Well I was curious just from a business perspective (and curious how many people would actually go for it). Turns out you could not even peek at the site without giving them your email address. So I did, thinking little of it, and discovered to my surprise that is all it took to create an account. After being thoroughly unimpressed (honestly I don't even recall the site it was so lack luster) I went to delete my account only to discover they wanted $80 to do so. Well, I discovered their brilliant business model.

Far more disgusting than any individual that wound up in this data dump are the heads of this business. How have we come to accept this kind of immoral behavior on the large scale, while blanket condemning all the individuals who fell prey to their game?

Hmm, so... did you pay? And if you did, have you verified your data is _not_ in the torrent dumps? It's been said that AM wasn't deleting as promised, even after paying, and that's a key part of a pending class-action-lawsuit.

To have a company simply not do their due diligence in providing reasonable protection is beyond incompetence and negligence. Its gross that they didn't even honor peoples' request to have their profiles deleted.

Hackers are gonna hack.

Cheaters are gonna cheat.

Haters are gonna hate.

But damn Ashley Madison, in such a high risk game, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

There is a comment somewhere -- maybe it's from the article, I can't remember -- expressing surprise that the AM home page doesn't acknowledge the breach at all. I would imagine that they are still receiving signups from folks who aren't following this story.

what a world

Except by releasing the users data, it clearly shows their motivation is more against the users, then any shady business practices.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34044506

Terribly sad and deeply disturbing.

Imagine what will happen the first time a government's database of all the sites we are visiting is leaked.

Cheating is legal and doesn't affect me a customer. Its crazy that an entrepreneur forum is obsessed with exposing these men and women. Not too long ago, my dad's generation were saying "A company run by a gay? I'd never do business with such a morally bankrupt pervert!" Meanwhile, my own bosses have said things like, "Hire someone who smokes pot? Well, we don't hire immoral criminals here! Now piss in this cup."

Now here we are, again. Maybe we should just stop moving the goalposts and understand that what people do privately is their own fucking business. I don't care how many affairs you've had. I just care about the value proposition. I hate how cheating makes everyone a moralist and a biblethumper, when they otherwise have secular liberal values. I hate this entitlement and culture of shame it brings out in people who should know better.

If people want to have an open marriage or practice polyamory, fine, that's entirely up to them.

The deception is the thing here that is problematic.

The poly people I know seem to have their own places for finding potential relationship partners. The poly people I know are also all quite open about their relationship choices.

If I saw a name I recognized on Ashley Madison, I'd assume they wanted to cheat and keep that hidden from their partners.

>my concern is that they're also OK lying to a customer.

This is ridiculous. Do you really think the CEO's sex life translates directly to the product? Do you even understand what a CEO does?

I also do business with a lot more people where I'm doing business with the owner themselves. If I'm looking someone in the eye and shaking their hand to do a deal, and then they turn around and lie to their spouse (someone they ostensibly owe a lot more to than me), that's hard for me to reconcile.

Maybe you don't care, and that's fine. I do. I find it hard to trust people who cheat. Why would I be treated differently or better than a spouse? (Again, open marriage/polyamory/whatever is a different story.)

"Look at other women?! I'm not buying his product!" This is no different than "A Hindu running a company? No thank you sir! I only go with good honest Christian men!"

In a large company the CEO does little more than attract investor money and recruit senior leadership, if that. The idea that his sex lies are going directly in your software is hilariously puritanical.

Then you should care about marijuana users and people in repressive regimes who import contraband media and news for in the same way for the same reasons.

People who enter into monogamous relationships can get one set of "this is what counts as honesty" rules w.r.t. what they owe their spouses (i.e. don't cheat).

People who are born into and live in repressive regimes can get a different set of "this is what counts as honesty" (i.e. some law is unjust and therefore can be broken).

Funnily enough, though, sometimes I do hear of people breaking laws that makes me think they're less trustworthy, too. Like a guy I know who wants to try and get a handicapped parking placard even though he isn't handicapped. You know, those spots are supposed to be for people who really can't walk that far, and he wants to try and grab one because of the convenience. That's a trivial example, and dumb, but when I hear that I think, there's a guy who wants to rip off the system in a small way, but one that could hurt people who actually need it.

So it's not like "here is one conception of honesty that I have to apply everywhere, mechanically and without human reasoning." Human life is more nuanced than that.

" In the United States, laws vary from state to state. Up until the mid 20th century most US states (especially Southern and Northeastern states) had laws against fornication, adultery or cohabitation. These laws have gradually been abolished or struck down by courts as unconstitutional.[138][139][140]"

If the law making it illegal is unconstitutional, it's legal.

No politician wants to be the one who says "I propose a bill to make adultery legal. It's not an issue for the courts." There have been less that a dozen misdemeanor prosecutions in the last half century in those 21 states combined. So yes, in those states, it's illegal. Unconstitutionally so. Just as in many cases, so was homosexuality, and anal sex.

Practically everyone has had a data breach by now. It's well past time to start acquiring data-protection habits to practice before going out on the Internet.

