Reddit has closed the board that became a hub for the leaked nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and other celebrities.
The massive celebrity photo leak originated on image-sharing site 4chan, but a Reddit page called “r/thefappening” quickly became a heavily trafficked page where users were sharing links to the stolen pictures.Reddit CEO Yishan Wong, in a post entitled “Every Man is Responsible for His Own Soul” on the Reddit blog, explained the site’s reasoning.
[…]
Reddit systems administrator Jason Harvey, also known by his Reddit username alienth, gave further explanation of the decision, along with providing a rundown of what happened after the massive leak. “The situation we had in our hands was the following: These subreddits were of course the focal point for the sharing of these stolen photos,” Harvey wrote. “The images which were DMCAd were continually being reposted constantly on the subreddit. We would takedown images (thumbnails) in response to those DMCAs, but it quickly devolved into a game of whack-a-mole. We’d execute a takedown, someone would adjust, reupload, and then repeat. This same practice was occurring with the underage photos, requiring our constant intervention.” “It became obvious that we were either going to have to watch these subreddits constantly, or shut them down. We chose the latter. It’s obviously not going to solve the problem entirely, but it will at least mitigate the constant issues we were facing. This was an extreme circumstance, and we used the best judgement we could in response.”
What do SN denizens make of all this?
Related Stories
PapayaSF and AnonTechie write in with 2 stories which seem to be linked. The first is the leak of nude and personal photographs of celebrities, and the second is perhaps the flaw that allowed someone to access the photographs.
Stars Exposed in Massive Nude Photo Leak
Nude celebrities, bitcoins, and Apple: it's a story seemingly designed to stir up the entire internet. Scores of private photos of celebrities such as Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, Kirsten Dunst, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead have been leaked (allegedly from Apple's iCloud), and posted on 4chan in exchange for bitcoins. A list of 100+ names has appeared, but pictures have not yet appeared for many names on the list (including Kate Bosworth, Kim Kardashian, Rihanna, and Kaley Cuoco). Victoria Justice claims the photos of her are fake. Twitter accounts are being shut down. The story is still developing, so grab your popcorn.
This could be the Apple iCloud flaw that led to celebrity photos being leaked.
An alleged breach in Apple’s iCloud service may be to blame for countless leaks of private celebrity photos this week.
On Monday, a Python script emerged on Github (which we’re not linking to as there is evidence a fix by Apple is not fully rolled out) that appears to have allowed malicious users to ‘brute force’ a target account’s password on Apple’s iCloud, thanks to a vulnerability in the Find my iPhone service. Brute force attacks are where a malicious user uses a script to repeatedly guess passwords to attempt to discover the correct one.
The vulnerability allegedly discovered in the Find my iPhone service appears to have allowed attackers to use this method to guess passwords repeatedly without any sort of lockout or alert to the target. Once the password has been eventually matched, the attacker can then use it to access other iCloud functions freely.
TorrentFreak reports:
After doing without an element needed for safe harbor protection, 4chan has just introduced an official DMCA policy. The decision comes in the wake of the celebrity photo leak known as The Fappening and 4chan users' connections to it. In the meantime, the leaked image library has clocked a million torrent downloads.
While most US-based user-generated content websites should not entertain operating without safe harbor, the way 4chan is set up provides a unique scenario in respect of infringing content being posted by its users.
“Threads expire and are pruned by 4chan’s software at a relatively high rate. Since most boards are limited to eleven or sixteen pages, content is usually available for only a few hours or days before it is removed,” the site’s FAQ explains.
Hacker sentenced to prison for role in Jennifer Lawrence nude photo theft
A hacker was sentenced to eight months in prison on Wednesday for a scheme that exposed intimate photos of the actor Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities.
George Garofano, 26, was accused of illegally hacking the private Apple iCloud accounts of 240 people, including Hollywood stars as well as average internet users, allowing their nude photos and private information to be spread around the internet.
He was one of four people charged in the 2014 hacking scandal, in which private photos of Lawrence, Kate Upton, Kirsten Dunst and others were published online. Lawrence said at the time the invasion was equivalent to a sex crime, and called for tougher laws.
A federal judge at a US district court in Bridgeport, Connecticut, ordered Garofano to serve the prison term followed by three years of supervised release.
iCloud leaks of celebrity photos, aka "The Fappening".
Previously: Celebrity Nude Photographs - and Possibly The Flaw that Allowed Them to be Accessed
4chan Introduces DMCA Policy
Reddit Bans Page Where Celebrity Nude Photos were Shared
(Score: 5, Interesting) by keplr on Monday September 08 2014, @06:07AM
The problem reddit has (4chan too) is the DMCA. So the solution seems obvious. Move your servers to a free country and incorporate there instead of the USA. The Internet is global; you can locate your servers and your company anywhere in the world and still reach all your users. Pick a non-Five Eyes country. Iceland would probably do, or The Netherlands.
