Posted on 09/02/2014 11:46:41 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
It’s a late entry, and a sad one, but the trove of stolen celebrity nudes that hit Reddit like a bomb over the weekend may just qualify as the Internet story of the summer. After all, it’s the perfect Internet scandal: sex, Bitcoin, shadowy hackers and long-reigning Internet darling Jennifer Lawrence.
And yet, the ongoing incident — which the FBI has said it’s investigating — is far more than a tawdry tabloid story. It also raises a lot of profoundly important issues about technology, security, privacy and power in the digital age. There are practical implications, as well: The leak is inspiring many inhabitants of the “cloud” — a club that, in all likelihood, you belong to — to take a second look at their security settings. Let’s parse the key questions.
What happened, in a nutshell?
Here’s the TL;DR version: On Sunday, a large cache of nude celebrity photos were uploaded to the anarchic message-board site 4Chan. It’s not entirely clear who uploaded the photos, or how many people were involved, but the images seem to have come from a loosely affiliated network of undeniably creepy dudes.
From 4Chan, the photos spread to Reddit. From Reddit, they moved to the rest of the Internet. Celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton have since confirmed that some of the photos are genuine. Which has left law enforcement, security experts and site moderators pondering what, exactly, they should do.
Which celebrities got hacked?
The cache purportedly includes photos of several dozen female celebrities, including Lawrence, Upton, Kirsten Dunst, Avril Lavigne, Lea Michele, McKayla Maroney and Ariana Grande. There are also some lesser marquee names in the mix, such as Jessica Brown-Findlay (“Downton Abbey’s” Lady Sybil) and Hope Solo (the U.S. women’s soccer star).
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Narcissism. Most people are guilty of it to some point or another. But I think it's a job requirement for media types.
I work in IT and I have to hear “move it to the cloud” at least ten times a day. Fortunately at least half time now it’s meant as humor.
“Psychologists are going to have a field day over this stuff for the coming weeks.”
The women that take these pictures tend to be attention whores. Their only assets are their looks for the most part. They won the DNA lottery. They are accustomed to being an object of attention. The press takes their picture everywhere they go. They have been told over and over they are gorgeous. Men make fools of themselves around them.
However, when that stops, it’s Norma Desmond in “Hollywood Boulevard”. Your 15 minutes is up.
“Because people have been told that “the cloud” was super secure and data could never be lost or hacked etc. People were actually stupid enough to believe that.”
And, moreover, those photos were purportedly deleted by the owners long ago. The idea being, if we delete them, they will be gone, and we won’t have to worry about them.
Not so on iCloud, apparently. You delete them on your phone, and OOPS, a year from now you find them on 4chan and Reddit.
Maybe that $19B for WhatsApp makes sense after all.
Hard to say.
They probably were not even aware the photos were going to the cloud. Their phone was likely configured with iCloud backup for emergency recovery but they never actually chose to backup those (or any other) pictures.
I think it's both. Porn "actors" have made normally endowed men look and feel inadequate and, yes, I don't think penis pics are of much interest to women.
Do you by chance live someplace cold?
No offense but I'm not going to take anyone's word for that. ;-)
No.
I've been thinking along those lines, myself. Why do people take, and post, pictures of their naked ass?
Frankly,I'd shower in my shorts and T-shirt if it weren't so uncomfortable. Too many mirrors in my bathroom.
Quietly hoping that, somehow, they end up in the wrong hands and in the news.
I’ve dropped about twenty pounds this summer.
The last thing anyone want to see is my naked pictures.
My ass looks like a sharpei dog.
Yeah, as a taxpayer I am not exactly thrilled that the FBI is now spending my tax dollars to deal with this on behalf of a handful of fabulously wealthy celebrities who were stooooopid enough to take nekkid selfies and then store them in the cloud, believing they’d be as secure as their purse.
Or maybe just in the pool like George was.
“...the trove of stolen celebrity nudes...may just qualify as the Internet story of the summer...”
Really, she writes this on the day the second reporter gets his head chopped off?
In a country where high school students know more about the Kardashians than the US Constitution, she’s likely correct.
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