More deaths linked to Ashley Madison hack as scammers move in The Ashley Madison leak may have driven another two people to suicide, police in Toronto, Canada, fear. And scammers are harassing anyone named in the databases, which were swiped from the website by hackers and published online. Word of the two Ashley Madison-linked deaths in Canada came after a government worker in San …
You seem to be assuming that the rash of crude opportunist extortion is being perpetrated by the original leaker(s). I very much doubt that. I imagine that if they have anything left to do it'll be very carefully planned and precisely targeted, and quietly executed under the generous cover of this recently incited flailing frenzy...
You seem to be assuming that the rash of crude opportunist extortion is being perpetrated by the original leaker(s). I very much doubt that
I doubt that too.
However, given the widespread geography affected, I wonder if they could be held vicariously liable for any adverse outcome of the leak? Surely there's a lawsuit waiting in America for instance, from the family of the deceased?
I'm not suggesting they should be held liable by the way, or that they should not - I've not thought that part through, I only wonder if the *could* be considered part of a joint enterprise or similar. It would only need one country with strange laws that considered it had global reach......
The problem here is other countries would have to go along with such a prosecution. Many countries will not extradite for such charges.
Further, AM's own liability would be a more likely cause of action as it should now be quite clear that they had nearly no security, did the same to competitors (minus the data dump), and ran around outright lying as to what service they actually provided. Some people happened to have affairs, sure, but the vast majority didn't for the same reason as they couldn't in real life - they just plain suck.
If anything, the possible criminal charges that AM executives may face regarding the preceding 'issues' should be the focus of the police media push. Ignoring all the other factors stinks to me of the police being pressured from above. I suspect someone(s) more powerful will be exposed. A more appropriate police statement would be to suggest ways of finding help for those affected as those most likely to self harm are likely the 'chump' users and do need to find a way to wind up their relationships so all involved can move on.
Suicide
Yesterday morning, upon reading the news, I instantly looked up suicide stats (Statscan has some good dbs) and found similar to the PS quote in the article. Of course, I wanted to see if there was a further refinement to the oft quoted 12.1 per 100k in the US. Canada's is a tad lower as is most of Western Europe, but given mostly males in the 40-60 bracket, this is actually more like 25+ per 100k.
Assume that people are likely in the top part of the income segment only cuts this to around 15 at the least. Now multiply by the marriage troubles factor of around 2 and we get 100-150 suicides per week based on 25-30M male users. We can multiply this by whatever fraction were clearly tied to it, but the figures will still be quite high.
Conclusion: Getting Out-ed Cheating using AM SAVES LIVES!
If you have the sexual loyalty of a cat, do not be surprised if you get scratched.
If someone did off themselves because they were found it, its because they knew they were found out. That is was the AM leak, a phone call from the "friend" to wife, or a neighbor with a camera, no difference really.
So you are prepared to ignore the possibility that:
Someone did not in fact register at the site, but had been led to believe (genuinely or otherwise) that their details (email address or otherwise) were in the database?
That said someone might be in a less than stable emotional state because of other factors in their life and/ or relationship?
That said someone might have come to the conclusion (justified or otherwise) that it would be impossible for them to prove to those who mattered to them that they had not in fact registered?
I don't suggest in any way that anyone who has in fact taken their life fits these possibilities. But I can accept the possibility that they might as well. And even if they don't, I find it hard, personally, to compare arriving at a place where one decides to take one's life to 'being scratched'.
But I'm probably wrong. After all, I'm an Idiot...
Here's another scenario:
Married persons are in a properly-negotiated open relationship with their partners.
However, these details are not public because the couple does not deem it suitable information for their children or employers.
Having these details made public may end up being fairly destructive.
"Married persons are in a properly-negotiated open relationship with their partners. However, these details are not public because the couple does not deem it suitable information for their children or employers.
Having these details made public may end up being fairly destructive."