I don't know what will change attitude of our industry. I guess lot of us are still stuck with mindset of real-world brick/mortor shops - if you don't want do anything with Shop X just don't go there! Sadly this does not really work for loads of internet services. Perhaps we need a legislation like Right to Forget (I am not endorsing EU law fwiw).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Data_Liberation_Front

http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/09/introducing-d... http://dataliberation.blogspot.com/

"For example, you can choose to have your data deleted — after three, six, nine or 12 months of inactivity."

Considering Steam don't ask about any of your personal information (and you can pay using PayPal or even "offline" wallet codes) I would suspect that such feature will be used more for harm than good.

Would deleting an account enable the associated Steam keys (physical or electronic) to be reused? Or is deleting an account equivalent to putting all your games in a pile and burning them?

By not having account deletion procedure they don't hurt anyone's privacy, but just save average user from one more possible pain in ass for no reason (because they wouldn't be able to delete accounts for real anyway).

On other hand, allowing users to delete their accounts can help with kicking serious gaming addiction. It usually takes time before you can level up a new account for playing at skill levels you were. Part of me thinks, Valve does not allow deletion of accounts precisely because of this.

Valve only runs two games that meet that description, TF2 and DOTA2, and "resetting your progress" is as easy as burning all your items.

And idea that some people going to remove somebody else account to "help with gaming addition" is good reason to not implement removal.

http://unsourced.org/blog/illicit-sex-and-free-advertising.h...

The single and only reason Ashley Madison got media attention -- and they got plenty (morning radio in the Southern Ontario space just loved bringing them up) is that it was salacious: The whole premise of a site to arrange affairs is just very "click baity", and it's sure to draw attention.

Ashley Madison played those cards brilliantly, turning their entrant in a hyper competitive dating site market into a newsworthy, edgy find an affair site.

But that same gambit also means that if you fail, many want to see you fail big, exactly the same motivations drawing media.

There is no hypocrisy or dual standards here. Site is newsworthy for its market, and it's newsworthy for success, and even more for failures.

The only ways to not be embarrassed by what is online about you are. [And I understand embarrassment is not the only reason to be anonymous, but if people are honest with themselves it is 90% of the reason they care.]

1. don't give a shit / don't be embarrassed / don't live by other's standards or norms (this seems easiest to me but I'm sort of anti-social amoral and have not been giving a shit what others values as they apply to me from a young age, YMMV)

2. Don't do embarrassing things. Sort of corollary of #1 (as in the less you are embarrassed by the easier it is to not to embarrassing things.

3. Don't live in modern society. Get born some place with no electricity and kill (optionally eat) all the scientist who come to study/photograph you.

I had to stop using that email because of all this over the years. It's unfortunate but this email address is tied to me, I've tried to erase my name from it as much as I can on the Internet tying it to me over the years.

Mostly I just laugh it off, it's annoying. At least my wife knows I wouldn't be on farmersonly.com.

I get cell phone bills which you can't unsubscribe from, since the auth is actually tied to the phone. I get tons of email newsletters. For a good chunk of them the unsubscribe flow doesn't actually work, so I wind up marking them as spam.

Apparently people signing up to gmail with bogus secondary recovery account emails that Google has a whole flow for "disavow this email from your account". I wind up using that flow 2-3 times a week.

The concept of email is hard I guess.

If ever a potentially relationship-breaking revelation was plausibly deniable, it's this one.

I would think it would be trivial to collect relatively innocent concepts and flood the net with them. Such that the nym "VLM" would now and forever be associated solely with thousands, perhaps millions, of facebook posts of cute kitten memes. That would be easy to filter, but its not like world wide civilization has any shortage of blandly familiar inoffensive fluff to use as a source.

Meanwhile build a worldwide black list, so no religious commentary at all, no alcohol / tobacco / other drug use, no political commentary.

It seems like a reasonable startup opportunity.

Meanwhile working the other side, another startup can work on filtering bland stuff from social media. Maybe with a secret back channel to the flooders. I would imagine, unfortunately, if you crossed off all the inane posts from most social media users, the end result would be many totally legit people having no record at all!

And don't forget the True you will still be online. A service that only works if you yourself are limited to no religious commentary at all, no alcohol / tobacco / other drug use, no political commentary. Is really no service at all.

> false data has to be some kind of "white noise composite" of all internet content,

It probably does or will be easily detected and machine filterable. There's already algo's that make good guess if some texts were written by same person.

You are facing divorce cause you cheated on your spouse.

Despite not cheating, your name is on list. Your spouse is still divorcing you because there were other issues and it was coming name on list or not. Or, they're psyco (can't understand name on list is not cheating) and good riddance.

You have healthy marriage.

So in the EU, if current legislation projects bear fruit, a case could probably be made for implementing this under the protection of the right to be forgotten, and there would be very little those services could do to prevent it.

And blanket statements are always false.

A EULA can never bind you into a legal contract that has consequences beyond those already provided for by a law or the ability of the copyright holder of the software to deny use of the license.

The EULA is itself purely informal, but informal speech can serve in the provisions of certain laws that look at it to determine the intentions of the two parties. If a law exists that considers whether a user agreed to something in the determination of whether that user must be held to that thing they agreed to, then accepting a EULA is obviously valid under that provision -- but so would an email stating as much.