Problem solved. Direct all DMCA notices to your spam folder and get on with business.
I don't respond to ACs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 09 2014, @02:14AM
Unless I'm mistaken, the USA still ultimately controls all of them though they are all scattered across Planet Earth.
So if a website gets too far out of line and becomes an 'IP address of interest', it will be tracked down, monitored and dealt with as needed.
Surely, this is why the USA is reluctant/dragging its feet to handing over control of 'The Internet' to the United Nations.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by _NSAKEY on Monday September 08 2014, @06:48AM
They allow subreddits for things that are unquestionably illegal like The Silk Road, but ban the sharing of leaked naked pictures of famous people. However frustrated I and others sometimes get with SN's editors, none of you are as baffling to me as the people who run reddit (And that includes the gewg enablers).
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 08 2014, @07:08AM
Posting photos of people is a straight-forward copyright violation, but how is talking about the silk road illegal?
Surely you don't mean to say that people are conducting silk road transactions on reddit itself.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by _NSAKEY on Monday September 08 2014, @09:09AM
This AC [soylentnews.org] nailed it. reddit doesn't care unless the bad PR outweighs the clicks/revenue (Sounds like every other corporation, right?), and it would appear that reddit's CEO has delusions of running a mega-corporation straight out of a William Gibson novel, minus all of the evil. [redditblog.com] While I'm linking to stuff, might I recommend a lesson in history [gawker.com] about the jailbait subreddit? Or you could read about how reddit users broke one of the site's only hard rules (No posting personal info) so that they could ID an innocent as the Boston bomber. [businessinsider.com]
Sometimes I really miss "Web 1.0."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 08 2014, @12:07PM
Is gewg running reddit?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 08 2014, @07:44AM
You can find subreddits many years old for every illegal thing under the sun.
But they only get deleted if the rest of the world notices.
Murder porn? Yep. Hate speech? No problem. Underage girls? We got that. Fucking your dog? Yup there's a subreddit for that too.
Just don't point it out to the news channels and they'll stay.
(Score: 2) by TGV on Monday September 08 2014, @11:37AM
It's absurd. They're trying to use morals to justify their petty actions, probably because picking a moral issue seemingly puts you beyond reproach. Doesn't work when they still condone these other horrible groups. I've killed my account.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by metamonkey on Monday September 08 2014, @07:42PM
They weren't making a moral stand. They were banning the subs and accounts because they were posting illegal content and were being served DMCA take down notices on it, with which they must comply. If the other subs with "objectionable" content received similar legal troubles, they would be shut down, too.
That said, I am a little surprised at how butthurt redditors got over this issue. First, the reddit admins made the decisions they did to ban the things they did for legal, not moral reasons. It's illegal to distribute somebody else's copyrighted pictures, some of which qualify as CP. They must honor DMCA takedown notices, which they were receiving from the celebs' lawyers or else they lose safe harbor protection and open themselves up to being sued by said celebs' lawyers. This is a no-brainer.
Morally, it is wrong to break into somebody's account, to copy their private photos, to distribute them, posses, or look at them. Using the word "morally" is usually tricky because different people have different moral standards. That said, I don't know of any moral framework that permits such behavior. Golden rule? Nope. Any religious moral standard? Nope. Kant's categorical imperative? Nope. Not even utilitarianism because it doesn't maximize the good for all involved. There's basically no way to say that it's not wrong to distribute these pictures. Are there other questionable pictures on the site? Yes, but they're questionable, not illegal, and the owners or subjects of the photos are not complaining about them.
Yet, the reddit groupthink is completely butthurt over the reddit admins' refusal to let them use reddit as a platform to conduct illegal and immoral acts. And it's easy to see this is the predominate view on reddit. Just go to the threads the admins made about their decisions. All the top rated comments are opposed to the admins' stance. I posted in agreement with the admins and was downvoted into oblivion. And yet redditors pretend to be these enlightened liberals. They love wagging their fingers at racists or sexists or capitalists or hypocritical Christians or US foreign policy or the NSA scandals. Hell, they're opposed to the NSA's activities because of privacy concerns, yet they gleefully invade the privacy of the victims of these break-ins.
And you would think when told "no you can't do this," they might say "aww shucks" and be chagrined at being called out for their shiteous behavior, or at least shut their traps and slink away to trade the photos on bittorrent instead. But no, they're vocally butthurt, angry at the reddit admins, that their "free speech" is being infringed upon, because they're not free to invade someone else's privacy. What the fuck? It's like a peeping Tom, busted, screaming at the cops because "I have every right to hide in the bushes and peep through somebody else's windows!" No. Not only is it morally wrong to peep on somebody else, but it's illegal to be in their bushes! Worse, being pissed because the cops won't give you a boost so you can see better. There's no legal or moral justification for their behavior and they're angry at being called out about it! What the hell?!