"A properly-negotiated open relationship" is what is destructive, the details becoming public are just the end of the fuse being reached.
>"A properly-negotiated open relationship" is what is destructive,
Wow tolerant f*cker aren't you? Plenty of closed relationships were the husband puts the wife and or a few kids in the ER or the ground as well. Just because I would never do it doesn't mean I am going to thump some crutch for the mentally weak Millennium old book at others.
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Another scenario - a woman wrote into Glenn Greenwald describing her loveless sexless marriage to a man dying from cancer and raising a child. She of course could just leave him - that would be great, no?
Too many judgmental moralists - many people are in complicated situations. Marriages often muddle along good enough when not meddled in by asshole hackers.
@The_Idiot
I have to agree with the OP as I have been scratched enough to know from first hand experience.
If you don't want to get burned don't play with fire. AM etc is a bucket of dynamite and gasoline. As you walk over to the bucket you can see what's inside it, you smell it and almost taste it. You have the choice of whether or not to light up a match and see what's at the bottom of the bucket or you can just walk away.
Wisdom comes first to those who fall and and get back up, unfortunately some people never learn to stand.
That's a lot of compound hypoetheticals
On balance I'd tend toward the view that if you can't do the time, don't do the crime: it's a dodgy proposition from the outset. Risky sexual behaviour has risk, surely that's part of the point?
If by any small chance some particularly fragile innocent bystanders get hit then I'm truly sorry for them personally but life's tough and always fatal.
>If by any small chance some particularly fragile innocent bystanders get hit then I'm truly sorry for them personally but life's tough and always fatal.
Remember these words when your medical records and credit card statements wind up on pastebin. Tip of the iceberg. Soon to be a real boon for future employers. Its public information after all right?
If you had never signed up for Ashley Madison and your name came out why the fuck would you suddenly commit suicide, that just doesn't make sense. You would have to be pretty damned close to the edge to start with. If you're in a relationship where you spouse distrusts you on that level well something else is clearly wrong in the first place.
It seems like a lot of people on this forum are quite simply not trustworthy, why else would you be trying to justify all extra marital affairs or whatever else you want to call it. If your not happy with your relationship, change it or get out...it's called divorce...and if you don't get out then you are likely to be the "cause" of a lot of other unhappy people/children....you make your own bed...
Personally to me there is no justifying an extra martial affair or suicide either for that matter. The issue is this honey pot scum sucking site harvesting a lot of email addresses of people who never did commit adultery or even want too. The site has been around since 2001 keeping everything. If you look at the actual data there is a lot more email addresses than actual name records and a whole lot fewer actual credit card records than even names. Even having an email address on there makes you suspect even though they are not verified. Luckily for me mine was used by someone else and the email address was very old and not very traceable back to myself. I don't imagine this is the case for everyone. At first I was holier than thou too until I did find a match and at first couldn't remember all the shit I did online 10+ years ago as a single young guy so that knocked that chip off my shoulder and made me realize this shit is only going to get worse even to those people who think they have nothing to hide.
>Luckily for me mine was used by someone else
Actually thinking about it there was no name record for my email address at all (and of course no credit card info) and the data that was associated with it looked pretty random (or at least definitely not something I would have entered even drunk). They do claim 30+ million as advertising someone said. I wouldn't put it past those dirty bastards to have filled their database up with emails they harvested off newsgroups or spam lists along with bogus records just for marketing reasons. It was quite remarkable how many fewer credit card records there was compared to email records. Wow guess they have already lawyered up. They are going to need it.
@AC
On balance I'd tend toward the view that if you can't do the time, don't do the crime: it's a dodgy proposition from the outset
Your view that everyone doing "the time" has in some way committed "the crime" is ill thought out. In every relationship where someone is cheating, the person most hurt by revealing the truth of that is the innocent partner.
If by any small chance some particularly fragile innocent bystanders get hit then I'm truly sorry for them personally but life's tough and always fatal.
