Who Is Downloading the Torrented Facebook Files? 142
eldavojohn writes "Gizmodo's got an interesting scoop on a list of IPs acquired from Peer Block revealing who is downloading the Facebook user data torrented this week: Apple, the Church of Scientology, Disney, Intel, IBM and several major government contractors just to name a few. The article notes that this doesn't mean it's sanctioned by these companies or even known to be happening, but the IP addresses of requests coming to one of the users' machines match to lists of IP blocks for each company."
needs control group (Score:4, Insightful)
On an average popular torrent, are these companies also listed?
Not Really News (Score:5, Insightful)
Looking over the long list of companies, you see what amounts to a list of large employers. Since we can't know if the downloading was an individual or a company decision, this tells us exactly nothing. There's no story here because there's no useful information.
Heck, if I were a company that wanted that torrent, I'd get someone to download it at home and walk it in to our office. Companies aren't always that foresighted, of course, but they're also not generally stupid if they're successful.
(It's like noting that an IP from the NSA checks Slashdot. It could be Slashdot being monitored or, more likely, it could be a random employee just posting.)
Re:Prone to prosecution? (Score:4, Insightful)
The profiles are NOT private, nor there is anything "hacked" here.
This archive contains only the information that users made publicly available (consciously or not) - this stuff was just crawled from the web and put together in one large file.
There is no news here... if I were Apple or Cisco, I would crawl this public info myself, rather than relying on some dude that posted it on a torrent...
Re:I would not be too surprised (Score:4, Insightful)
I would not be terribly surprised if the organizations that were listed had instructed their employees to download this torrent.
If a company sanctioned it (and that is purely an assumption) they could be looking for info on their own employees.
So should corps be held liable? (Score:2, Insightful)
When they pull crap like "we just reset/changed/added some protection settings, everything you had guarded is now wide open, kthxbye!", especially when it is a blatant attempt to further their own business plan, and then someone sucks all the data off and makes it available like this entity did?
The old "permission change without warning" has happened with Yahoo and FB that I know of.
YA, TOS probably state they can do whatever they want, but with TOS like that there has to be a fine line crossed somewhere eventually that lands them in hot water.
There's nothing wrong with what they're doing. (Score:2, Insightful)
Heck, if I were a company that wanted that torrent, I'd get someone to download it at home and walk it in to our office. .
Why? There's nothing wrong with what they're doing.
People put their lives up for public view. And if you made you profile private or whatever, then that's an issue with FB and not with these companies.
This is not different than reading someone's published autobiography.
Re:Prone to prosecution? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, the profiles were all private, and then facebook changed the default privacy settings to make them public and 100 million chumps didn't know/care enough about their privacy to change things.
Re:hmm...Church of Scientology (Score:4, Insightful)
You can be assured that if they find their own MEMBERS acting out in unapproved ways, those members will be disciplined. The rest of the data? Maybe they'll sift through it, looking for potential rich converts. They can't rest on their laurels, after all. They need to continue bilking wealthy people out of their money!
Re:needs control group (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because an IT department is strict does not mean the IT guys themselves are. Many feel they are above the law.
You're right, which is why its usually a good idea to isolate your IT Security team from the IT department at large. Don't give them access to implement policy, just make it and monitor for abuses.
Re:needs control group (Score:1, Insightful)
Bottom line, you were laid off and someone felt the poor slob machinst was capable of running the network. What people do not understand about employment. The boss is always right, even if you have documented proof of the problems that you sent him and he blew them off, he is STILL right. If you job is fix 10 widgets in an hour and you only do 5, you are failing. It doesnt matter that the guy next to you "fixes" 10 an hour but his sloppy work ends up with 5 of them coming back in 6 months. See, the company and your boss is measuring your performance off of how many per hour you do, not your extended recall rate. If you do 10 per hour, you succeed and look good. Now in 2 years of the boss gets direction to reduce the extended failure rate and they start measuring that, well, you fix them correctly and reduce your failure rate and now you will look good. Sorry man, that is how it works dude, really. Okay, that concept is "wrong" and does not seem ethical but you are the employee and the company defines the rules. Another example. Your bosses biggest concern is being at work on time. You are a dedicated employee that devotes 110% effort when you are at work but you sometimes are late. Your cube mate is a freaking idiot and spends more time avoiding work than doing work but... He always gets to work on time. In theory, you are the better employee but in reality, the boss hates you because you are always late. It happens, deal with it.
Like i said, the simple fact you were let go has nothing do to with your technical ability, it was because your boss did not value your worth. The boss is always right.
Re:needs control group (Score:4, Insightful)
And I did what I was told, most of the time.
I dug my heals in at times, refused to delete backups containing financial information rather than buy extra backup media, which would have been a felony under some of the laws that got passed after Enron, or refused to put the company at risk by trying to download apps on torrents, lest it attract the BSA's attention. I may be willing to follow orders but I was not going to risk jail time or the lively hood of my co-workers.
I think the biggest thing that got me was I did my job too well. When I started the network needed daily babysitting, some printer wasn't working, or a VOIP phone was buggy. Always something, so I was running around dealing with brush fires all the time, they saw that and thought "Oh, hes doing something". After I had cleaned up the network configs, updated phone firmware, etc., I spent most of my time in my office improving the automation, security and reliability of the IT operations. To an outsider it looked like I wasn't doing anything, and they didn't understand when I explained it to them. Hence I was considered unneeded.