The biggest story in the world today? As ISIS saws off Christians’ heads, and Planned Parenthood does the same for babies, and the nation lurches toward a Presidential election that, if it were held at this moment according to the results of junk media polls taken six months before caucuses and 15 months before the election, would be a contest between the star of a real reality show and the co-star of a virtual reality show?
Ashley Madison’s data breach.
Ashley Madison is, of course, a website purportedly devoted to helping married people find extramarital amoreuses. And the hint that some of the people ostensibly busted in the breach were famous “family values” crusaders (notwithstanding the high likelihood that they were fake accounts) had the usual social-lefty suspects aroused to a fever pitch; social conservatives straying from their message is the social-lefty’s hard-core pornography.
What this episode shows us is that lots of Americans – including many who design and build websites – are illiterate about data security.
Tech tabloid editors are foaming at the mouth, just thinking about finding something that’ll implicate someone they know. You’ll have hundreds, if not thousands, of people downloading the torrent file to see if their loved ones, or boss, local priest, sister, father, scout leader, or public figure’s names are in the cache. It’s hard to feel even a morsel of remorse for any cheating hack husband, wife, or partner who gets caught out.
But, even the worst people in this society should expect — and deserve — privacy.
It’s certainly hard to defend a cheating spouse.
But I’d nominate a few other people – drug-cartel hit men, late-term abortion providers, serial killers, Sidney Blumenthal, pedophiles, people who hack off other peoples’ heads – for “Worst People In Our Society”.
Who in the world would use such a thing? It would be kind of like a dating website for people with VD. Do you really want to risk a data breach?
If there is any justice the names, faces and home addresses of the hackers would be published along with an announcement that the police will take 48 hours before responding to a 911 call from that location.
So I was thinking . . .
The number of men who are willing to have an extra-marital affair is about one in five. The number of women willing to have an extra-marital affair is much smaller than that, about one in twenty (sorry, can’t find the ref right now). Wouldn’t the female side of ashleymadison fill up pretty quickly with prostitutes and blackmailers? Maybe there is more going on with this leak than first appears.
More info re the ashleymadison leak:
There is a story in IBT about the hack. The FBI thinks the hacker was an insider. No one is certain, but the hackers referred to a one-time CTO by name, and the leak proved that ashleymadison was defrauding its users by charging them money to “completely” delete their ashleymadison user account and data. There is also a suggestion in the article that only 5 – 10 percent of ashleymadison’s users were legitimate females.