Innocent bystanders like all the faithful spouses that just got "hit" with these revelations and had their lives turned upside down? Those innocent bystanders? If you have a million cheaters then you can pretty well guarantee that when you tot up the wronged spouses that get hurt, and the children that have their home lives shattered, that you'll more than double that number.
Childish moralising and absolutes are ultimately only about your own ego. I.T., you, the rest.... you've no right to involve yourselves. Which part of "Mind your own business" is particularly difficult for you to grasp?
(And no, I'm not on the list and I haven't checked for my wife or anyone else I know)
@kane
The Crime : Cheating on your spouse. It's a crime in a moral sense not a legal sense.
The Time : The consequence of being caught. Divorce, lot's of unhappy moments for all in proximity, children having their family broken up is not a happy moment, lawyers, cost, large costs....and maybe even a visit to the local beak when things turn sour.
No, it's not a criminal act, it's a moral faux pas. Marriage/Relationships are about trust, why is that so difficult for so many on this thread to understand...
>If someone did off themselves because they were found it, its because they knew they were found out. That is was the AM leak, a phone call from the "friend" to wife, or a neighbor with a camera, no difference really.
Except in those cases the person obviously did do it. Unverified email addresses means some innocent people accused with little recourse potentially by everyone who has ever known their email address. Probably won't lead to suicide but not fun for sure.
Lots of intolerant comments on here, I'm not impressed.
I would say that as a relatively scientifically minded person, I will usually lean toward the idea that: as long as no-one else is harmed, do what you like.
I've seen no evidence that being signed up to a website does anyone else harm. That in of itself does not prove the intention, or the outcome of a membership to AM.
I can however, see the harm to those individuals when their personal information is leaked. I can see the harm when a business is blackmailed.
Just because it's a business operating in an emotionally charged area, doesn't alter the ethics of the event, and I feel the same away about this as I did the Target hack, or any of the other big data dumps. Poor bastards.
'Get scratched'. Churlish, sticks and stones nonsense.
As grownups, in English speaking countries, I'd expect the commentards to be far more reasonable and slow to judge. What a shame.
>to i think they are right ..... no. Does that make me intolerant?
Debatable but it definitely does if you are in position of power and treat the person different than any other person who you don't have supposed data on.
>The Crime : Cheating on your spouse. It's a crime in a moral sense not a legal sense.
Perhaps but don't assume every email address on there is guilty. As I said I suspect a great amount of fraud on those. If names show up in the credit card records that is a bit more damning (though credit card fraud is hardly rare) but even then the odds are much more likely a single person (over %25 of records status) got suckered into an extortion sausage party and paid for one month than a man actually cheated on a spouse. Cheating is very bad obviously but based on the data in that dump this website did a much better job of suckering horny fools than facilitating adultery.
@<shakes head>
As can I. However, from DDG:
"Tolerate: To allow without prohibiting or opposing; permit."
Therefore, I would say that comments which convey a strong opposition to the members of AM based on moral outrage are intolerant; as well as misguided (for reasons mentioned in my last post).
If someone were to loudly condemn an individual for membership of a religious organisation, and say that they deserved every bad thing that happened to them because of that membership, would that be intolerant? Yes.
FYI, in my opinion, people in a committed (sexual or not) relationship owe each other the courtesy of ending that relationship before starting a new one; but that has nothing to do with a data leak.
(Also FYI, I'm not your single downvoter. I see nothing negative in your comment and am happy to clarify. Not sure why I got downvoted the first time, sad times)
> FYI, in my opinion, people in a committed (sexual or not) relationship owe each other the courtesy of ending that relationship before starting a new one;
In many case one of the partners has chosen to forget that there are 2 sides to marriage vows, everyone seems to recall "forsaking all others" but there is also a clause in there about "to have and to hold" which is often overlooked. Of course no one has the right to demand sex from anyone, but if you're in a marriage and you no longer desire you're partner and yet you know that they still love, adore and desire you then you should equally owe them the courtesy of telling them and ending the marriage as you have chosen to break the vows first.
