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."
Prone to prosecution? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not Really News (Score:4, Interesting)
Or, it could be a random NSA employee posting to provide a cover of plausible deniability to the monitoring! But seriously, the only thing the torrent does is make the information more easily obtained at one go. You can still click through the whole database and get all the information at http://facebook.com/directory [facebook.com]. I really don't see where any actual news is involved in this story, even from the beginning.
Re:needs control group (Score:4, Interesting)
I bet they are.
At the company I worked for the IT department had a machine which was always on and whose only purpose was to download files like that over BitTorrent. Of course only a few people inside IT knew about this machine.
The company had about 10'000 employees. I guess a company like Intel (which has around 80'000 employees) downloading some random file over BitTorrent is absolutely nothing special.
Re:Not Really News (Score:3, Interesting)
Program limitations (Score:2, Interesting)
Corporations seem like a much more likely consumer of this data than anyone else. I'm thinking about downloading it just to see... I'll let you know how the sort time goes....
Re:Program limitations (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not Really News (Score:2, Interesting)
24/7, searching, connecting in real time.
As for the rest, could be workers seeing the info and requesting it at work for reading, sorting at home?
For unique interests its a win, search for users with as anti war, anti cult, anti rodent sweatshops interest.
Befriend, turn, wipe, passive monitor, take over, re direct, mis direct or clone with a few twists. That might be the real key, grassroots that still feel like grassroots, used when needed, tracked when an issue.
Or a very blunt warning, a second or third world security service officer befriends you, just to let you know they know about your interests and can reach out in the real world too if you write too much
Re:needs control group (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm surprised any employee gets away with that.
On my job, about five years ago, I installed torrent to grab some Doctor Who audio files to relieve the boredom, and the next day I came-in to discover my computer missing. They thought I had some kind of virus, wiped the drive, and handed it back to me a day later.
Re:needs control group (Score:5, Interesting)
As to your question of "what kind of IT department
When the employee count got down to 25 I was laid off too on the premise that they didn't think they needed a full time IT department, the guy from the machine shop was going to babysit the network again. Thing that pisses me off if as long as he doesn't fuck with it will run smoothly until a hardware failure. I had set everything up to be just about idiot proof. Makes me think I did my job too well but its the only way I know how to do things.
Re:needs control group (Score:3, Interesting)
At a major corporation I used to worked for, the PR director used to purchase all the WetFeet [wetfeet.com] reports and FuckedCompanies.com alerts (in addition to the more traditional news clipping service related to our company). If anonymous people within your company are going to be publishing internal gossip/information about your company, and if your job is Public Relations, you might as well try to do your due diligence and try to be the first one to see what they're saying about you. I suspect that in the case of this Facebook information, I wouldn't be surprised if one of the corporate drones was ordered to download the data set in order to compare it to a list of existing employees (or at least, to a list of senior executives). It's the job of PR to not only protect the image of the company, but the image of its more well-known employees as well.
As to Intel, I'm not surprised they're on that list. Intel has been known to go through the trash of its own employees as a counter-intelligence precaution. Early mornings, they'll pick up the trash of their own employees and switch their trash can with an identical one so as not to attract the suspicion of the targets they have under surveillance. Same goes with the Church of Scientology, nobody should really be surprised that they're on there either.
Having an easy to download data set to compare to an existing data set is an attractive proposition for someone in management who doesn't know about the possibility of creating his own downloadable data set from the YahooSQL/YSQL tool or google labs free custom search engine tool.
Re:needs control group (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the best way to do it. It makes your job easier while you're there. As we've learned, there is no company loyalty. They expect us (the employees) to be loyal to the company, but when the time comes to save money, they aren't loyal to us.
Don't worry, I'm sure he took your nicely configured system, and managed to mangle it in horrendous ways.
The last real big place that I worked, I had everything running like clockwork. It looked like it was easy, because I did it so well. Within a month of them letting me go ungracefully, people started dropping me emails saying there were problems. They weren't related to the company, they just knew I ran everything. My only answer for them was "They fired me. I don't care. If they want me to fix it, I'd only go back with a huge raise and a bulletproof contract on my terms." They fixed problems. They made worse problems. Still, a few years later, I get the occasional email "their site is down.", which always gets the same response, "I don't care." :) The day they stopped paying me was the day I stopped caring. I do miss that job though. There's a certain feeling of accomplishment to have a well tuned machine running like clockwork.
The thing in both of our cases is, we know they cut us loose because someone else said they could do it for a fraction of our price. And for that, we know they got someone with a fraction of our ability.
Re:needs control group (Score:1, Interesting)