your e-mail address is in the Ashley Madison database it means nothing,” Cluley wrote. “The owner of that e-mail address may never have even visited the Ashley Madison site.”
Cluley also wrote recently about the real risk that a leak could lead to suicide…
And then there is another concern: that although the leak itself appears to be a moral vendetta, it could lead to individual cases of blackmail as people comb through the information and spot co-workers, neighbors or acquaintances…
But seriously… what the hell is releasing this data supposed to “prove”? That too many office drones have time on their hands? That the same people who can give you accurate mathematical statistics on the futility of playing the lottery will sometimes buy a ticket when everybody’s talking about a record-breaking jackpot? That the imagination is a hairless primate’s most potent sexual organ?
Family values advocate Josh Duggar had paid account on Ashley Maddison, report http://t.co/E30yzJMrSj pic.twitter.com/cz4tYyTH9i
— MSNca (@MSNca) August 20, 2015
Of course he did.
Turns out preaching about family values all the time is to adultery as homophobia is to having a wide stance in the MSP airport men's room.
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) August 19, 2015
JPL
It’s fun to joke about Duggar, but Chris Hayes is correct.
redshirt
Hackers gonna hack.
schrodinger's cat
Second thread in a day about Ashley Madison, is this story that interesting? Or is it a slow news day?
Gimlet
Dear people:
Someone has used my name and address to create an “Ashley Madison” account.
I have reported this to the proper authorities and they will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Josh Duggar
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@schrodinger’s cat: I’ll be interested when family values Republicans show up on the list*– national, elected ones, the Duggars just make me sad at this point, and I don’t care about some state assemblyman from Shreveport or an alderman from east Coeur d’Alene, I want somebody Reince Priebus is gonna have to talk about on CNN. Or Reince Priebus. I am concerned about hacking, though not enough to stop doing my banking and bill paying on-line. Just got my fingers crossed and hope for the best.
* Dear Jeebus, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Santa Claus, Odin and the Great Earth Mother- If one or more of the Mittlets is on the list, I will give a thousand dollars to some charity. I only wish I could offer more. That is the exception to my rule.
Peale
Ahh…I see. Because SJW’s are especially hypocritical for having affairs in private? I guess the next step for the aggrieved is to go after all the women to prove once and for all that the men’s movement is necessary.
Betty Cracker
@Gimlet: Apparently that particular shit-hook came clean and admitted he’s a big fat hypocrite. They must have had irrefutable evidence.
Not That Guy
So Wikipedia tells me that there are about 168 million adults in the US between the ages of 20 and 60. If AM really had 33 million unique members, that’s 20% of the population looking for extra-curricular nooky – higher if you limit it to 30 – 50 year olds, and higher still if you remove the single people. That part seems somewhat incredible to me, but maybe I lead a sheltered life.
redshirt
redshirt is not on AM. I am your rock, BJ.
gratuitous
@schrodinger’s cat: I don’t know that the story has much beyond a prurient interest, but I think the Christopher Hayes tweet is accurate: Instead of bored married man looking for a little strange online, consider the compromise of privacy should it be a dump of medical records files or tax returns.
I don’t suppose anyone would be all that interested in the raw data in my medical records or tax returns, but that’s not really what unscrupulous people would be after. They’d much prefer social security numbers linked to dates of birth. Much mischief could be done, with very bad consequences to me. Or you.
Since humanity is unlikely to stop using the internet to transact all kinds of personal business, what should we be concentrating on to avert the catastrophic compromise of so much information?
Amir Khalid
Like I said in the other Ashley Madison thread, I’m surprised it was ever a viable business. If I had a spouse and wanted to cheat, I wouldn’t leave an online business record of my doings.
Marc
@Peale: No, it’s that weapons like this don’t get to be used only against the people that we don’t like. Reactionaries always get out of these things by claiming that Jesus forgives them. It’s our first hint that this won’t end up just getting used against Duggar.
Gimlet
@Betty Cracker:
[sob] “I have sinned against You, my Lord, and I would ask that Your Precious Blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God’s forgetfulness, not to be remembered against me anymore.”[/sob]
Peale
@Not That Guy: Yeah. I don’t know how many of their users are outside the US. Canada, pretty much all of the EU. I think I calculated it out as like 4-5% of adults in their network area, excluding India because, once you include that extra billion point two in the denominator, the population becomes far more holy than plausible.
PhoenixRising
Josh Duggar confessed. But I never said he had to live by MY values. I don’t want a confession, I want an apology… for making a job out of lying about my family and all the other families like mine.
It’s not even the hypocrisy that grates. It’s the evidence that it’s all projection. Anyone preaching ‘morality’ based on who puts their noun into whose noun is secretly fantasizing or paying good money about that same act, or one that they imagine is less ‘bad’.
Tommy
@Amir Khalid: Yeah just that. Look I have NEVER cheated on a woman I dated or was serious with, just a thing for me.
But when not dating said person I’ve done some shit. The biggest trail that I just left here saying it. Who goes on a site and says I want to cheat on my partner? Puts up a profile?
Then get found out and can’t figure out how it happened. LOL at the stupid here.
Gimlet
@PhoenixRising:
Too bad he’s married, Bristol Palin seems like a good match.
ericblair
To kinda set the record straight, there are a lot of people with .mil addresses that aren’t active duty military, including civilian employees, contractors, reservists, retired, and family I think. Lots of jumping to conclusions based on a lousy understanding of email addresses.