@Triboolean
If someone did off themselves because they were found it, its because they knew they were found out. That is was the AM leak, a phone call from the "friend" to wife, or a neighbor with a camera, no difference really.
Are you sure?
Were I to tell my mates wife that he is cheating on her, I can be reasonably sure neither will top themselves. If you tell a million peoples spouse their partner is cheating, you can be reasonably sure some of them will kill themselves or their cheating spouse. The scale of numbers involved all but guarantee it.
As someone married with kids, I'd hope my mrs isn't playing away. I'd also hope to never find out if she is, at least not until the children have grown up. They come first, before my ego, and it would be better for them to grow up with a stable home life. I'd prefer Impact Team et al simply stayed out of my families business.
@LucreLout
At last someone whose moral values do not appear to be egocentric.
"Were I to tell my mates wife that he is cheating on her, I can be reasonably sure neither will top themselves. "
Unfortunately that I do not imagine that that is possible to know beforehand, jealousy is a very strong emotion capable of producing some very unfortunate outcomes. "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" was not invented without reason. There are a multitude of indirect consequences, children, peer pressure, religious belief, destruction of personal moral values which are less obvious which could have dire outcomes, in the short of long term. In all cases scars will remain, losing trust in or from your partner is not a positive situation for anyone to live through.
"If you tell a million peoples spouse their partner is cheating, you can be reasonably sure some of them will kill themselves or their cheating spouse. The scale of numbers involved all but guarantee it."
I would state the scale of numbers only gives us an idea of how many people might be cheating on their spouses, not on their suicidal tendencies or their capacity to commit murder.
I would also debate that people most people do not have a disposition to kill or commit suicide and that it would take a lot more than just an AM kind of sex scandal to induce them..
However, there are people who are already borderline who could easily be pushed over the edge, but as stated, they were already borderline and a multitude of reasons could have sufficed. AM is nothing more than the toppling point.
What I find most disturbing of all though is the quantity of people that must be direly unhappy enough to believe that something like AM will bring them some comfort.. In reality it is more than likely to bring them a lot more unhappiness, the truth of the situation is that AM, like most of the others sex sites is a money making scam....( with or without the hackers)...
> "Were I to tell my mates wife that he is cheating on her, I can be reasonably sure neither will top themselves. "
I seem to recall reading somewhere that under those circumstances the most likely person to end up dying before their time is the messenger. The wife is likely to lash out and the husband is likely to think your motives are to steal said wife.
You are totally missing the point. It might be worth chuckling this time but the way these data breaches are going down at some point you, and hell even Ned Flanders will find information about themselves in the public domain they are not happy with. Hope you have never purchased anything on a credit card you wouldn't mind telling your Mom or Boss in detail about. Regular buyer of Viagra or Preparation H ha ha! Wait why did you purchase sporting tickets for the last sick day you took? (etc ad nauseam)
"Hope you have never purchased anything on a credit card you wouldn't mind telling your Mom or Boss in detail about. "
You may not be able to believe this, but *lots* of people go through life on the assumption that everything they do will come out in the end. For centuries, mainstream religious belief taught *exactly* that. Nowadays we are too sophisticated to believe in God, but we appear to be using the internet as a replacement.
Of course, throughout the same centuries, there were always those who appear to believe that retribution and come-uppance was for other people. History isn't generally kind to them, but they certainly existed, so I'm not surprised that AM had such a following.
>For centuries, mainstream religious belief taught *exactly* that
What slavery, misogyny, torture and death of infidels who don't look and believe exactly as you do?
