Well shucks, I was away for the weekend and missed The Fappening. Looks like the pics aren't so easy to find now. Although I agree that the celebrities have a right to their privacy, now that they have been leaked....I WANNA LOOK DAMMIT. Plus I have a serious girl crush on Bar so missed out on that either intensifying or being replaced.
Whoever wrote this is actually defending the counter to the point they are trying to make. It is about internet security and has little to do with naked photos. If I was famous and someone hacked into my iCloud stream right now, you know what they would find? Some pictures of food, a few photos of clouds, some funny thrift store clothing items, and a bunch of my dog doing stupid things. You know what they wouldn't find? Pictures of my cock or pictures of my current or ex GF's tits. Have I ever taken any of the above? Um, yeah. Lots actually. Would I ever let photos or documents get put into a web server if I wasn't prepared that they could possibly become compromised? Not likely. So really, it becomes less about whether there are naked pictures of you online and more about the security of your information and how you treat information you don't want others to see. One thing you don't see here is people who may have gotten their accounts hacked and had no information worth stealing. How many people have had their accounts hacked without even realizing it only for the hacker to find nothing worth stealing. Would we be talking about this if people spent a little more time protecting their data instead of just blindly trusting someone else with what you consider "A flagrant invasion of privacy in the most intimate of ways"? The actual content of what was leaked is immaterial to the story. It being nude photos just creates a feeling of outrage wrapped in a sexual ribbon.
By doing what, exactly? What else are they supposed to do? Granted - passwords and their reliability has already been discussed in this thread, but...what else does one do?
You don't have to back up your photos to the iCloud. You can shut that setting off. I'm not saying it's okay their stuff was hacked, but if I was a celebrity and taking those kind of pictures, I would check and double check that setting. Probably triple check it as well. Because with my luck, I'd either send them to my dad or post them on facebook.
Serious security concerns? Store your data on an encrypted external hard drive secured using two factor authentication (a password and a code from a token generator, ideally not one that's network connected like your phone). Never reuse that password anywhere else and make sure you keep track of crypto security bulletins relating to the encryption tool you used so if it's compromised you can update. Make sure you use a secure erasure tool to scrub your camera memory card. Never throw out a digital device without physically destroying it's hard drives or memory storage device. Never put secure data anywhere that will be backed up to the cloud. Never access that data from or save that data too any device that has an active network connection. Ensure that secure erasure tools are used before that device accesses a network again. When accessing your secure data, disconnect your reader device from wifi and any cabled networks. Ensure that you maintain a well updated antivirus solution and regularly update a usb based portable malware scanner. Run an antimalware and virus scan from both your active protection solution and the locked down USB key. Clear any local caches or stored copies of data using a secure erasure tool before reconnecting to the network. Honestly though? That kind of security protocol is insanely annoying. It's for military or major business ip - come to terms with the fact that people might see your tits and it's not that big a deal is the sensible advice for most people. For celebrities? That kind of protocol might be applicable if they really want to take photos that can't ever leak - but honestly, I'd say for most celebrities that the unfortunate reality is that any time you record that kind of thing, you're risking it leaking no matter what protocols you engage in. There's too many neckbeards who want to invade your privacy, and too many stay at home moms and internet dwellers who'll pay for access to your private life. Being a celebrity has a bunch of shitty consequences, that's why it pays so well and you get to do so much cool stuff.
Well the point of putting shit on the cloud is mainly so you can access them from anywhere, why would you really need to have naked pics accessed anywhere? "I really want to send that dick pick I took last week, but I'm not at my home computer?" It's pretty silly to put that stuff on the web. Protecting yourself is simply not putting it out in the "open." Yes the World Wide Web is the open, www = world wide web. Period. Putting something on the internet these days is akin to leaving it out in the middle of a park. Yes its wrong that dude stole your pile of money, but why did you leave your pile of money in the park in the first place? It'd be so much safer in your house.