PhoenixRising
@Amir Khalid:
That’s the whole point. They thought they were paying for the secret to be kept for them. I suspect there’s a claim for fraud, theft by deception and a bunch of other torts I don’t know the names of. The owners of the business represented that what they were selling was private access to a little strange.
Clearly the upsell to ‘destroy a file’ was money for nothing, but an enterprising lawyer could make a case that the whole thing was money for nothing because their security was inadequate.
Wonder if there’s an enterprising lawyer in that data dump.Stupid question. Wonder if there’s anybody else besides preachers and Republicans.
Germy Shoemangler
Open thread:
Today is the second day our mailman has delivered wet magazines. We have had no rain here for days. But yesterday I saw him come up our front steps and deliver the mail. I went out a moment later, and found that four pages of a magazine were soaking wet.
I figured, okay, maybe he has a bottle of water in his bag and it leaked or something.
Today he delivered another magazine. Soaked almost all the way through.
I don’t understand.
Dr.McCoy
@Tommy: I’ve been to the site, I even registered. But I’m not married.
And you could hook up with singles, who were trolling too. Whatever your flavor, it was kinda there.
But I’m just a country Doctor.
Boots Day
According to Bloomberg, 90 to 95 percent of the real users of Ashley Madison are male, which really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been on the Internet before. That’s what I think about when I hear how all these dudes are going to be revealed as cheaters. The vast majority of them didn’t actually cheat; they’re just chumps, and that’s got to be even more embarrassing than being shown to be an adulterer.
Roger Moore
@Not That Guy:
Several points:
1) The site was not restricted to the United States, so the total population involved is quite a bit bigger than that of the US.
2) As the case of Josh Duggar shows, individuals can have multiple accounts.
3) It’s entirely possible that a substantial fraction of the accounts were created by people who were only curious or had other reasons for going to the site. There has been some suggestion that a lot of the “women” on the site were fakes used as bait to get men onto the site.
As to the general background of the hack, I am betting it was an inside job. The whole thing has the ring of a disgruntled former employee who wants to get revenge.
Provider_UNE_AndPlayersToBeHatedLater™
@gratuitous:
Good question.
Unfortunately everything is hackable. Period. There is no absolute security, unless your computer is buried in concrete and sitting on the bottom of the mariana’s trench.
Also unfortunately proper security measures that might make it enormously difficult to hack systems are expensive enough to impact the bottom line to a degree that most cross their fingers and hope for the best, rather than pay the price.
I seriously doubt that Sony hired a shit ton of security experts after they got hacked, but would be happy to be wrong.
…
Dr.McCoy
@Boots Day: Boo-Yah!! Got me.
Peale
I guess it’s an update to the “phone sex chat” worker, but I wonder if there were fake accounts to attract male customers, if there weren’t also people hired to chat. Or are our sex chats so pattered that a bot could turn us on.
Amir Khalid
@Boots Day:
Wait. If 95% of Ashley Madison’s customers are male, then only 5% are female. Does that mean that 90% of its customers are gay men?
Belafon
@Not That Guy: @gratuitous:
The answer is that you’re social should not be used as a form of identification. I could see a new sideline for banks or customer service centers at stores where, when you want to apply for something like credit, you go to one of those places, and they verify for the other end that your face matches the information on your ID. I haven’t thought of all the details, but it would be more secure.
I’ve also noticed that places online are asking questions that require me to pick relevant current information, such as which one from a list is one of my cars, what company I am paying my mortgage to, etc.
PhoenixRising
@Boots Day: Good point. These guys were chumps, not necessarily even cheaters.
That list is a marketer’s dream. Those guys are buying a LOT of natural remedies, $120 shirts and books about how to get women to agree to have sex with them. If they can afford Ashley Madison…I’m getting all verklempt thinking about how many of the emails have already been deleted. Sad, really.
Germy Shoemangler
How did they come up with the name “Ashley Madison”? Was there a focus group involved? Is it supposed to sound like a porn star name?
It sounds more like a line of sensible office wear, possibly plus-size.
Boots Day
@Amir Khalid: No, it means that 5% of its male customers hooked up with a woman, and 90% of them didn’t.
Actually, I suspect that prostitutes used Ashley Madison to entice those 90% to pay a little additional user fee for services rendered.
gogol's wife
@PhoenixRising:
What’s getting to me is that my treadmill reading material (People magazine) is STILL polluted by cover stories on these Duggars. Now it’s “after the scandal.” I didn’t care about them before the scandal, and I certainly don’t care about them now. Aren’t there hundreds of beautiful young actors, models, musicians that People could be putting on their covers? I don’t care if I’ve never heard of them or don’t like their art, at least they would be people who actually do something for a living!
John Dillinger
The best would be if Vitter’s name pops up. So he stops paying for it, directly anyway, and still gets nailed.
Peale
@Amir Khalid: LOL. No. The site was not set up at all for men seeking men or women seeking women. There wasn’t accommodation for that group at all. There was just an imbalance, such that if you were a woman, you had about 20 men to choose from. Most of the profiles of women were just made up by the company to make it appear to male users that the place was teeming with available women.
gogol's wife
@Germy Shoemangler:
LOL My thoughts exactly
Tommy
@Boots Day: @Dr.McCoy: Of course they are all male. We dudes will troll for sex any place we can.
I had a bad experience with a dating site, and I bet many might not think it was a bad. I swear I am not making this up.