That Duggar fuck showed the more holy someone acts generally the bigger hypocrites they are. What is that saying how do you keep a Mormon out of your beer? Invite two of them over. I have never been arrested, never cheated on even a girlfriend, don't drink, don't smoke, don't take any illegal drugs and I did all that without being afraid of some sky fairy burning me alive. Like I said somehow a very old email address I haven't used in a decade wound up on this stupid site without any other identifying information about me which normally I would shrug off but it made me realize even doing the right thing is not enough in this retarded post privacy world the Millennials have brought upon us because they are too stupid to understand what privacy is. Sadly in today's world privacy now automatically means you have something to hide.
>You may not be able to believe this, but *lots* of people go through life on the assumption that everything they do will come out in the end.
Well since God already knows why don't you go ahead and post a pic of your wife's/gf/mistress/daughter bare chest and give the link here? Might as well post your social security number while you are at it as God knows that too. Credit card statements and prescription drug history too.
>History isn't generally kind to them, but they certainly existed, so I'm not surprised that AM had such a following.
And I think you will find the majority of those on that list would consider themselves Christians and a large portion even go to church. In fact more than likely a few your church. Its been pretty well documented how big internet porn and hookup sites are with repressed evangelical Christian men for example.
between this and otherwise cheating(or trying to cheat) on your significant other and them finding out about it another way. People blame the hackers, or blame the company, when it was the users that signed up for the site to begin with. Unless it was a false user account or something in which case you shouldn't have a guilty conscious.
Maybe next time they'll be more anonymous.
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mysql> select count(*) from am_am_member where gender = 1;
+----------+| count(*) |+----------+| 4414808 |+----------+
1 row in set (10 min 26.73 sec)
mysql> select count(*) from am_am_member where gender = 2;
+----------+| count(*) |+----------+| 27546956 |+----------+
1 row in set (11 min 26.97 sec)
mysql> Bye
gawker@blackmesa4:~$ bc -lq
(4414808/27546956)*100
16.02648220006595284000
And I think I heard a majority of those are probably fake as well. Yes this is a giant honey pot. Guys into adultery in my experience are usually pretty outgoing and aren't going to use a nerd sausage party site. This site was mostly used by gay guys and dumb young horny bastards (a good number were single as another query can show) figuring out what it was after a short amount of time and realizing they got suckered. What they didn't probably realize is the real cost coming back to bite them perhaps a decade later.
Your math is out, you accidentially took the ratio of females to males, not females to the whole corpus - when you do that you find it's 13.8%, not 16%:
4414808/(27546956+4414808) = .138 (ish)
Of course, once you remove all the fake profiles it's going to be more like 0.00001% anyway :-)
I had to guess the enumeration for the gender. poking through the database I determine that gender==1 meant female and gender==2 meant male. Whether there were other gender enumerations I did not investigate. There are about 33 million entries in total in the table am_am_member and the profile number seems to be the key that links the member_login table. So that simple search did indicate the percentage of gender 1 compared to gender 2.
I was just curious how many people in my area were on it. I found one on my road, on my side of the road (a bloke though, pity, thought it might have been the curvy blonde six doors down!)
Nom the tiger cage has just come down, and some people are not emotionally strong enough for it.
And if ALM has been keeping details of people that had paid to be unsubscribed, then there is practically a guarantee that some of those "subscribers" had joined when single, found love somewhere else, delisted (or so they thought), and now find themselves in this shitter through no fault of their own.
Those of you gloating at the suicide toll should think of that for a moment. Then go hang your head in shame.
A U.S. appellate court has ruled that ignoring your security is an “unfair or deceptive business practice” and the sort of thing the FTC was made for.
http://www.wired.com/2015/08/court-says-ftc-can-slap-companies-getting-hacked/
This made my week.
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AM creates site to do something immoral but legal. Hackers expose immorality by doing something illegal. AM users are angry, like a burglar being angry about getting caught. It's understandable, but is it defensible? In the case of burglary, it is both immoral and illegal. In this case the act is immoral yet legal. So, when the law and morality are on opposite sides, who should care? The police will drag their feet, the public will look on with only vague interest. In Saudi Arabia the law and morality are on the same side, however in the west they'e on opposite sides. I've seen people cast the hackers as immoral because of this aligment. They're "reasoning" that because Saudi Arabia has made the immoral act of infidelity illegal, by exposing the crime, the hackers have acted immorally. It's hilarious to watch rhetorical gymnastics that people are going through to try to occupy the moral high ground.