EULAs are just a list of statements the copyright holder and the user are throwing at each other in bulk format in order to cover those provisions where laws take such statements into account, along with a conditional authorization to use the software. If a EULA does anything else, it will be ignored, as there is generally no law that says "You must do what it says in the EULA". Unless you have one where you live, in which case ouch.

I can say whatever I want in an EULA, but it's going to be worth nothing in court if the user stopped using the license unless I was saying something that directly ties into an existing law. And if they do continue to use the license after doing things I forbid in the EULA, they are committing the specific crime of unauthorized use, since I'm no longer authorizing them.

As much as some EULA writers might get a kick out of writing that you will be tried according to whichever court's law they want, and that you'll be held responsible for XYZ humongous damages if you breach even the tiniest provision even up to two years after you cease using the software... yeah, nope, you'll still get convicted for unauthorized use, not the rest of that crap they listed.

Mind you, I'm repeating what a canadian lawyer explained to me. YMMV and some places may indeed hold the EULA against you.

He was threatened with 55 years in jail for abusing an account with the American College of Physicians after clicking accept on the EULA.

I think that, in practice, it's about whether or not social media sites and search engines should be forced to maintain a market on personal data to serve as a crowdsourced proxy for state-sponsored surveillance.

I don't, in this case. Search engines and social media sites were never intended to serve as arbiters of historical truth. Is it really a good idea to suddenly pretend they are, and insist they act like it?

You could argue that preserving public goods is the task for the government and yes, we shouldn't insist that private companies do their job for them. But here, we have a company that wants to do that job out of its own will, and the governments insist they stop.

Violation will certainly give the social media cite grounds and desire to delete the false profiles though.

So deleting this fraudulent account will cause a measurable, definable, actionable, $0.0001 decrease in shareholder value, ignoring it will have no effect on shareholder value, what is my fiduciary responsibility here?

Paranoia is definitely building. Awareness of how exposed people are is building. Yet, exposure is going up not down. People are posting more stuff online. I wonder if, for example, the cloud hack has impacted the trend of people taking nude picture at all? I suspect it hasn't. I suspect that none of these leaks will impact user behavior.

On one hand, a leak of an Ashley madison profile or salacious photos makes people aware that the danger exists. On the other, it confirms how widespread and normal it is to do these things.

Here's my (soft) prediction: Norms concerning fidelity and/or modesty will give before online behavior does. If the choice is stop sending nudie pictures or stop getting embarrassed when they leak, we'll go for the latter. For infidelity… maybe strict monogamy will soften as a norm.

Polygamy is already the norm in the West, only it's serial polygamy instead of parallel one, i.e. you're supposed to dump your previous partner before picking the next one. But most people enter most relationships being very open to the idea that it won't be lifelong, and that other partners will be part of their sexual, sentimental and patrimonial future: this constitutes polygamy, irrespective of the order in which you have sex with the several partners you plan to have.

Will insistance on serial polygamy soften? I'd say that the forces seem aligned for this to happen:

* reproductive control was the main reason for historical control over people's sexuality. With reliable contraception and easy paternity tests, those incentives are dramatically weakened.

* don't underestimate homo sapiens' urge to practice polygamy: historically we've had to punish adultery by gruesome death, it still routinely causes financial ruin in the US, yet people always kept committing it! They're still willing to wreck their own children's family and well-being, in exchange for some renewal in their sentimental and sensual lives! This urge seems to me at least as strong as the gluttony epidemic, which turns many Westerners into impotent, morbidly obese wrecks, one hamburger at a time.

* Exposure accelerates acceptance. Internet is bound to make affairs more and more visible, and as a result, we'll get used to them.

As for modesty, even before Internet, the list of which body parts / positions were naughty evolved fast and flexibly, within decades (think miniskirts, sleeveless tops, bikini, monokini, Frei Korper Kultur, or conversely, the comeback of islamic female garbs in middle eastern countries). With Internet as a great accelerator, we'll soon be mildly too bored to Google sextapes of our acquaintances. I known I already feel that way about celebrities. First time patrons of naturist resorts typically report nudity-induced awkwardness to last about 1/4h :-)

Besides, my whole point is that this behavior constitutes a variant of polygamy, not a variant of monogamy, so I stand by that term. That there's a "serial monogamy" idiom describing it (I just discovered it thanks to you and Google, I'm not a native speaker) is tellingly disingenuous IMO.

In fairness, fab was splitting hairs with me. What I meant is a softening of the monogamy using the currently normal relationship model as the definition. What he meant is that the definition of normal monogamy has changed anyway over the past few generations. Courtship became relationships, which really became marriage-like partnership.

He's right. What we call monogamy would not have held with our great grandparents. They would have objected to the serial partnerships much more than the infidelity which at least we have the decency to try and keep secret.

Moreover, infidelity was about sex. It might also have cost a bit of money, going to mistresses and bastards, for wealthy male adulterers, but it didn't affect patrimonial rights. Neither could the mistress be promoted as new wife, to the detriment of the incumbent one.

The idea that marriage is first and foremost a love affair is a fairly recent one, and coincides with its demise (explosion of divorces, monoparental families...) The lifelong marriage was a patrimonial affair.