Found this lady online. We met for dinner. Things seemed to go well, this was 1997. She said I seemed nice. Intelligent. But I wasn’t Jewish. But she could deal with that. She just needed a date for a few days or two weeks to get on this father’s boat and head out to Europe.
I was like WTF!
I kicked her to the curb. In hindsight I wonder what the boat trip would have been like :)!
aimai
@Amir Khalid: Oh for gosh sakes–people are so lazy and disconnected from reality that if they could order a sex-bot-mistress off of Amazon they’d do it and brag to their wives that they got the Amazon Prime discount.
Brachiator
@JPL:
Yep. Really not much more to add.
The Internet is vulnerable to self-righteous hackers. Perhaps always will be. I guess we have to deal with it, somehow.
But what adds to the problem is the delusion that somehow we can separate those we think should be hurt from those who are “innocent.”
Germy Shoemangler
@gogol’s wife: And yet I think their slogan “Life’s short. Have an affair” is sheer brilliance. Definitely preying on midlife-crisis men.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
anyone seen a decent write-up of the AP story on the IAEA and the Iran deal? the whole thing reminds me of Jonathan Karl and the Benghazi memos that didn’t exist, rat-fucking given a little help by friendly media. I’m hoping Pierce looks into it, it’s the kind of journalistic malpractice that gets his dander up.
karen marie
@Provider_UNE_AndPlayersToBeHatedLater™:
Which is why the person whose personal information is stolen from, say, Target or a bank is responsible for cleaning up the mess most of the time rather than the corporation, which just sends out a notice saying, “Sorry! Whocoddanode?” If corporations were on the line for these kinds of breaches, they would happen less often.
Germy Shoemangler
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: But do more people see Jon Karl than read Charles Pierce? If so, damage is done.
gian
@schrodinger’s cat:
It’s better than another Sanders/BLM thread.
A nine year old girl was murdered in Ferguson yesterday. I expect no national attention to the efforts of local community leaders to stop the violence. She was supposed to take a reading test today. Her name was Jamyla
Baud
@aimai:
You can’t, right? Cuz last time I checked…
Peale
All of this “Ashley Madison” destroys the world talk has reminded me that Vanity Fair had a story the other week about how Tinder is “Disrupting” dating. Apparently all of those articles we’ve read about the sexual behavior of millennials being a bit more tame than the previous two generations is out the window because Tinder is addictive, loaded with people ready to hook up, and impossible to put away. All of those studies are based on “statistics” anyway, not the stories of six people…so what are you gonna believe…science? Or some nitwit professor who says that Tinder is the biggest thing to happen to sex since the invention of agriculture.
I think what I believe is that the company that owns Tinder is going to be having an IPO in a few months and would like everyone to think the world is full of gorgeous young professionals waiting to hook up.
Amir Khalid
@Germy Shoemangler:
There’s a British company called Laura Ashley, named after its late founder, that sells home furnishings, such as curtains, and mom dresses that look like repurposed curtains. That’s what the name Ashley Madison reminds me of.
If I’m not mistaken, the name was chosen to sound vaguely pornstar-ish.
Baud
@karen marie:
There’s a major FTC case currently pending against Wyndham to hold them accountable for lax data security.
Tree With Water
@redshirt: There you go. It’s a dog-bites-man story.
JGabriel
NYMag via Anne Laurie @ Top:
I’m not sure they need to be thanked for that. I strongly suspect that the only reason the cougar site was left out was probably because one of the hackers found his mom’s data in there.
trollhattan
@Germy Shoemangler:
When I first heard of its existence the story was the took the two most popular girl names (of what birth era I do not know) and combined them to name the site. I can vouch there are a TON of Ashleys and Madisons playing girls soccer, although Sophia and Savannah are trending.
gogol's wife
@Peale:
The article was totally ridiculous. It was based mainly on midtown Manhattan bars, plus a few sorority girls in Indiana and UDel.
eldorado
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: http://www.vox.com/2015/8/20/9182185/ap-iran-inspections-parchin
Gimlet
Open thread
Tiger Woods produced his best competitive round for two years on Thursday on the first day of the Wyndham Championship at a soggy Sedgefield course in Greensboro, where he shot a six-under-par 64, two off the early clubhouse lead.
Woods, the world No286 who last week missed the cut at the US PGA Championship – the third major in a row he had done so – made seven birdies and one bogey in his first appearance in the North Carolina tournament
catclub
@Provider_UNE_AndPlayersToBeHatedLater™:
But making your system enough harder than the other guy’s, so yours gets skipped over, is NOT so expensive.
Sherparick
@Not That Guy: AM started in Canada and is world wide customer base, although predominately American, Canadian, British, & ANZAC from what I surmise. I guess because Google picked up that I am male and heterosexual and married, AM ads popped up on web sites such as Salon, Slate, (I think at least once Balloon Juice) and everytime I check out Wonkette. Really, the Wonkette site must think I am the nastiest dirty old man in the world from the ads that pop up there and so lurid that is a site I now avoid when I am work. Gee, you can be heterosexual and pro-feminist and not be a perv.