Maybe you forgot that, before exposing the data, the hackers were blackmailing ALM ? That they published the data because ALM didn't fold and pay up ?
These scum are NOT do-gooders in any sense of the term. They went in for the money, and when they couldn't get any they decided to blow everything up, without a thought for the people involved and what it could cost them.
I hope the police catch them and they get tried for attempted murder in addition to blackmail and whatever else can stick.
Moral high ground: cheating is unforgiveable betrayal.
Human nature: cheating happens all the time, in fact one theory why menage-a-trois is so popular is that one male tended to share a cave with multiple females way back (cough Neanderthalensis /cough) and this particular genetic trait got passed on as a result.
My attitude to the whole thing is that if people feel the need for company of any sort then they have the right to seek it, as long as it doesen't interfere with day to day life within sensible limits.
I feel that the shameful behavior of religious fundamentalists (of any type!!) is far more of a concern, what right does any group have to force its moral codes on any other group.
Belief should be an individual right, and no-one has the authority to take it away.
Gets off soapbox...
"Belief should be an individual right"
It is an individual right but the society that that indivudal lives in, and profits from, has collective ideals, that's what make the society powerfull, it behaves as one very large entitiy, with all the up and downs that that entails . If everyone behaved according to their individual idealogies we'd end up in an Anarchy, law breaks down, public disruption and eventually all that will come from it is fuedilism....which is basically just small "societies" fighting each other over peanuts.
It's a choice, all that is required in order to live to the full, by ones very own ideals, is complete isolation... I do not like most of contemporary societies ideals but I definately realise that without them I would be in very diffirent situation.. ie a lot less comfortable than I am now. ( Have you travelled and seen how some of the rest of the world live, it's not always a pretty sight).
I believe that living completely self sustaining life would mean a hell of a lot of concessions for very little, if any, gain ...You have to provide food and shelter for yourself, hail rain or snow, you must be capable of defending oneself from "deadly" foes, you must be capable of healing oneself in the event injury or ill health.. As a society these things can be accomplished far more easilly that on ones own..
Unfortunately we are not taught to defend for ourselves, we are taught consumerism, this is the price to pay for moderm comfort.. None of this stops me having my own ideals but it certainely calms down some of the wilder ones.
By the way, there are no such things as "rights", they are merely a man-made conception to make you "believe" that the powerfull and wealthy are not profiting from your labour....
attack.
Listen up, leaving Post-it notes with passwords under keyboards or having one person admin the database with only one password is NOT sophisticated. Its a fundematal security cluster fuck.
You got caught using sloppy security practices and are about to get arse-reamed becasue of your laxidasical attitudes to customers privacy..
Popcorn.....
This leak is not fun, it is a disgrace for all working in IT.
Spending a majority of my time on system management of web servers, it is saddening to see IT technology is so bad in general that this year the privacy of many millions was violated.
Seeing this, the only hope is that some will stand up and build mysql databases in which the data can only be read using the user provided password as session key. The current IT architecture is too much like a pyramid upside down, one password and you have all.
These sick hacker m#t@rf*^kers should rot away in a Guantanamo style jail cell for the rest of their life.
They are basically murderers, and should be treated as such.
As explained on the Intercept, homosexual people on the AM list, now have to flee their country in fear of being executed, and now we also have the first suicides.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/20/puritanical-glee-ashley-madison-hack/
It's amazing how commentards are rejoicing in the ruining of other peoples life, just because somebodies email was linked to AM, without any other proof that anything has happened.
Just like these sick radio hosts who killed a relationship live on radio, just because an email address was in the database, apparently it's okay nowadays to just publicly lynch people on the flimsiest of evidence.
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