If you think about this for 10 seconds and realize that (in spite of being told not to) plenty of people re-use their access credentials across multiple sites then you'll realize that it is not very funny because it will affect a very large number of websites as fall-out and that your comment is not just rude but simply stupid. Large scale hacks like these affect all of us, whether you like it or not and the reduced trust by consumers affects all of us as well.
Take a look at AshleyMadison.com. Their whole business is helping married people have affairs. I saw them on a daytime talk show when they first came out (years ago). The thing I loved most about their story is that the name of the site was derived by taking the two most popular baby names from that year and combining them.
The site is real and it is a "scam". You just had to look at the chargeback rates they were getting and how often they were changing acquirers because they were getting kicked because of their chargeback rates.
I don't have exact numbers but they were infamous in the industry. I know of two scams they were running. Firstly a lot of the profiles are fake or professional. Secondly they ignored when you cancelled your monthly subscription and kept charging you anyway in the hope that you either wouldn't notice or wouldn't bother filing a cb.
Everybody knew what was happening but was looking away as long as the money was good, even MasterCard. Internally the code names we used for them was "online gaming" or "innovative business models". Whenever an executive used these words you knew he meant them. There are acquirers that specialize in merchants with high cb rates. But they go kicked even from there (after MasterCard intervened). I have no idea where they are now.
It actually didn't start out as a site for people looking for sex. It was started by a guy (Andrew Conru) who was looking for people to go fishing with, he lamented how hard it is for adults to find friends. Soon after he started the site, people started posting sex pictures, and it pretty quickly became the focus of the site.
That is both sad and very interesting. I have a similar problem with finding people to go running with me around where I live. Meetup groups around here are spread over a 50 mile radius or so, so that's no help. Perhaps I can try the opposite approach and post "hey, looking for a running buddy" on Match.com, OkCupid, AFF, etc.
I wonder if something like this can be piggy backed off Facebook would work. You kill many birds with that stone: you can use the degrees of separation to verify people ("Oh, that's Joe's friend"), you already have an audience, and people are less likely to flood it with casual sex proposals.
Facebook would be great but they're so full of garbage that few meaningful messages get through. I once sent out a query for people interested in a software project and tagged every friend I had who knows something about code (30-40). It didn't even show up in all their feeds. But hey, share a cat video hosted on a big commercial site and everyone gets that...
That's why with FB it's better to private message. When I see myself tagged in a post with 30 other people I can safely ignore it. It's usually someone trying to send out a social message. If someone messages me directly, I know it's important enough and take the time to respond. YMMV.
Meetup.com seems to do this successfully, is that the same type of site that you are referring to?
I've considered going to a computer / technology / entrepreneurship club, but haven't yet. They also have local groups for dog owners, walking/fitness/specialty (ballet, dance), FPV drone flyers, sports groups, and almost anything else I could think of they had a group already started for it in my city.
Some have memberships fees (completely optional when setting up a new group, afaik) and some have more strict requirements when joining (a potential problem but I haven't heard of it being abused).
Meetup seems to be successful because it only handles scheduled, group activities. If your website lets people privately connect with others who live in the same city, some of your user base will start using it to find sex.
OKC at least has a "Looking for friends/Activity partners" option, whether it ever works is questionable. maybe people will message you, if not what have you lost? 10 mins to fill in a profile!
OkCupid needs a lot more than 10 minutes to fill out a profile. Spending a couple hours answering questions is generally recommended for their matching algorithms to work well.
I actually went to school to learn to build a site similar to this (2003, not sure how many tutorials there were then, but I didn't know of them anyway). Though my inspiration came from loving to camp and canoe/white water raft and no friends of mine liked that outdoorsy stuff.
I also didn't realize this site was already out there, but if it was dating/sex related by that time, I wouldn't have known it could be used for that.
FWIW, there's another site I think similary created for meeting people nearby as friends (Meetme.com) that has also turned into a sex/hookup app.