Tracy Ratcliff
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
http://www.vox.com/2015/8/20/9182185/ap-iran-inspections-parchin
tl;dr: AP was leaked a draft agreement not the final. The site in question is an Iranian military base where the Iranians were testing explosives up to 2002, quite possibly for a bomb program, but no nuclear material is expected on the site. As two disarmament experts say, the IAEA and Iran got into a “pissing match” over what sort of inspection was going to be done on the site, and it’s entirely a side affair to the main inspection program.
sukabi
@Betty Cracker: he’s getting ready to go full Swaggert in hopes of getting some “redemption”. Wouldn’t surprise me if he turns up in a couple of years as a TV evangelist
Baud
@Tracy Ratcliff:
Media are untrustworthy.
Roger Moore
@Germy Shoemangler:
They were two of the top 5 names for girls born at the time the site was founded. It was designed to sound as feminine as possible as a way of getting men to join.
trollhattan
@Gimlet:
Speaking of dudes who won’t keep it in their pants….
trollhattan
@sukabi:
John Oliver has some pointers.
I can’t be the only one who finds Oliver’s show startlingly educational.
Baud
@Amir Khalid:
It reminds me of Madison Bumgarner, which might have been an even better name for the site.
Botsplainer
I talked about this before, but given the gender demo (95% male), it is apparent that the whole thing was a scam, including the paid deletion. Place was full of girlie sounding sock puppets.
FTC needs to rock the world of the Avid Life directorate good and hard.
jl
Ashley Madison sounds like some career focused fashion thing to me.
Ashley Madison lip gloss, now in pinstripe!
So, what information did the website verify? Anything?
Did the social justice warriors bother to read up on how the damn place worked before they did their good and noble deed?
I guess you could ID the clientele by their IP addresses!??
redshirt
@Baud: lol
Amir Khalid
@Amir Khalid:
Laura Ashley is now Malaysian-owned.
Baud
@Amir Khalid:
Cool.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Germy Shoemangler: no question, but just to be clear: The AP/IAEA story just reminds me of the Karl/Benghazi thing from over a year ago, he wasn’t involved in this.
Here’s a Haaretz account, that doesn’t really capture the way AP sensationalized (IMO) the initial report (Exclusive!– in a nutshell, the story was that Iran would be allowed to inspect one of its own nuclear sites, Parchin, then issue reports to the IAEA, so Iran would be grading its own homework, the revised story notes that Iranian scientists will record data under IAEA supervision). In between the initial report and the correction, The Wall Street Journal found time to run piece attacking the Iran deal based on the initial, bad information, Tom Cotton put out a statement claiming that the Iranians will be doing their own inspection at all nuclear sites, and I’d be willing to bet that the bogus story will work its way into the House and/or Senate, and your angry uncle’s Facebook page. To quote the great Cokie Roberts, “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s out there.”
I include this because I find it funny that the sober-sided Steve Clemons converses with fake twitter-Nixon
JGabriel
Anne Laurie @ Top:
I don’t know what it was supposed to prove, but it did prove that Ashley Madison was collecting $19 a pop to delete client data that it never deleted. That should give at least some of the cheaters grounds to sue, assuming they aren’t too ashamed to pursue it.
BTW, I’m not approving or justifying the method here – just noting that it did in fact prove at least there is/was one fraudulent business practice at Ashley Madison.
JPL
According to the Washington Post, Josh Duggar changed his statement and didn’t include the porn stuff. I guess he wanted to simplify it.
This is the first paragraph..
I have been the biggest hypocrite ever. While espousing faith and family values, I have been unfaithful to my wife.
link
He still doesn’t understand how the internet works…
smintheus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: You mean apart from this one at Vox?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Tracy Ratcliff: Thanks, the AP story aside, that’s an interesting view of the how this kind of inspection regime works.
I think the media/political/rat-fucking angle at AP remains to be explored. I’ll bet a million internet bucks Ron Fournier’s fingerprints are on there somewhere if anybody looks hard enough
JPL
@JPL: This was the original first paragraph
I have been the biggest hypocrite ever. While espousing faith and family values, I have secretly over the last several years been viewing pornography on the internet and this became a secret addiction and I became unfaithful to my wife.
The Other Chuck
@JPL: I dunno, I think the edited version is an even bigger admission than the previous one, which deflected onto things like “porn addiction” and slightly passive language like “became unfaithful”. This more succinct version doesn’t make any excuses whatsoever.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
I suspect the hackers are assuming (possibly correctly) that they aren’t going to be strongly pursued by the law because it’s all about the S-E-X and everyone will be too embarrassed to talk about it. It’s basically hackers using internet shaming to their advantage. They get to pretend to scold cheaters while stealing their credit card numbers.
MomSense
If anyone wants to watch something uplifting, there is an extended interview with Barack Obama and one of his mentees, Noah McQueen. Noah is about to become a Morehouse Man after making incredible changes in his life.
theobamadiary.com has the link.
Cacti
The excitement from the danger of getting caught is part of the allure of infidelity, is it not?
Gimlet
Trickle-down is not working.
The Dow Jones industrial average .DJI fell 358.04 points, or 2.06 percent, to 16,990.69, the S&P 500 .SPX lost 43.88 points, or 2.11 percent, to 2,035.73 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC dropped 141.56 points, or 2.82 percent, to 4,877.49.
The S&P 500 and Dow posted their largest daily percentage drops since Feb. 3, 2014, while the Nasdaq had its biggest loss since April 10, 2014.