I think 'don't put it on the cloud' is probably unrealistic advice for celebrities. Remember how Murdoch's press was hacking phones for news stories in the UK last year? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_Inter ... ng_scandal It's just naive at this point to assume that investigative journalism - the same pack of cunts who have moved away from reporting the news and onto generating clicks with headlines for a living, routinely involving outright slander against celebrities, are consistently and scrupulously not hacking anyone's phones just because someone got bitchslapped for it in the UK. That's like assuming that steroid use stopped in professional sport after Lance Armstrong got caught. Not putting it on the cloud closes a relatively small loophole. But honestly the very minimum advice is use a fucking camera that isn't connected to any kind of network, and give the pictures to your partner or whatever by physically handing them the memory card - never transfer it over any kind of network and don't save it to any device that's network connected.
Well for starters, as HFB said, understand how the device you are using works. Do your due diligence. If I know I'm going to be storing something valuable, regardless of what it is, I'm going to want to actually learn about the system I'm going to use to store it. You don't have to become an expert level user, but at least understand that if your phone is set up to sync all of your information to all your devices and also to a cloud server. If you don't want that to happen, learn how to turn it off. What happened in this case is, no one really gives a shit about how things work until they suddenly don't. Myself included. What you can't do after the fact is play the naive card and expect everyone to fix your stupidity. I had this happen to me about a year ago. I had finished doing a photo shoot and afterwards I was exhausted and decided to put off going through the normal backup routine I usually do. I took the camera out the next day thinking "what's the worst that could happen if I don't back this up before I go out" and unfortunately half-way through the day I started getting write errors to the memory card. I was well aware that memory cards have a fail rate and should have done my normal back up routine, but I felt there wasn't a need to do it because I had never had an issue before. I easily could have called up the card company and ranted to them about how shitty their product was and how they ruined this or that, but in reality, I was just as much to blame for not taking the precautions I should have with information I didn't want to lose. Instead, I learned a $100 lesson about why it's important to back up your data after a company thankfully recovered the photos off the card.
I fucking hate this... They are NOT normal people. By their very job description, they have become abnormal. As such, they don't just go out to the bar, they have extra physical security. They don't just pop out for dinner to a local restaurant, they do something discreetly or have it prearranged with their publicist, and it's arranged or they have protection. They have heightened security at their house. Why? Because they've made themselves targets as a result of their celebrity. Do people target your nude pics on your phone? Hell no. Why? Because you're normal. You might be fucking hot, but you're not famous. They can no longer, realistically, consider themselves to be that kind of normal, or enjoy the protection that kind of normality provides... they now have people who have an interest in invading their personal and online space, so they should know better, and protect against it. The fact that they don't understand how it works is no fucking excuse... they should know better and hire someone who CAN protect them, just like they take that big black security guard with them to the club. Welcome to being famous. If they don't have someone helping them with their online shit, just like the accountant who's handling their money, or their manager who's handling their career, then they are fucking idiots and I have no pity for them when shit like this happens. Should people do this to them? Fuck no. Will they? Fuck yes. Welcome to the real world, and either you deal with it accordingly, or you get virtually "raped" and shut the fuck up about it. You can't be making millions of dollars a year and have a professionally crafted image and then just bury your head in the sand and claim to be ignorant when something like this comes along. In the end, we have to protect ourselves against that one-in-a-million person in a crowd who's going to do something bad. 99/100 people won't fuck with your car, so why do you have car keys or lock your car? Because of that 1 in 100 person who WILL fuck with your shit. 9,999,999 people out of 10,000,000 won't try and blow up an airplane, and yet we put so much effort and money into stopping that 1/10,000,000 that it's not funny. I wish celebrities would grow up and realize that as ugly and unfair as it is, that's the world they are now living in, by their own choice, and they have to take the appropriate actions.
Interesting wrinkle in the cell phone security discussion. Realistically, how secure are mobile phones? We know the Government can read and listen to anything they want officially but it looks like there are other means of listening or seeing data as well.