I have a somewhat unique perspective on this subject, and one of the insights I have gleamed is that gay and lesbian dating sites generally have much higher success rates. The reason is that perceived risk is much lower. Generally, when a man and a woman go out on a semi-blind date, the woman has a lot more to be afraid of. The guy can turn out to be a "creep" for example. Or if she decides at some point to have sex with him, she might get pregnant with little commitment from him. She has a lot to lose from a bad date than he does.
On the other hand, two guys or two girls going out on a date is not as big a deal. The perception is that it's safer. There is of course a lot to worry about, but the playing field is usually a lot more level. This of course is offset by the fact that on most dating sites your pool of gay or lesbian candidates is smaller, but your chances of them responding will generally be higher.
Bingo, but (for the reasons given in the other reply, and probably an imbalance in members) that's expected for response rates to male--->female messages.
Is there a running goods store near where you live? I don't have the time to run as much as I'd care to, but if I were new in town (Washington, DC), I'd start with the group runs that Pacers (1500 block of P St. NW) organizes, or Fleet Feet (? 1800 block of Columbia Road NW).
You can see who runs around you via Strava.com, not to mentions its an awesome GPS app for running/biking. App also has features to post pics/comment/like, social network centered around outdoor activities with GPS features, pretty cool.
I actually ended up in my last job because of OkCupid. Someone sent me a message, we ended up talking for a bit, and they invited me to a board game party at their house. Ended up going, then later got nagged into providing a resume.
OkCupid, at least when I signed up 10+ years ago, allowed you to specify that you were interested in platonic activity partners, and would show both a match rating and friend rating.
A (good looking, male) friend was in SF for a conference or something. I'm not sure who initiated contacted, but he got to talking to a (good looking, female) person(/account) on Tinder. They never met, but would talk about the tech industry. Tech gossip type stuff, similar to what you might see here or on Techcrunch, etc.
The female he was talking to may or may not be real... But, if you wanted to get inside information on a bunch of companies, it would be a great way to do it (and i'm sure it's happening as we speak).
I've gotten requests on linkedin from accounts for fake women with stolen photos. I recall one in particular where I did a reverse image search on the profile photo and found that it was of a woman who'd been murdered a few years prior.
In a nutshell, I built - together with my partners and employees - the first publicly available webcam software (which had a lot of customers from the adult world), and the first webcam community and we found that it turned into a porn site whenever we weren't looking for longer than 30 seconds.
Eventually we gave the adult content its own space on the site and charged for access to that portion and this was the financial cork that kept the whole thing afloat during many years.
I've always resisted the pressure to either partner with a porn company or to let the inmates run the asylum but plenty of porn companies licensed the software and quite a few of those then pushed the envelope in terms of development often with lucrative deals as the result.
You wouldn't be the first to get support from a source you're conflicted with to do what you actually wish to accomplish. If you would decide to walk away, well, then you wouldn't be the first to do that as well.
Under the "business as usual" umbrella, many awful things seem justified. Not saying this is the case but just to keep that in mind. Also, "you're not the only one doing this" goes in the same direction.
And there lies the problem. Even though porn doesn't do anything for me (I'd have noticed by now ;) ), there are plenty of people for who it is apparently quite effective so I'm sure there is a market for it but I wouldn't know how to tell a 'fully consensual adult porn' image from one that is just 'adult porn' without the 'fully consensual' bit.
IMO it's up to the individual to decide if they watch porn or not. So moving these users to a dedicated space seems like a fair thing to do? Even I don't watch porn because I prefer to have the image of my partner in my head when "doing" it, other people might think differently. I prefer to keep judgment out of it.
This is really sad to me, I legitimately want a site where I can find a buddy to go fishing with. I moved several years ago, and I really don't have any real "man" friends. I'm friendly with my coworkers, but its not really a "lets go fishing this weekend" kind of thing.