The S&P 500 is now down 1.1 percent year-to-date. It also traded below its 200-day moving average for the full session, something not seen since last October.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@JPL:
I’m guessing that someone at his PR company clued him in that, in the secular world, you look like an idiot when you blame porn for your actions. No one has bought that since Ted Bundy tried to claim he murdered women because Teh Pron made him do it.
greenergood
Somebody posted me a FB photo with the caption ‘When are you going to hack the Fannie Mae college loan accounts??’ (or something like that anyway). C’mon hackers, make yourselves useful and non-tut-tutting. Get into the college-loan data and dodgy mortgage stuff and delete it; get into the tax-dodgers’ hidden off-shore accounts and transfer their tax-dodging sums into places that need the money. Only when you do that will I think that hackers are useful on an everyday basis – the intelligence stuff is a whole ‘nother ballgame and important, but not where ordinary people feel it right where they live. Is it illegal? According to the law as it stands, probably. Was the banks distorting the economy, lying about assets, rigging the interest rates, etc. etc. illegal? Um, yes …
Omnes Omnibus
@Cacti: I wouldn’t know.
trollhattan
@The Other Chuck:
An even earlier one included “playing violent video games” but was scrubbed when he remembered he hadn’t committed a spree killing.
Cacti
@Omnes Omnibus:
Me neither.
It’s just an extension of the old forbidden fruit phenomenon.
Marci Kiser
But doesn’t all of this just prove Josh Duggar and the FRC right? We’ve been hearing for years that gay marriage was destroying “traditional” marriage. Clearly teh gay has so damaged Josh’s marriage that he had no choice but to diddle one of Ashley Madison’s “guaranteed affair” prostitutes.
Chris
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
How did you know about my angry uncle?
Chris
@greenergood:
YES. Good God, hackers, PLEASE!
MomSense
My grandmother used to tell me stories about the sexual shenanigans of some of the .00001%ers she worked for as a nanny/cook. This was in the “roaring twenties”. Humans like sex, always have. We haven’t invented anything new, just new ways to find partners.
Kay
Here’s your daily Scott Walker update :)
I just think they needed the perspective of a larger stage to really see him clearly.
Amir Khalid
@Kay:
Scott and Jeb are in the Billionaires’ Boy club, aren’t they? (Along with Rick Santorum, but he’s too far behind to count.)
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: It’s also the people are starting to see the real world effects of his policies. They don’t look good.
Baud
@Kay:
Looks like someone needs to bust another union.
Baud
@Gimlet:
Trickle down sucks. But that’s more about Europe and China.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Chris: He stalks me, follows me all over the country, sits near me in bars and restaurants and on planes, sometimes trying to engage me in conversation.
@Kay: In other polling news, it looks like Quinnipiac has decided that the methods that got Gallup such great numbers last time should be the industry standard, from Ed Kilgore:
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
The horse race pays the bills.
piratedan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: gee, it’s AMAZING how well the GOP does when you only poll old white people, whocouldanoode?
Gimlet
@Baud:
The whole world is on an austerity kick so yeah.
But this crisis is more home grown I think. They just finished a disappointing quarterly earnings season. If the US economy were growing robustly revenue and earnings for companies probably wouldn’t be as disappointing.
Political policies have shackled economic growth.
Kay
@Amir Khalid:
There’s two groups of billionaires. Jeb Bush has the “establishment” billionaires and Scott Walker has the radicals.
Walker made this pitch to donors last week that he was the “bridge” between the angry populace and Jeb Bush-type money people, which was interesting, if delusional. I was happy to read it because I’m glad they think they need a “bridge” to us, or….what? We’ll come after them?
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@MomSense:
The old saw is that the first thing that was published by Gutenberg was a Bible, and the second thing was porn.
I still suspect that AM was more like Air BNB for hookers — they could use AM’s space to troll for clients and AM would have plausible deniability when it came to your illegal activities. I seriously doubt anyone was checking people’s marital status.
NotMax
We have met the enemy, and he is horny.
Kay
@Amir Khalid:
I kind of give Rick Santorum credit for seeing the populist thing early. He latched right onto that last cycle. It’s nonsense, but he has to be something other than corrupt and fake-religious, and no one other than Huckabee was picking it up.
Anoniminous
1. The Internet knows where you’ve been.
2. The Internet knows what you’re doing.
3. Within a reasonable Margin of Error the Internet can predict what you are going to do.
4. The Internet never forgets.
5. Anyone with the required skills also knows items 1 through 3.
sukabi
@trollhattan: ILOVEhis show. Who knew you could educate people AND be entertaining at the same time.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay: I saw a tweet that Walker had assured “supporters” he wouldn’t be pursuing a “social agenda”, then I couldn’t find it again to check out the story. Did you hear anything about that? I was a little surprised as I thought the word was he was a True Believer. But I doubt the Kochs want all that Bible-y twaddle getting in the way of eliminating the capital gains tax and extraction regulations.
Anyone know where Ken Langone has come down in the primary? or is he gonna devote his energies to getting Ratzinger back on the throne?
mai naem mobile
I think Madison became popular after Darryl Hannah’s character’s name in Splash. Personally,Ashley and Madison sound like stripper/masseuse kind of names to me.
Anoniminous
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Last I read Langone was backing Christie. That was 6 months ago so who knows where the money is flowing now.
ETA: p2016 has Langone listed as National Finance Co-Chair … so take that for what it is worth.
Kay
@Anoniminous:
I don’t agree with theft but I’m surprised they aren’t more careful too. I’ve gotten three letters in the last 6 months. First my Top Secret postal employment record was hacked then my health insurance company as to me and then the health insurance company as to my 13 year old.
