Ashley Madison data reveals different things than we thought

[Undertoad]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor...n_most_of.html

...about two-thirds of the site’s male users—slightly more than 20 million men—had checked their messages at some point after creating their accounts. But only 1,492 women had looked at theirs.

That's 1000 active male accounts for every active female account!!

So, Protip: if you are going on dating sites, and you are a hetero man, only go on sites marketed at the women population you are targeting.

AM made its founders a lot of money, because it was easy to market (attention grabbing - shocking, even) and nobody at all would review it and tell you that it was ineffective. There's no Yelp for infidelity websites. (If you don't get a match on a matchmaking website, you probably think it's you.)

~

I downloaded the AM dump. I wanted to see what it really was, and whether I could do it. I didn't actually download it with the idea that I'd paw through it and find people I knew. It turned out to be in SQL dump format such that, if I wanted, I could easily push into a database and run queries against.

Because it was in this format, it would only take me about 10 minutes to set up a web site to allow everyone in the world to search the database. I understand a few of them have popped up.

But I know what you're asking. Nobody I looked for was in it. I only looked for a few addresses. And not yours.

[Griff]

close call.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I didn't know what it was when I heard Ashley Madison had a data breech, I just ho hum another one, there's been so many lately. Then the shit hit the fan on blogs and even the TV news, what it is, and why the fan.

[Clodfobble]

Have any public figures been vilified, other than Josh Duggar? I haven't seen any, but I also haven't been paying any attention. I ask not because I want the names, but because it seems to me that most people have silently agreed that this whole thing is overall in bad form.

[DanaC]

I heard on the radio there had been a few suicides apparently due to the data reveal.

[sexobon]

Any of them women?

[Undertoad]

The original writer found that what she was counting was not actually the number of women on the site. It turns out that's not possible to work out. Buuuut...

It’s a lot weirder than that. Those columns in the data don’t record human activity at all. They record the last time a bot—or “engager” in Ashley Madison’s internal parlance—emailed or chatted with a member of the site.

What that means is that we have absolutely no data recording human activity at all in the Ashley Madison database dump from Impact Team. All we can see is when fake humans contacted real ones. In other words, the dramatic discrepancy between men and women is entirely because Ashley Madison’s software developers trained their bots to talk almost exclusively to men.

So the original count is wrong - 1,492 is the number of times a bot tried to chat with a woman. 20 million is the number of times a bot tried to chat with a man. They found about 70,000 female bots trying to chat up men on the site; and, strangely, 43 male bots chatting up women.

The entire site is fake women talking to actual men.

Gizmodo update

[Griff]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

The entire site is fake women talking to actual men.

weirdness

[xoxoxoBruce]

Talking to a hot babe or a bot through your keyboard makes no difference, it's a fantasy anyway. As long as your ego is stroked, whap whap aaahhh.

[it]

I have to admit, I was extremely disappointed to not find anyone I know.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Ashley Madison’s user database, published by hackers earlier in the month, showed a spot just outside Murray Building in Central and Ruttonjee Hospital in Wan Chai to be the exact GPS locations of 89,936 users and 61,160 users respectively, according to a report in Apple Daily.

[Gravdigr]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

I only looked for a few addresses. And not yours.

Well, what are we? Chopped liver?