I've had similar thoughts. Someone needs to create a kind of "Tinder for hobbies" app, if one does not already exist. Perhaps it could show a list of local activities allowing you to swipe right on things you would be interested in attending, then attempts to match you with people who would also be interested in going to the same event.
This could work well for scheduled events as well as your weekend fishing example.
That would be fantastic, and definitely something I'd use. The idea of meeting up with a dynamically composed group of people to go and do an activity really appeals to me - especially with hobbies where new views/insights are particularly valuable.
Does something like this already exist, anyone (I'm googling and not yet finding anything)?
Other commenters have noted meetup.com seems to be the closest. I'm hoping something else more like this already exists, as meetup.com isn't exactly what I had in mind.
There's Meetup.com where you can start or join local groups for such things. My local area has a ton of groups for all sorts of social activities and if there are any other fishermen looking to cast a line, you might have some luck there (or start your own group and take the initiative).
I really wish someone built this - not just for fishing, for any activity, with the serious intention of forming long lasting friendships. Meetup is good for specific activities, it is fun during the said activities. But it rarely lasts beyond those times. The only other avenue to forming good friendships seems to be volunteering. It would be awesome to have a place where making friends is primary objective, and everything else is secondary.
“Among the 26,939 users with a UK email address,” technology producer Geoff White explains that there were, “just 1,596 who identified as female: a ratio of one woman to every 16 men.”
Seems about the same as bars, clubs, and most of our working environments.
The adult world is rife with such leaks, and hardly any of it ever gets published. If you've given your credentials to some adult site in the past you probably could bet even money about whether or not that data fell into the wrong hands.
In part this is because of the nature of the businesses, they're borderline and tend to have operators that try to find out just where that border lies in terms of cost savings, outsourcing and the quality of the employees they hire (so slipshod work is the norm rather than the exception, and quite a few operators built scam sites, the employees of which are likely not amongst the most ethical characters to begin with), in part it is because their systems tend to hold juicy data and make very fat targets for hackers, either external or from the ranks of the employees.
If you do use such a service I'd strongly advise you to use only pseudonymous and throw away data and to make sure that if you pay by credit card that you are talking to some highly reputed processor and not to any of the servers operated by the company directly. That's a huge risk (it is a huge risk in any e-commerce environment but with adult the risk is definitely elevated).
Adult companies have done their bit when it comes to innovation, but when it comes to security most of them are well behind the times.
>> Adult companies have done their bit when it comes to innovation...
That tidbit gets bandied around a lot. I've especially seen it lately. I'd be interested in seeing real data on this. I recall years ago seeing blog posts from media industry experts saying the idea is an urban myth.
Well, those media industry experts should be disqualified then. I've witnessed up close how transaction processing, video, real time interaction between people and a bunch of lesser innovations were powered and paid for by the adult industry.
But the heydays are definitely over and now innovation comes from many other corners and adult companies are no longer in any way near the frontiers.
Former Pornhub Lead dev here, the media industry experts are right. There are no more occurrences of DB leaks than in mainstream. And to an extent they are of lesser importance, most of the user data is garbage, fake email, throwaways, and so on, CC data is never handled by the site, so in and out there is nothing of real interest to steal.
So, like, is there a list of patents somewhere or something?
My rationale is that, at every VR meetup I end up going to, some jackwad wants to turn it into an opportunity to skeeve the hell out of any of the women who happen to be attending by forcing the conversation to porn. He argues it's "legitimate" because "porn drives innovation". And my understanding is that that has almost never been true enough to make a meme out of it.
Even though it is true in my perception and backed up by my personal experience I wouldn't see how forcing the conversation in that direction would make any progress. It's just a simple fact. Sounds to me like your friend needs a pretext to talk about porn.
> Is there a list of patents?
No, I never took out a single patent for the stuff I built, though that didn't stop the patent trolls from doing just that and trying to sue me - and my customers - after the fact, some of those have been fairly high profile cases, and some of those trolls are still at it today.