MomSense
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
You’re probably right. I don’t know enough about AM to have much of an opinion about it. I bet there are a ton of married people on sites like Match, too. I think there are probably a lot of married people who carry on internet/virtual “affairs” just for the escapism.
I grew up in part of a larger community where there were people in poly amorous and open marriages. They were honest with each other and everyone seemed to be happy. I think it is the dishonesty associated with sites like AM that is so hurtful. We are a pretty messed up society when it comes to sex generally. IMHO we could do with a lot less moralizing and guilting and a lot more honesty about sexuality.
EthylEster
@Amir Khalid wrote: Laura Ashley….mom dresses that look like repurposed curtains.
Hey, that’s what I have always thought about LA dresses.
You made me laugh, thanks.
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
No, but I’m glad you told me. That to me means he’s going after the Bush voters/donors because Trump is taking his voters. The Bush/Kasich money people don’t give a shit about social issues. That’s for the lower classes.
Hillary Clinton should thank god every day for Jeb Bush. Bush messes everyone else up. They can’t get around him. He’s like a big, unappealing, oozing lump surrounded by people frantically zigging and zagging. More like a big wad of cash, maybe. If he wasn’t Jeb Bush the obvious solution would be to haul him out of the road and let Walker or Kasich move up and past him but they can’t, because he is.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Provider_UNE_AndPlayersToBeHatedLater™:
Based on some of the leaked materials (Windows domain names, proprietary documents, org charts, sales brochures, etc.) it’s looking like this was an inside job, or the mother of all social engineering hacks.
Meaning it’s not enough to secure against attacks from the outside; you have to keep an eye on your own employees and contractors.
ThresherK
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): From the caves in Sochaux, France: The first image humans painted on a cave wall was to celebrate a hunt. The second was a naked cavewoman, who was totally Alley Oop’s girlfriend.
kc
Is the last half of the OP supposed to refute the first? Or vice versa?
kc
@Tommy:
Sounds like a romantic comedy movie plot. Only in the movie, you would have accepted, you two would squabble and bicker, many comical misadventures with the family would ensue on the boat, and then you and the lady would realize you were made for each other and live happily ever after.
You blew it!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay: I made a google
The authors of the article agree with your take, he’s trying to appeal to Trump’s people.
kc
@greenergood:
Hell YES, I have been saying this.
Wipe out some big time CEO or hedge fund manager’s bank accounts and give the money to the poors; now THAT would be some good hacking.
Jeffro
OT but Frank Luntz is about to kiss The Donald’s ring…on Megyn Kelly’s show, no less:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/frank-luntz-donald-trump-megyn-kelly
I think this is a backhanded slap at Kelly, amongst so very many other things…
Anoniminous
@Kay:
The Internet’s architecture was intentionally designed to obliterate privacy. One of the DudeBros on the committee had the memory of a mayfly and thought it was pretty cool he wouldn’t ever have to write anything down ever again. The cybersecurity system was written with “advice” from the CIA/NSA with the result they, or anybody else with the skills and hardware, can crack it whenever it amuses them.
The Big Three computer operating systems: Windows, Linux, Apple, aren’t intentionally designed to be insecure but that’s the practical result. UNLESS a whole bunch of money is thrown at the problem and then only maybe since there’s fairly well established evidence of internal accomplices to the more notable breaches.
The various mobile offerings have more holes than a Swiss Cheese. Starting with the most common password for a mobile is “passwd” (RTFM, people!) and continuing on down through to inept hardware implementation.
With things as they are we all have to assume anything we do on the Internet and anything we do on a computer, etc., hooked to the internet – directly or indirectly – is Public Knowledge.
Smiling Mortician
@PhoenixRising:
I like this a whole lot. Mind if I share it on FB?
Kay
@Anoniminous:
My eldest son works in that specific area and he told me a long time ago to just let it go. I’ll tell you one specific area where people may resist, though, and it’s children. For a lot of parents that’s a line you can’t cross. I work with children’s information and I am really, really aware of it because I’ve seen it. That Bill Gates project, Inbloom, where was going to donate the architecture for a huge cache of data on students so he could use big hunks of data to improve public ed? Parents halted that. He had to abandon it. I saw that anger building and I thought “oh, he doesn’t know that- they will hate this idea”. Boy, did they ever. The fear is this stuff will follow kids to adulthood and harm them, that they won’t be able to recover from a label. The right to have your 7th grade math score or learning disability forgotten.
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
One of the main reasons I support labor unions in any shape or form is how terrified these people are of them. They must think there’s power in that idea or they wouldn’t spend billions of dollars trying to put a stake in it. In some of these states we’re talking about 9% of workers or something. THAT’S the existential threat? That’s ridiculous. They’re afraid of the idea. They have to erase it.
Roger Moore
@mai naem mobile:
It did. If you track the popularity of Madison on the Social Security Baby Names web site- which everyone who is interested in names should have bookmarked- it first shows up in 1985, the year after Splash came out, and rapidly climbed the rankings. I think it must have been right for the zeitgeist or something, because it’s had a far more enduring popularity than the movie did.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
I think they’re right to be afraid of unions. They want to kick them as hard as possible when they’re down so that they don’t have the potential to get back up.
Geeno
@Gimlet: OMG – you solved the mystery!
Josh Duggar is the father of Bristol Palin’s baby!