If I had a spouse, to whom I was devoted, and they were hit by a bus and killed, and then I had another spouse, who was killed by a falling meteoroid, and then a third spouse, who died of an aneurysm, and finally a fourth who left me because of a reasonable fear of death-by-misfortune--I would still be considered monogamous.

Yours is a very tortured interpretation of what polygamy is.

But I don't think that's the topic. The original question was, will it become morally acceptable to be polygamous? And my answer was, you don't have to, of course, but you already can, in a contrieved way.

You can live the hookup culture without much stygma. You can dump your partners every 2-3 years, when novelty wears off, possibly having children with each of them. You can temporarily put up with a partner who doesn't satisfy you on some subjects, because you know there will be a next one who will fulfill those currently unmet needs.

TL;DR: polygamy isn't the only acceptable way, will probably never be, but some form of it already is a viable and non-stygmatized possibility.

They don't see the real underlying issue about privacy and informatic data. The day it's something more sensible like medical or financial records being leaked, I hope they'll change their outlook at it.

And many against even these hacks feel that the victims of hacks of hidden tor services 'had it coming'. Most people think that a sufficiently immoral online action means the hacked individual 'had it coming'. The difference is in what counts as sufficiently moral, not in the underlying view of if it is possible for someone to deserve to be hacked.

Then, when it comes to stuff like this, it's not even an issue. My partner wants to hook up with somebody else? Totally, go for it, enjoy yourself. Find love in others as well. It's not that scary, and I have no fear of ever being cheated on.

I have a hunch that it may be a byproduct of the ongoing evolution of the dating marketplace--if you have, for example, a rather uncommon kink or something, it makes sense not to voluntarily limit yourself to one supplier.

And yes, the vocabulary here is somewhat on purpose. I think it's easy to argue that, if you're willing to treat the whole thing as matching providers and consumers, the poly approach is a strictly better marketplace than mainstream dating. Somewhat comically: the odds are good, but the goods are odd. :)

How do you know the spouse's opinion on the matter? That's the only opinion that matters regarding how bad it is.

"Cheating" implies dishonesty and deception.

..Something I think that keeps getting lost in this discussion that inevitably turns towards discussions of polyamory - this is not a discussion about whether polyamory is okay, it's a discussion about whether it's okay to lie to another person who you've of your own free will promised that you will be monogamous with.

I've noticed recently that polaroid cameras are making a bit of a comeback. I wonder if this has any connection? (Not sure myself.)

With the availability of reliable contraceptions (for both genders) and paternity tests, it has lost one of its main advantages: Ensuring that your offspring is really yours (for males) and that it won't have to compete with another mates offspring (for females).

Your great grandmother might have had a much more forgiving reaction to this infidelity stuff as a lot of people today. She probably thought girls having extra marital relationships some lasting days and some lasting years (as is normal today) as immoral trollop behavior.

Side note on evolutionary monogamy:

A lot of birds are monogamous. A lot of foundational zoologists were Victorians so they saw eye-to-eye. There were a lot of studies of avian reproductive behavior for the entirety of the modern scientific period. Recently, DNA tests on nestlings revealed that birds cheat. The reason Victorians (and other later) rarely picked up on it is because they're so damn sneaky about it. It's a no no in bird marriages, but they still do it.

Why is that? Is it because men are more likely to cheat, or because men are more likely to need the help of online services to do so?

I suspect both are true, but can say with confidence that the latter is definitely true. Women don't need sites to help them cheat; all they have to do is go out and they will be hunted down. As a woman I find this a clear sign of the remaining, quite sinister, gender inequality.

It's funny that there seems to be an assumption that most were either men checking about themselves or paranoid/untrusting spouses checking on the status of their men. From the information that's being reported, there seems to be remarkably few men checking up on their women...

Not sure if that's a valid observation, but it's an interesting one that is telling of the mental/emotional differences between men and women on the whole.

Who knows, people are a weird bunch. The more you know about them, the more you realize that all this shit that goes on behind closed doors that people judge in public eventually leaks and then when you analyze enough data about the state of humanity, appears to be "completely normal behaviour"... Then when everyone realizes it's completely normal behaviour they're like "okay then, perhaps we should just change the rules so that we can all stop hiding and be publically equal and love who we are in public again."

We're all human, we all fuck up from time to time and we all get caught in embarrassing moments where we hope the ground would open up and swallow us occasionally. Perhaps not in ways that get leaked all over the internet, or to be used as blackmail against us, but it happens.

Given the few women on there (by all accounts), one would have to wonder how many men could actually have ended up cheating with anyone... from the sound of things, all the female accounts were either fake or sex professionals... so who were all these millions of men cheating with?

But the 'why' is varied. It's illogical to say "they cheat because they are more likely to cheat". They cheat because of many factors, but according to surveys, they cheat more often out of a need for physical satisfaction, while women cheat more out of a need for emotional or intimate satisfaction.

As far as need for online services to help? That's completely dependent on the person, again. True, women get hit on more often & indiscriminately, so they'd have more choice. But they also can't necessarily get the emotional satisfaction they're looking for, so that narrows the field. Men just need to be attractive enough to get laid, which again definitely depends on the man.