Hence my long standing offer to aid companies (porn or not makes not difference to me) that are sued by patent trolls in the video/interaction/pay-per-view/payment realm.
The other part is that many attackers see this kind of site as "fair game", compared to more upstanding companies. By its very nature the adult industry attracts the ethically challenged.
There are specialty processors that deal with adult sites. The reason is not so much that the other processors would not like to do business with them but that adult sites tend to have higher charge back rates and consumer fraud rates than what the credit card companies will let them get away with (another factor is scams by the adult companies) which qualifies their charges as 'high risk'.
Specialty processors take care of the issues in such a way that the risk becomes tolerable. Another reason is pressure from the big card companies not to accept such clients even when the processors would accept them otherwise.
Hence the prevalence of adult customers with CCBill, Epoch, VXS and several others.
Not all that much once you take into account that 'high risk' merchants will pay more to the credit card companies as well and typically tend to eat quite a bit of their income due to all kinds of fines (charge-backs for instance) which are assigned fairly arbitrarily.
Solutions such as VBV and meticulous logging can take care of this but are hard to implement in a bullet proof way to stand up in case of a dispute. The processors do a good job of this and in general are the more solid component of the eco-system.
The only time the costs are excessive is when a processor goes belly-up, which has happened twice for a large enough processor that it affected thousands of merchants.
Retail stores are at a huge advantage here because they have inherent address verification and a signature upon delivery, whereas most - if not all - adult sites operate entirely in the virtual domain. That does make it much easier for them to absorb the extra costs.
I worked for a site in the adult space and fighting credit card fraud was a huge problem. A lot of effort was put in to preemptively trying to catch fraud (e.g., when your credit card country doesn't match the IP address and/or the location of the profile you're creating) and refund the charges before it even got to the chargeback stage.
Inevitably there would be fraudulent chargebacks against the site when someones partner would read the credit card statement at the end of the month ("No honey, why would I use that site? Our credit card has been hacked!"). There was a team of people who would prepare reports of usage to fax to the banks to challenge the chargebacks.
You want someone at a bank to get a faxed copy of naked pics? Upload them to the site and then deny the charges. Easy!
Adult Friend Finder, one of the largest online dating sites, may have been breached more than two months ago, and the sensitive files—include names, ages, email addresses, zip codes and more—are apparently still online....
Bev Robb, who does malware and dark Web research, came across the Adult Friend Finder files in March. She said she held off on publicizing the information for a few weeks before contacting two security experts.
During a fit of rage, a pissed off hacker (going by the handle ROR[RG]) posted 15 downloadable spreadsheets (in zipped file format with credit card data stripped) to a week-old Darknet forum stating that he had rooted the adult site database. Why? Because they owed his guy approximately $248,000 USD. He bragged that the company and law enforcement could not touch him because he was based in Thailand. His ransom demand was set at $100,000 (50G to begin and 50G to end).
Maybe someone can set up adultfriendfinderfinder.com that cross references this data with accounts on the site so that you can find actual people in your area instead of fake accounts.
To find horny married people, of course, since that seems to be what this site is primarily for. What you do with them is up to you but I have a few ideas that benefit both parties.
https://haveibeenpwned.com/ has added the emails to their index. You can search by email address or username for accounts involved in various data breaches.
Sex at Dawn is highly speculative and polemic. Truthfully we have no idea what our "natural" relationship inclinations are. Personally, I think we are naturally monogamous but tend to have affairs. Additionally, it's more driven by economics than it is by sex.
This is a bit like saying humans are actually naturally homosexual, just because a significant portion of the population is. Or that humans are naturally turned on by fecal matter, just because some people sign up for websites tailored to that interest.
Your math does not add up. The analysis highlighted 26,000 people in the UK. There were 12.3 million married people in the UK.
Given those numbers and that Adult Friend Finder is not specifically just for people in bad relationships, I would say that the evidence suggest strongly that we are predominately a monogamous species.
