A reminder to all not to put their backups under public_html.
Toilet selfie dump PR? Words that probably shouldn’t be in the same sentence if you are doing things right.
Yay! Fuck off stupid creepy site, and your 37 million shitty members.
Gawd, it’s so easy to laugh at these buttwipes, but privacy is privacy. It’ll be a better day when Ashley Madison is drummed off the web, but a VERY bad day for a whole lot of people who now will have their private lives made public.
I’m not gonna celebrate just because it ain’t MY particular ox being gored.
What is it with you guys and big dumps?
If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading Dan Savage’s empathetic response to the initial story of the breach itself:
…sometimes cheating is the least worst option. Slogging through the Savage Love mail for the last 25 years has convinced me of this: There are a lot of people out there who have good cause to cheat. Men and women trapped in sexless marriages, men and women trapped in loveless marriages, men and women who have essentially been abandoned sexually and/or emotionally by spouses they aren’t in a position to leave—either because their spouses are economically dependent on them (or vice versa) or because they may have children who are dependent on both partners. […] sometimes a discreet affair saves a marriage that should be saved.
The arc of his argument is much longer than what this paragraph captures, so I suggest, if you have ten minutes to spare, reading the whole thing. It won’t change your mind about all 37 million members (and it shouldn’t) but it might change your mind about some of them and their motivations.
But for every real example, I’ll bet there are 99 examples of people fooling themselves into believing it. People are such snakes.
You’re probably not far off in that estimate. I can recall many Savage Love letters where it was clear that the writer was seeking what Dan calls ‘license to cheat’, and in almost all instances he denied them that license because it was clear they’d hadn’t earnestly addressed the more central problem of the relationship.
What @Snowlark said. Here’s another, and similar, take by Graham Cluley:
But if they’re in the Ashley Madison website, don’t they deserve what’s coming to them?
No.For one thing, being a member of a dating site, even a somewhat seedy one like Ashley Madison, is no evidence that you have cheated on your partner.
sm[idiotic,wasteful,malicious]h
Weaponizing the private details of ideological foes - no longer a sport for only the rich and powerful!
I have no sympathy for people who signed up for a cheater’s dating website, but I have great sympathy for the partners of those people who may have had no idea what their partner was up to. For shitheads, particularly misogynist shitheads of the gamergate ilk, to specifically target female partners of Ashley Madison members is beyond disgusting. Words fail.
It is my sincere hope that there isn’t a spike in domestic violence over the next couple of months that correlates with this data dump.
Privacy is privacy: this dump is illegal and sensationalizing it will encourage other hacks.
So, if I’m reading this right, Ashley Madison charged people money to delete their accounts - which probably struck people as kind of blackmailish. Then they didn’t actually delete that information? I guess you probably don’t expect the best ethics from a website dedicated to helping people have affairs?
How confident are we in that ratio, though? I can just imagine those people who passed mandatory minimums for drug crimes thinking, “For every ordinary person who just made a mistake there are 99 predatory thugs out there to push drugs on our kids.”
I don’t even know what I’m saying here. I just find the societal anger at cheaters grates on me a bit. I might have a personal beef with monogamy-as-standard.
Deceiving yourself so you can hurt your loved ones is not exactly like selling hard drugs to minors.
Beef all you want, but most marrried people still expect loyalty and trustworthiness and honesty. You can make up your own rules about sex - but not about honesty.
As if we needed another arena in which to shame our friends and neighbors.
Depends. I’d say sex affairs and data security are too orthogonal for such correlated expectations.
Data security usually sucks, regardless on the other qualities of any given subject.