--

As a side rant: Assuming sex and gender were considered about the same, gender inequality is a function of gender differences. In other words, it's not only inevitable, it's normal. Women request [and should get] special care for breastfeeding/pumping, maternity leave, they have higher incidences of breast and ovarian cancer, they naturally have less muscle and are shorter on average, etc etc. These aren't controversial statements, and yet, they show simple examples of how women are different, and in some cases should be treated different in order to provide care. How would one make these differences "equal" among the genders? (obviously sex isn't gender, but clearly there's more cis-women than trans-women)

Women admit to cheating less than men, and this is reflected in a bias of studies whose methodology includes self-reporting. In general, women self-report about one third less sex partners than men. That presents a curious mathematical problem: who are all those extra men partnering with?

Let's say the average reported number of sex partners for males is 11.7 [1]. Now that means that the set of men has a number of connections into the set of women times 11.7. Say, the number of men in the set is 31M [2], then the number of connections is 362.7M. For the set of women, the numbers are 7.7, 32.2M, and 247.94M, respectively.

The connections can terminate in either of the sets, so we can have M-M, M-F, or F-F connections.

At one unlikely extreme, we could have no heterosexual (M-F) pairings at all, so that means 11.7 gay partners for men, and 7.7 lesbian partners for women. Clearly, this isn't the reality, not even in the UK. But even if we map all the connections from the female set to males, we'll end up with 247.94M hetero connections, no lesbian connections, and 114.76 connections from the male set onto itself, or 8.0 hetero + 3.7 gay connections per male, and 7.7 hetero + 0 lesbian connections per female.

There may be a large number of spinsters, and a small number of gay people may be skewing the mean away from the mode for the males, but the important take-away is that, mathematically, hetero-sexual partnerships always draw from both sets equally, and therefore the mean number of heterosex partners is always the same across the whole population.

[1] http://www.nhs.uk/news/2013/11November/Pages/Results-of-UK-S... [2] http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census/population-...

Uh, no, not from the sets under study. You've ignored time and space. The sets under study are the set of men and set of women currently living in a particular countries. The sets from whom their past partners are drawn (even assuming purely heterosexual relationships) may include people no longer living at the time of the survey, as well as people who are alive, but not living in the country under study (either at the time of the survey, or even ever.)

If you managed to get responses from representative sample of all men and women who had ever lived (which, you know, is logistically tricky), then you could validly argue that all heterosexual partnerships must draw evenly from both groups. But you don't, so you can't.

The imbalance could just be that UK men are more likely to have had past relationships with women not currently living in the UK than UK women are to have had with men not currently living in the UK. (It could also be the kind of reporting bias you suggest, and there are certainly other sociological reasons to suspect that such reporting bias is at least partially to blame -- its just not, even without bringing into it questions of same-sex pairings, the kind of mathematical necessity you make it out to be.)

Time. Women live longer on average, and there is also on average an age gap between heterosex partners (males older); therefore it is more probable that the male sex partner will be deceased, not the female. The numbers for females, if anything, should therefore be higher.

Space. If the UK is a net exporter of male sexual partners, that would mean that some other country or countries would be net importers. Regardless, the worldwide number of heterosex connections must be the same for women and men. But that's not the case. In every country, with the notable exception of New Zealand, women report less sex partners than men, and the worldwide aggregate for men is still unexplainedly higher than the aggregate for women.

Some studies suggest the gap to be due to women underreporting, some studies suggest prostitutes are underrepresented in the samples, but in the end, whenever somebody wants to argue that men tend to have more sex partners than women, let them know that (a) one number is pretty useless in telling the whole story, and (b) if conclusions of a study present a mathematical paradox, they should be taken with a grain of salt.

The simplest answer to your question ("who are all those extra men partnering with?") is incredibly simple: there's a smaller group of women who sleep with a greater number of men than vice-versa. And this makes total sense if you consider that women have more choice of partners, and men have less, and that there's a larger pool of men looking for purely physical/sexual relationships. Basically the availability of men is greater, the availability of women is smaller, and so the reported number of women cheating is smaller, and the reported number of men cheating is larger.

That's a falacy. If a small number of women raise the number of their sexual partners, the rest of the women must lower their number of sexual partners, to keep the average the same. That's not the way to explain the deficit.

I remember reading something that said something along the lines of "A married man in a bar, cheating, is more likely to do so without thought to the wedding ring - either oblivious to taking it off or apathetic".

Women doing the same thing were much more likely to make a conscious point of removing the wedding ring in the same situation.

So the worried responses would be from users, and the user base displays bias.

Can you expand on what you mean by that? (Specifically by "hunted down" and how what you're talking about relates to inequality)

These are vast generalizations with plenty of exceptions, but surely you have noticed that in most cultures men tend to pursue women more actively than vice-versa?

From my experience, most women are not interested in holding sex as a trump card. Like you and I, they are simply looking for companionship - for someone they can count on for support and non-judgement during times of crisis, but who will also push them to become better and achieve their goals. Like you and I, most are at least partially attracted to looks, confidence, humor, power, intellect, etc.