Misleading title. The current title implies that the article actually lists out or provides reference to linked data of extramarital affairs. I didn't see that in the article.
105 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadI learned that lesson 20 years or so ago. Unique passwords for every site now.
There are a lot of people who use these sites. The spreadsheets possibly only represent a fraction of the data appropriated.
This event is making news, many don't. Including other dating services, or non-dating services with online data.
Really: you simply don't know where, when, or how your data might get caught up in a system such as this.
Don't be so smug.
Everybody knew what was happening but was looking away as long as the money was good, even MasterCard. Internally the code names we used for them was "online gaming" or "innovative business models". Whenever an executive used these words you knew he meant them. There are acquirers that specialize in merchants with high cb rates. But they go kicked even from there (after MasterCard intervened). I have no idea where they are now.
The main problems seem to be:
1) The sites only work once you have enough users to make them work, but you can't get more users until the site works.
2) People use them for sex, which is off-putting to large numbers of users.
OKC should probably set up some kind of meet-friends-in-groups thing.
I've considered going to a computer / technology / entrepreneurship club, but haven't yet. They also have local groups for dog owners, walking/fitness/specialty (ballet, dance), FPV drone flyers, sports groups, and almost anything else I could think of they had a group already started for it in my city.
Some have memberships fees (completely optional when setting up a new group, afaik) and some have more strict requirements when joining (a potential problem but I haven't heard of it being abused).
This seems like something that would be in a David Letterman "Top 10 list of things to consider for your new website".
Althought it sounds a bit sparse at the moment.
I also didn't realize this site was already out there, but if it was dating/sex related by that time, I wouldn't have known it could be used for that.
FWIW, there's another site I think similary created for meeting people nearby as friends (Meetme.com) that has also turned into a sex/hookup app.
Her response rate was about 40%. I cried a little.
On the other hand, two guys or two girls going out on a date is not as big a deal. The perception is that it's safer. There is of course a lot to worry about, but the playing field is usually a lot more level. This of course is offset by the fact that on most dating sites your pool of gay or lesbian candidates is smaller, but your chances of them responding will generally be higher.
OkCupid, at least when I signed up 10+ years ago, allowed you to specify that you were interested in platonic activity partners, and would show both a match rating and friend rating.
The female he was talking to may or may not be real... But, if you wanted to get inside information on a bunch of companies, it would be a great way to do it (and i'm sure it's happening as we speak).
I guess it's the universe rewarding him for his good intentions.
Eventually we gave the adult content its own space on the site and charged for access to that portion and this was the financial cork that kept the whole thing afloat during many years.
See also:
http://jacquesmattheij.com/content/story-behind-wwcom-camara...
I've always resisted the pressure to either partner with a porn company or to let the inmates run the asylum but plenty of porn companies licensed the software and quite a few of those then pushed the envelope in terms of development often with lucrative deals as the result.
You wouldn't be the first to get support from a source you're conflicted with to do what you actually wish to accomplish. If you would decide to walk away, well, then you wouldn't be the first to do that as well.
This could work well for scheduled events as well as your weekend fishing example.
Does something like this already exist, anyone (I'm googling and not yet finding anything)?
Seems about the same as bars, clubs, and most of our working environments.
Working environments - certainly.
In part this is because of the nature of the businesses, they're borderline and tend to have operators that try to find out just where that border lies in terms of cost savings, outsourcing and the quality of the employees they hire (so slipshod work is the norm rather than the exception, and quite a few operators built scam sites, the employees of which are likely not amongst the most ethical characters to begin with), in part it is because their systems tend to hold juicy data and make very fat targets for hackers, either external or from the ranks of the employees.
If you do use such a service I'd strongly advise you to use only pseudonymous and throw away data and to make sure that if you pay by credit card that you are talking to some highly reputed processor and not to any of the servers operated by the company directly. That's a huge risk (it is a huge risk in any e-commerce environment but with adult the risk is definitely elevated).