Eric U.
when Penn State forced us to put our medical records online or face punitive increases in our medical costs, this was exactly what I was worried about
Cervantes
@Anoniminous:
I’m fascinated. Would you care to elaborate?
Geeno
@Dr.McCoy: Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor not an adulterer!
boatboy_srq
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): I find it interesting that there are so many .gov and .mil addresses in the list. Assuming someone had a gripe (and who would, really? /snark) against the modern US police state and recent US adventurism, exposing all those users would net more than a few adulterers, who would face fairly immediate disciplinary action. If anyone wanted to throw a wrench into, say, Invade Iran on Day One, this seems like a fairly effective way to do that.
I had been thinking initially that these jokers were asking for it, and while I wouldn’t gloat I sure as shooting wouldn’t feel especially sorry for them. But thinking in broader terms, there are probably a lot of public-sector professionals and career military who will shortly be out on the street with black marks on their records – and that’s going to mean a heck of a lot of disruption. Not necessarily disruption of activities we disapprove of, but nonetheless…
Tommy
@Kay:
My grandfather walked out of WWII and took a union job with Snap-on. Worked there for like 40 years, plant is now far gone and in Mexico. He retired as the millionaire next door, Frugal guy and stunning how they paid him well. Stock options, which he took.
His union had his back. I say this to people entering the workforce today and they can’t believe it is true. That this was how things use to be.
Put this three kids through college paying for it. Owned his house. Wasn’t that long ago that was just how things were.
Provider_UNE_AndPlayersToBeHatedLater™
@karen marie:
Exactly!
…
shell
On TCM tonight, at 8pm, the 1931 version of Waterloo Bridge. At 9:30, the original Frankenstein!
Kay
@Roger Moore:
Politico fired their labor reporter today for trying to form a union at Politico.
Okay, ADMITTEDLY, I read him and I read him before he was at Politico and he’s a maniac and he probably shouldn’t have asked Bernie Sanders what Sanders thought about Politico and unions in an interview.
BUT they must have known that when they hired him. It’s what makes him great. He’s a fanatic. That’s why he camped out in Tennessee and followed every twist of turn of the UAW vote there. His stuff was great.
Provider_UNE_AndPlayersToBeHatedLater™
@catclub:
Playing devil takes the hindmost is a poor security strategy.
Also there is no way to know if your implementation is better than the other guys.
The defining metric is how valuable is the shit you want to protect…
…
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Holy God. Anybody seeing Jebya Bush on the Hayes show?
“Give me another word [for anchor babies]”
“Children of undocumented immigrants?”
“That’s like seven… that’s not a word”
The smart one.
Marco Rubio: “You have people coming to this country expressly for the purpose of having children”
I’m sure it has happened. I genuinely wonder how many. I’m pretty confident it’s not a crisis.
Tommy
@Kay: Gawker. Buzzfeed. Vice. All working towards unions. I am a grandson of union people. My folks are not so liberal, but say something against unions and they will jump down your throat.
I was raised in a very pro-union house. My father often told me you can use non-union work, and maybe said work will burn to the ground.That is an old saying but true at the time. Best said you didn’t fuck with unions.
the Conster
So, it seems like the takeaway is to not say anything or do anything online that you wouldn’t want published on the front page of the NYT. That’s a pretty good rule of thumb, generally.
raven
@the Conster: Like, “what’s with FOUR plus hours on this silly ass topic”?
Kay
@Tommy:
I feel like Politico thinks they’re too cutting edge and innovative for a union. It doesn’t matter. Mike Elk will simply go somewhere else and immediately try to form a union :)
He organized the place he worked prior to Politico. It’s funny because they must not actually read his stuff. He’s hard on labor unions. He cuts them no slack when they’re hypocritical or do dumb things or are corrupt.
beltane
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: There are supposedly some extremely wealthy Chinese families who chose to give birth in the US for purposes of obtaining duel-citizenship. I doubt Jeb or any of the other Republicans have a problem this. If they do have a problem with this, I’m sure it wouldn’t take that much money funneled into their campaign chests to make their objections disappear.
jl
@the Conster: I thought that cheating was kind of a ‘do it live’ sort of thing. The whole idea of using any kind of introduction service for cheating seems odd to me. Isn’t sexy and romantic chemistry pretty much what a fling is about?Otherwise it is a business deal, but if the trade is worth it, then chemistry is part of the bargain. And that is the big drawback of computer dating, or wise and knowing matchmaker friend setting up a blind date: the chemistry is very difficult, maybe impossible to predict.
So, not surprised the thing was a scam for suckers.
Provider_UNE_AndPlayersToBeHatedLater™
@catclub:
Playing devil takes the hindmost is a poor security strategy.
Also there is no way to know if your implementation is better than the other guys.
The defining metric is how valuable is the shit you want to protect…
…@Grumpy Code Monkey:
Which is why i suggested that the safest computer is encased in concrete and under seven miles of water.
Physical contact with hardware and oe “the mother of all social engineering hacks” can penetrate any security.
I got out of the game awhile ago. More a networks guy than code monkey, because they paid you guys better and i did not like the responsibility per pay ratio.
…
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I don’t think you can couple a mean word with “babies”.and expect people not to mind. I actually hate the phrase and I bet I would hate it more if it were directed at me. I don’t even want to know what it means.