It sounds like you're pretty bitter about something or other. I think you should make more friends that are women so that you can talk to them about the way they view relationships.

transfire explicitly was addressing the condition of men seeking sex, which is not the same as mean seeking "companionship - for someone they can count on for support and non-judgement during times of crisis, but who will also push them to become better and achieve their goals".

Insofar as women are seeking that (whether or not that's like you), that would likely be a problem for men who are simply seeking sex and not to find or provide companionship.

To the extent that there are asymmetries in the degrees to which (heterosexual, for simplicity) men and women seek sex vs. mutual companionship in relationships, this will produce advantages and disadvantages to some people on both sides. For instance, to the extent the stereotypical idea that men are more prone to seek sex and women more prone to seek companionship is true (note that I'm not claiming it is), men who seek sex will have a more difficult time, as will women who seek mutual companionship (while, conversely, women who seek sex and men who seek mutual companionship will have a comparatively easy time.)

Its a simple issue of poor alignment of supply and demand (but it doesn't make it worse to be a man than a woman -- it makes it worse to be a man or woman seeking what people of your gender are most prone to seek, and people of your preferred gender are least prone to want to provide.)

Still, I wanted to draw attention to the fact that most people are looking for some mix of physical intimacy (sex) and emotional intimacy (companionship).

There will always be imbalances where needs are not met, but to posit that most women use sex as a tool to manipulate men that are less than perfect doesn't sit well with me.

First, don't get so hung up on "perfect". I think the poster intended it to mean "passing some standard", presumably a high one, and possibly one they themselves are unable to meet. Their word choice just wasn't very good.

As for the rest, it doesn't have to sit well with you: it's simply the way things have been in any culture where we expect long-term relationships and especially any culture where you have heredity concerns. Consider the stigma around, for example, "being a slut"--a great deal (if not the majority) of which is perpetuated by women against other women, from mothers warning their daughters, and so on!

The entire mythos surrounding virginity and monogamous relationships and whatnot hinges on the notion that women control the supply of sex, that men voluntarily prostrate themselves to obtain that sex, that men punish other men who take it by force (because, frankly, women are ill-equipped by mother nature to do so), that men need to know that their children (historically and especially the eldest male) are in fact theirs (something hard before paternity tests and so a piece of the slut-shaming puzzle), and so on.

To deny that women are at least somewhat shrewd and discerning in their sexual exploits is patronizing.

That's a pretty unkind thing to say to a stranger on the internet. I lose a bit of faith in humanity every time I see such things.

> I think you should make more friends that are women so that you can talk to them about the way they view relationships.

Which definitely doesn't sound near to "hey, you're fat."

And that "fat-like" part is also in fact different:

"It sounds like you're pretty bitter (...)" -- note that it discusses the impression of the written comment not the person.

Btw I don't think it's OK to remove your claim that roymurdock's response was "mean" as the responses then lose the context, maybe deleting the comment would be more appropriate?

I guess I wouldn't write it. When I read transfire's and roymurdock's comments, it's not obvious to me whose opinion is more informed, or if the question even makes sense. Their experiences with women could just be different, and one ended up more cynical than the other.

> Btw I don't think it's OK to remove your claim that roymurdock's response was "mean"

Yeah. Sorry. I was just trying to make my own comment less mean :-/

Please watch Monty Python's sketch "Nudge nudge."

I'm also not trying to imply that OP does not have enough friends. Just that he might get a broader picture of women in general if he had more female friends.

I read your edited comment about how that made you sad. A lot of things on HN make me sad - there are many unnecessarily mean, rude, snarky comments posted here with amazing regularity. I try to make helpful comments without putting others down. I'm sorry if my comment came off in a negative manner. I'm not trying to add to the general negativity of the site.

What did they say that made them sound bitter? I often see this response for points similar to the one GP made, so I was wondering what about it makes one seem bitter?

    What did they say that made them sound bitter?

Is it perhaps some view that those who complain about social relationship norms are generally those not in, but wishing to be in, such relationships?

   There are definite gender imbalances in our society. Is someone 
   bitter when they point out that women make less or that men die 
   more at work?  [...] I wouldn't call Clinton pointing out the wage 
   gap as her being bitter.

   For a man, unless they are handsome, wealthy and well endowed (i.e. 
   perfect) then they are at the mercy of women

Myself and plenty of other men I know, who are far from this definition of "perfect," manage to have perfectly healthy relationships with women in which nobody is at anybody else's mercy.

Not really, considering that the gender wage gap often pointed out (the 70-something cents to the dollar) is not standardized for time worked, experience, career choice, or a number of other factors. I would say Clinton is wrong to bring up the 70-something cents to a dollar, but I wouldn't call her bitter.

>If that doesn't sound bitter to you, see a therapist.

Even if they meant actual perfection and weren't using hyperbole, that would still just make them wrong, not bitter.

If I were to say that the average worker's pay is at the mercy of their boss, that doesn't make me bitter, even when you consider it is often wrong (direct manager often has limited input on overall salary).

That is some seriously messed-up stuff!

Imperfect men can either beg for sex or attempt rape?

No! Just, no! A thousand times no!