Adult companies have done their bit when it comes to innovation, but when it comes to security most of them are well behind the times.
That tidbit gets bandied around a lot. I've especially seen it lately. I'd be interested in seeing real data on this. I recall years ago seeing blog posts from media industry experts saying the idea is an urban myth.
But the heydays are definitely over and now innovation comes from many other corners and adult companies are no longer in any way near the frontiers.
And I'm happy that pornhub has their act together (you're on the hook for that one ;)).
But there are many more companies out there than pornhub and quite a few of those have serious security issues.
Maybe this is because quite a few porn companies still operate on software that is rather long in the tooth.
My rationale is that, at every VR meetup I end up going to, some jackwad wants to turn it into an opportunity to skeeve the hell out of any of the women who happen to be attending by forcing the conversation to porn. He argues it's "legitimate" because "porn drives innovation". And my understanding is that that has almost never been true enough to make a meme out of it.
> Is there a list of patents?
No, I never took out a single patent for the stuff I built, though that didn't stop the patent trolls from doing just that and trying to sue me - and my customers - after the fact, some of those have been fairly high profile cases, and some of those trolls are still at it today.
Hence my long standing offer to aid companies (porn or not makes not difference to me) that are sued by patent trolls in the video/interaction/pay-per-view/payment realm.
Specialty processors take care of the issues in such a way that the risk becomes tolerable. Another reason is pressure from the big card companies not to accept such clients even when the processors would accept them otherwise.
Hence the prevalence of adult customers with CCBill, Epoch, VXS and several others.
So how many times higher a cut do the CCBill, Epochs, VXS and others take compared to... what a retail store would pay?
Solutions such as VBV and meticulous logging can take care of this but are hard to implement in a bullet proof way to stand up in case of a dispute. The processors do a good job of this and in general are the more solid component of the eco-system.
The only time the costs are excessive is when a processor goes belly-up, which has happened twice for a large enough processor that it affected thousands of merchants.
Retail stores are at a huge advantage here because they have inherent address verification and a signature upon delivery, whereas most - if not all - adult sites operate entirely in the virtual domain. That does make it much easier for them to absorb the extra costs.
Inevitably there would be fraudulent chargebacks against the site when someones partner would read the credit card statement at the end of the month ("No honey, why would I use that site? Our credit card has been hacked!"). There was a team of people who would prepare reports of usage to fax to the banks to challenge the chargebacks.
You want someone at a bank to get a faxed copy of naked pics? Upload them to the site and then deny the charges. Easy!
http://www.cio.com/article/2925874/leaked-database-of-adult-...
Adult Friend Finder, one of the largest online dating sites, may have been breached more than two months ago, and the sensitive files—include names, ages, email addresses, zip codes and more—are apparently still online....
Bev Robb, who does malware and dark Web research, came across the Adult Friend Finder files in March. She said she held off on publicizing the information for a few weeks before contacting two security experts.
Possibly an extortion / non-payment issue:
https://teksecurityblog.com/blog/2015/04/13/hacked-how-safe-...
During a fit of rage, a pissed off hacker (going by the handle ROR[RG]) posted 15 downloadable spreadsheets (in zipped file format with credit card data stripped) to a week-old Darknet forum stating that he had rooted the adult site database. Why? Because they owed his guy approximately $248,000 USD. He bragged that the company and law enforcement could not touch him because he was based in Thailand. His ransom demand was set at $100,000 (50G to begin and 50G to end).
Edit: Worth it.
95% of these "females" are likely spammers, escorts or someone you don't want to meet in a dark alley.
We are much more inline with open relationships than we think.
Further reading: Sex at Dawn Further watching: Polyamory (HBO)
Given those numbers and that Adult Friend Finder is not specifically just for people in bad relationships, I would say that the evidence suggest strongly that we are predominately a monogamous species.
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/family-demography/families-and...