Roger Moore
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
It does happen, and even a fair amount. There are even maternity tourism operations that help people who want to have their children in the US, not always legally. But the people who come to the US expressly for the purpose of having children generally go home after the children have been born. That’s sort of implied by the idea that they’re coming here expressly for that purpose. They’re having their children born in the US so the kids have more options when the time comes, not to help the parents’ immigration chances. Once they have the birth certificate and the child is ready to travel, they go home so they can get on with their lives.
The term “anchor baby” was originally dreamed up to describe the citizen children of parents who didn’t have permanent residency, either because they had temporary visas or were undocumented. The idea was that the “anchor baby” being a citizen was supposed to help the parents avoid leaving the country, i.e. serve to anchor them in the US.
redshirt
Brandi Pierre agrees!
Linnaeus
@Kay:
Noam Chomsky, in a different context, called it the “threat of a good example”. It applies in this case as well.
the Conster
@jl:
Clearly, since the ratio of men to women is something like 95% to 5%. Men are idiots when it comes to thinking with their little heads.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@shell:
I see it’s James Whale night on TCM.
rikyrah
@Kay:
bridge ?
LOL
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Last I heard, the majority of people who come here to have “anchor babies” are rich foreigners from Asia and the Middle East. We just had an “agency” get busted here in Los Angeles who were getting paid tens of thousands of dollars to coordinate it for billionaires from China.
Poor people don’t have “anchor babies.” Rich people do.
Roger Moore
@beltane:
If we didn’t want people with money to have an easy immigration path, we wouldn’t have the EB-5 visa program, which lets rich people more or less buy green cards by investing enough money in US businesses.
Kay
@rikyrah:
He can kind of translate billionairese to the teeming masses :)
He is that “commonsense” bridge between the job takers and the job makers. Or, he’s just a person who should have remained a county-level executive and would have but for the Tea Party and a wave election.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay:
Yep.
Feathers
@Belafon:
Haven’t read the thread (I need to get the trash out) but wanted to put this here about your biometric comment:
Schneier on Security: Biometrics
His main point is that the uses of biometrics that we see in the real world have a backup. The guard can see that it’s you holding your ID card with a picture of your face, somebody would have to break into your iPhone to replace your fingerprint’s data with someone else’s…. That real world link needs to be there.
The Other Chuck
@Anoniminous:
Care to point to an RFC that supports this contention? Considering the ability to “source route” that was built in to TCP/IP, the opposite seems more likely. Hell the core routing protocols on the internet are still so easily taken over that IP spoofing is still a thing to this day. The reality is that it was built without giving a toss about privacy or security, because those simply weren’t issues then.
jl
@the Conster:
” Clearly, since the ratio of men to women is something like 95% to 5%. Men are idiots when it comes to thinking with their little heads. ”
Most men have trouble thinking straight with their little heads down low. The male customers of this web scam also had trouble thinking with their big heads up high. (Edit: and that condition is sad lose-lose situation.) When I first heard about this, the idea of an introduction service for cheating seemed so strange to me, I kept figuring I must be misunderstanding something about the story. How could a person not smell ti was a scam from a mile away?
Anoniminous
@Kay:
Ooopsie on my part. Didn’t mean to techsplain what you already knew! Ask your son about the next bit and I’m sure he’ll concur: once something gets on a computer system it’s always there because it costs almost nothing to keep the data around and it is expensive to go in and delete it. The information Gates wanted to use is still there, still – for a price – available, and may even be being used by whomever for whatever. Oh companies will say they deleted the data which is one of those funny Tech moments when a company will lie through their teeth while telling a version of a Truth; they may have deleted it on their local system(s) but it’s still in Data BackUpLand somewhere in the world.
@Cervantes:
That’s all I remember. At the time I was taking a career break from direct ICT to pad my resume with other things. So I wasn’t directly involved but knew guys who knew the guys who were. I accidentally ran across the name a couple of months ago, the old neurons fired and I said, “Oh, yeah. That idiot.” and promptly forgot his name again.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Maternity tourism isn’t for “anchor babies,” it’s for the US citizenship of the kid(s). You’re right that it’s only for the rich – they come to the US, deliver and get the US birth certificate, then they go back to their country. But the US born child/teen/adult can then get a US passport.
NotMax
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Regardless, it’s longstanding settled law that being born to foreign parents while on U.S. soil confers citizenship. So longstanding that case law predates the 14th amendment (which codified that the extant case law applies equally to African-Americans and other non-Caucasians).
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
It may be somewhat So Cal specific, but I have frequently heard people claim that poor women from Mexico come over the border in droves to have their babies in American hospitals so their babies will be US citizens.
Howard Beale IV
@The Other Chuck: The Internet (TCP/IP) NEVER had security as a core design requirement.
Operating Systems (Multics, Unix, z/OS, Windows, Unix, Linux) at least make an attempt to design security as part of their requirements.
Networks? Pffffffft.
OJ Duggar
I’m on the trail of the real adulterer.
mclaren
Well, you know, if my emails ever got dumped on the public, universal boredom would result. Lots of pointers to articles in the arxiv and various other journals. Urls of lectures at CERN and so forth. Plenty of scholarly discussions of history — my most recent distribution to my email circle of cohorts was an article called “The surprisingly contentious history of socks.”
I must be really pedestrian. No scandalous kiddy porn or outrageous married trysts in my browser history, just searches for the latest info on the Higgs boson and CERN results. Also, dark matter tests like the Ice Cube project results.
Everybody else must have a much more torrid life than I do…