I would strongly encourage you to talk to a professional mental health practitioner if that's your view on sexual relations. Something has gone seriously off the rails for you, and I hope you'll put in the effort to try and fix things up.

That might be what you are doing when you take a woman out on a date and pay for it, but I can assure you -- as a man who has dated (now happily married) that that is not even close to universally the case.

> When a man is forward with a woman in hopes she will like the advances it is subtle form of "taking".

That doesn't seem consistent with any reasonable definition of the word "taking", differing in kind rather than degree from anything for which that word is a good fit. Its more like offering than taking -- you are putting your desire on display in the hopes that it will get a positive response; that's not anything like "taking" anything. (Unless its in a context where there is an implicit power dynamic where the expression of interest amounts to an implied threat to take, or an implied threat to impose adverse consequences if the interest isn't fulfilled. But that's a rather special case.)

I kinda figured you were looking at a distinction similar to inbound/outbound marketing, but your example elsewhere of taking somebody out to dinner vs. asking them directly is just bad.

I hope that one day you have happy, healthy relationships where you simply enjoy each others' company and things aren't so transactional.

   For a man, unless they are handsome, wealthy and well
   endowed (i.e. perfect) then they are at the mercy of 
   women.

You're right about insecurity being a turnoff for most people, though.

Women have a whole different level of choice. Not necessarily good choices, but choice nonetheless. Just try to put up a fake profile on a dating site as an experiment and see what ends up in your mailbox over the course of a few days. It's an "enlightening" experience. Not necessarily very pleasant.

Yes, in Western (or at least American) society men do tend to pursue women more actively than vice-versa. This is probably true in most cultures though I don't have firsthand experience.

No, you do not need to be "handsome, wealthy and well endowed (i.e. perfect)" in order to avoid being "at the mercy of women."

   Just try to put up a fake profile on a dating site as
   an experiment and see what ends up in your mailbox over  
   the course of a few days.

That's not the point. The point is the relative difference in effort. And it's not just that men tend to pursue, but that the starting point on dating sites is so extremely uneven - the threshold to message someone is so low that men approach at a far higher rate than they dare to in real life, and approach women well outside of the "range" they'd normally do.

Whether or not this means that women can more easily find successful and enjoyable dates and/or relationships on dating sites... is another story.

An inbox full of unwanted advances from a bunch of strangers is not exactly a liberating experience, I wouldn't think. Certainly women I know don't think so.

They clearly have a greater number of suitors to choose from, yes, but like you say - men tend to approach women in such great numbers that there's no way to know who's worth pursuing.

How do you have a quality conversation with a stranger when 100 strangers are trying to talk to you simultaneously?

To top it off, the stakes are a little higher for women. A woman is one mistake (or one instance of violated consent) away from getting pregnant. A woman is always one step away from being sexually assaulted. Obviously men can be victims too, but adult female-on-male sexual assault is vanishingly rare.

It's an incredible story. I'm not sure the English language has a word to describe this: watching millions of people go through marital pain all at the same time. It's not a train wreck -- you can watch that and see that there are real people suffering. This is all just some huge faceless mob.

I am reminded of Stalin's quote: when one man dies, it's a tragedy. When a million men die, it's a statistic.

(I absolutely do not approve of lying and cheating on spouses. I will not keep your secret for you. But I also do not approve on taking action that would result in folks I do not know getting exposed. Folks have a right to their own lives.)

Do they? Say this was some tor service that was leaked with users engaging in what you would consider far more immoral activity. Would you feel the same way?

Now, maybe you would. But for most I've spoken to about this hack, they would feel different. For them, they 'right to their own lives' only exists as long as they aren't doing something too immoral. The difference between them and I is not based on if we believe they have a right to privacy with their business... we both do believe there is a limited right. We merely disagree on where the limits are.

For comparison, this isn't the difference between someone who believes in freedom of speech and someone who doesn't, but between two people who both believe in limited freedom of speech trying to decide if some individual case is bad enough to censor or not.

Tucholsky's quote.

I do not think there is such a right, because what you are describing is (in probably many cases) a right to break an agreement (marriage in this case) and keep pretending that you honor it until you yourself disclose it.

In simpler terms: you may have "a right to your own life", but do you have a right to lie to your partner?

Many people may have already worked out the cheating issue with their partners, and put themselves past it. However, now their friends and coworkers and neighbors can pretty easily search to see if they're in the dump. Not because they need to know... just because they're curious.

I don't think these people need to be exposed to that kind of scrutiny.

You just can't demand there won't be consequences when they find out. And you can't force other people to respect your decisions if they find out.

So, no. If you cheated and someone finds out, they are under no moral obligation to shut up about it. There are of course exceptions (e.g. if you're a woman in a country that applies Sharia law) but as a general rule: if you fuck up and lie about it, you should think about it as a delay rather than a way out.

Which seems rather appropriate given the extremely sick facts delivered to us by Snowden on a silver plate and the absence of change of course of society.

Of course that possibility will not stop the witchhunt but I'm fairly sure that at least a small percentage of the people in that database have no idea they're even in it.

I've been signed up to so much over the years that I mostly ignore it now, just unsub from the things I can and mark as spam everything else.