The reality is nothing is secure. Not your phone, not your home, not your place of work. While I understand the necessity of security precautions, the reality is if you truly want security, you can't possess that which you want to remain completely secure. You can take all the precautions you want, if someone wants something of yours bad enough, there's a way to get at it. Always has been, always will be. Hence, why I tend to focus on the perpetrator rather than the victims. And make no mistake, celebrities or not, these people are victims. Someone broke into something THEY thought and fully intended to be secure, and exposed it to the world to see. What drives me nuts is we treat the internet so differently than the physical world. If someone had broken into the homes of these celebrities and taken polaroids of them while they were sleeping, people would be aghast. If they broke in and took polaroids out of a safe, they would be completely vilified. Yet, breaking into someone's virtual property? Oh, you should have seen this coming. Unfortunately, this argument has a huge consequence. And that consequence is the idea that 'if you can see something coming, no matter how fucked up or illegal, then you are at fault' in privacy terms. Ultimately, having had my car and my home broken into, you can live your life taking every precaution, knowing there is no such thing as completely safe, or you can focus on the people who commit these acts, damn them, and make doing so not worth it. Since I personally know that you will never be completely safe, I think the dialogue needs to focus on how we treat the ill gotten gains to make them no longer worth stealing. But hey, just my opinion, and there are a lot of sides to this argument.
The weird thing about this whole debate is how it's essentially an unpunishable crime. The photos of Maroney were taken when she was underage, so they are technically child pornography. I have mixed feelings about that term, because a teenage athlete nude and a 8 year old nude are in separate categories. However, I think it's unrealistic for the authorities to track down and punish the people who saw them. What about her culpability (or her photographers) for producing said images? The concept of an illegal image is weird, but one that gets seen by millions and they are guilty of a crime by "possessing" it, through viewing it on the internet is positively bizarre. The internet is getting better at policing itself, as seen by the fact that most major sites aren't keeping the photos up, but I wonder about the ramifications of this. Realistically, this just solidifies the idea that celebrity nudes are an atypical security issue in the internet marketplace. Any other sensitive information wouldn't be shared so casually, and it wouldn't be "valuable" to so many people. I can't think of anything else that appeals to so many people, but is secret and people wouldn't care if it was illegally obtained.
I actually read that with both their voices in my head saying it exactly like the foot massage scene.
I see your point. But, the argument like Nett was making . . . yes, if someone had broken into the homes of the celebrities and taken pictures off the wall while they were sleeping, people would be aghast. But, what if in the police report, the details included that the celebrity gave their security guard outside their gated house the night off, disabled the alarm and left the back door open? It's the same crime, but people would've said, that was really dumb. Still the perpetrator's fault, same crime, but really dumb. Now, where I live, I don't have a gate, and I could probably leave my back door wide open, with no repurcussions. But, if I suddenly became really famous, and stayed in the same house, you can bet I'm going to change my alarm code, and start closing the back door. Extra attention requires extra security, that's just part of the deal.
I'm not sure if we have already talked about this. I know it was mentioned earlier by someone that there might be some underage pictures. And now Mckayla Maroney's people are saying that she was underage in some of them. Isn't that blatant self incrimination? There have been cases where teenagers have been charged with possession of child porn when they had pictures of themselves on their phones. If they want to try and scare everyone out of seeing them, shouldn't they also be scared of just having them? Glass houses and all?
Yeah I thought the same thing. But I don't think the best way to fight a stupid law is to double-down on it and publicly ruin a girls entire life to make a point.
I just think its a fucking stupid and hypocritical point for her PR team to make. "Ooooooh you all are disgusting perverts for looking at that because she was a minor in the nude picture she took of herself! You better watch out you child molesters! But they aren't really her!" I mean Jesus. Own it or don't. But don't play the pervert card and then deny that the pictures really are authentic.
I understand and appreciate that celebrity changes things for them. It absolutely does. I don't know if the celebrities in question know or understand how their phone security and iCloud works. Or, how to change or update their settings so things don't go to different places automatically as backup. However, if they have an iCloud account, they also have passwords...easy to guess or not...I don't know. But we can assume the passwords (even weak ones) met the standard Apple set for creation of the account. I just don't believe their right to privacy changes just because of their job description. There's no special "Celebrity Edition" iPhone or iCloud. There's no super secret layer of encryption available to them because they're celebrities... It comes down to "*shrug* Ya don't want newd pics of yer boobies on the intertoobz, don't take newd pics of yer boobies..." and that's a bullshit argument because it lays some responsibility for those pictures being illegally obtained on the owners of the images. It isn't like these people were leaving their phones laying around unlocked. It's 100% that these photos were illegally obtained. How - when it's password protected and encrypted to the fullest extent the owner can possibly, reasonably take, can they have 'extra security'? What measures - on an iPhone, or iCloud, could they possibly take?