BTW, if anyone implements a "Thank you for signing up" email, please please please put the original IP address used to sign up in the email along with the "If this is not you". The few services that have done this have enabled me to identify (from my own web server logs) the users of the forum(s) that have been peeved at me on those days. That at least gives me the chance to talk to them and stem the flow of porn emails (or whatever they've decided to sign me up to).

+1; doing a macro-level lookup of the IP address's location would be useful, too, for less tech-savvy consumers.

"For a good time call 555-755-4988, ask for Jane"

Also: You must love your neighbour as yourself...

So basically... you're gonna fuck up at some point, so don't be too hard on others when they fuck up; because when you do it, you're gonna need some support and then where will you be?

In the original story this quote comes from, the one guilty was to be stoned to death because they had committed a crime deserving the death penalty. In comparison to crimes with similar punishment today, how many would say to not judge a murderer unless you are blameless? Say it and mean it?

Surely you are aware that the "crime deserving the death penalty", in this instance, was the "crime" of adultery. Based on that, I don't think your line of questioning holds up.

To insist that this quote only applies to adultery and not to other actions which different societies may or may not judge as capital crimes is about as meaningful as insisting that this literally means to not throw the first stone, but other punishments, including other means of execution, are allowed.

I'm reminded of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's comment when he defended a bill decriminalizing homosexual acts: "There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation".

Comes from the same set of books where anyone guilty of breaking one law is guilty of breaking them all, and comes from the guy who claimed to not only be the son of the one who made the laws that carried capital punishment, but who was there to give people a way to not be punished regardless of the crime. Nothing in His message was 'these crimes here are far worse than those crimes there'.

As for the bedroom bit, I find that almost no one believe that as soon as you have either money exchanging hands or some person who has been around the sun one too few times.

  So got a call, from our church leaders yesterday, saying 
  my husband's work email was on [redacted], oh my! 

If you value families, you should not go around hammering wedges into every crack you find in them.

Of course, it may be that she is just a paranoid spouse but needs to concoct a reason to look up her husband's email without sounding too paranoid.

Either way, it's sad beyond belief.

So many people who lied to everyone about how they believe in mongamy.

Sorry for the throwaway, my relationship status is no secret to family, friends, and colleagues but I don't want my private life public.

AM seems extremely representative of the American attitude to sex: seemingly everybody knows about AM, supposedly only sexual deviants use it, yet the leak reveals a significant portion of the population (and a lot of conservatives I would bet) signed up for it.

Compare that to the porn industry: it's one of the US's biggest markets, tons of people work for it, insane amounts of people consume it, but if any individual admits to using porn they're some kind of sex addict or pervert (and oh my god the Christian family values -- won't someone think of the children!).

A weird place, that country. Victorian morals on the outside, sexually liberated on the inside.

Likely to be similar across Europe.

It's personal data in the sense that you're likely not allowed to process them (as a business or corporation -- whether for commercial use or not). But most of these laws are written for companies and for individuals granted access to personal information by those companies.

As a person you're certainly not allowed to distribute the information (or at least not any personally identifiable parts of it) but mere "looking at them" doesn't seem like it would be a breach in and of itself.

The article you linked would indicate this: looking at the data isn't a breach of the data protection act, it merely means whatever you do with the data falls under the provisions of that act, limiting what you can do with it.

So in the UK be careful and anonomise it before working with it -- as is required with e.g. similar (legally obtained) datasets in the social sciences. Then totally delete the raw dataset from your system -- otherwise if you e.g. lose your laptop you become liable for any further re-distribution.

Not planning on looking at it anyway.

Profit...

> Thanks for all your replies. My general understanding here is that it not explicitly illegal to download but would put me in a possibly uncomfortable legal situation should I get unlucky. I have plenty of other work to do, so I'll avoid satiating my curiosity.

http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2015/08/is_it_illegal_to_do...

Spouses are the real victims in these situations. Part of the pain of infidelity is the humiliation. Airing a whole community's dirty laundry just makes it worse for the victims.

In the context of those affected by the fallout, if enough are affected, then one could claim the opposite: That it makes it easier knowing that so many were affected that nobody is passing any judgment on their specific incident because everyone is in the same boat - thus the humiliation is actually less.

The one thing that resonates with nearly everybody, however, is sex. Sex hits most of the 'bell curve' (to put it crassly).

So, part of me says that all of this information should be exposed, so that people start to 'get it.'

I don't know- I'm on the fence here.

It's easier to diet when you don't have a chocolate bar in front of you!

I mean, it's straight up mySQL dumps. You don't even have to do any complex ETL. Making that geographically and attribute searchable is remarkably easy. Like four hour project easy. Mapping everyone on OSM would be trivial.

Yet very few such apps have appeared. I suspect because of the privacy implications, coupled with the fuzzy legal area of the data -- I might have it, but I'm not going to announce to the world that I do.

I don't think that exposing peoples private lives, even though they did something wrong, on this scale is remotely funny. I think it is quite sad. It does not only effect the members of the site, but also their families, the company they work at, etc.. This breach has so much collateral damage.

I can not really understand how it is funny.