I'm just kind of stunned. While I didn't think redditors would be paragons of virtue, I thought they at least had some common decency. Apparently not.
Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TGV on Monday September 08 2014, @08:59PM
It's not that publishing stolen pictures is morally justifiable, it's that there is a whole lot of much more objectionable content on reddit, and illegal content as well, against which no action is being taken. That's hypocrisy. I don't care about "free speech" as much as others. I think it's ok to shut up hatemongers and racists. But I also think that when you write this:
> The fact that these photos belonged to celebrities increased the interest in them by orders of magnitude, but that in no way means they were any less harmful or deplorable. If the same thing had happened to anyone you hold dear, it'd make you sick to your stomach with grief and anger.
and then try to shift the focus to "pictures of minors" and actually use the word "child pornography", you cannot simply ignore subreddits celebrating the raping of women, dead children, etc. Here's another gem from the same post, written by the sysadmin who had such a hard time:
> seeing that all of my efforts were due to a huge number of people scrambling to look at stolen private photos didn't sit well with me personally
So the subreddit that publishes nude photos, including minors, plundered from some obscure site does sit well with him personally? The one about beating women? Sexy abortions? Come on, it is a pathetic attempt to hide behind a thin veil of morality and a plea for pity. I did find out about these aberrations because of the responses to the "time to talk" post, at which point I decided I'd had enough.
I give reddit all the reason to remove those stolen pictures, but then they should also step in and remove the other objectionable and frequently illegal content as well. It's that, or be the moronic champion of free speech and only comply literally with the DMCA requests. But don't try to hide your cowardly decisions behind victimhood, morality and child pornography.
(Score: 2) by metamonkey on Tuesday September 09 2014, @04:45PM
But again, there's a difference between "immoral" and illegal. While in horrific taste, the "sexy abortions" pictures may not be illegal, and no lawyers are issuing take down notices. The celeb nudes were both illegal and drawing fire. So, they can ignore the subs about dead children or whatever because they're not illegal and there is no hue and cry to take them down. They cannot ignore the celeb nudes because laws.
Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.
(Score: 2) by TGV on Tuesday September 09 2014, @06:25PM
It's simple: those abortion pictures are illegal. It's pretty unlikely they got permission from the copyright owners and other people involved. Idem for the photo plunder. But all the reddit admins had to do to follow the law, is to comply with the DMCA notices: take down thumbnails and links. There's no need to say that they felt bad about it and make a fuzz out of child pornography, where there most likely wasn't.
(Score: 2) by metamonkey on Tuesday September 09 2014, @07:52PM
But you don't know those abortion pictures are illegal. And copyright doesn't really work like that. You have to claim copyright infringement for there to be action. How is any service that lets you post pictures supposed to verify the copyright status of every image before they let you post? If the copyright holders of the abortion images want to make a claim, they are free to do so. Otherwise, reddit is under no obligation to act.
I agree that they should have ignored the moral tut-tutting. With the kind of content you mentioned, they don't really have a leg to stand on. They should have just kept it about the legal issues. And it would fit in with the timeline. "At first we just deleted the content as the notices came in. When it became obvious the posters wouldn't stop, we banned the subreddits."
Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday September 08 2014, @12:14PM
They missed the wetriffs train, though
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday September 08 2014, @05:41PM
"Underage girls?"
Where? Not because I wanna find that genre, but because claims that they exist seem to pretty much be made up or its pure sensationalism (technically posting official biography pics of miss teen usa contestents or album art from teen "musicians" is posting pix of underage girls, but aside from copyright violations its hard to see a practical problem here other than sensationalism?)
I read a lot of reddits for the, uh, interviews, and they're pretty harsh about this individual topic, to the point that its not an issue.
Some of the mods are downright draconian. Post a pic of an amateur woman who later became a model to /r/realgirls, even if she wasn't a pro model at the time of the pic, and they will hunt it down and tag the post and ban the poster. Holy cow! Some mods are really harsh and really fast and maybe a little overboard.
And god help you if you're downright trolling by posting the wrong body parts to the wrong subreddits. Even just getting sizes wrong WRT curvy or petite is a fast and effective way to experience the banhammer.
It is highly curated content, despite endless attempts at claiming otherwise.
Given the high curation, and some of those women celebrities not being very attractive compared to the women on /r/gonewild and other subreddits, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the pix are getting censored out because they're just not hot, if you don't have some previous relationship of having seen that chick in concert on in a movie, she would never make it to the front page of GW or whatever other reddit. Maybe not /r/butterface material, but... So since the only thing that makes the pix interesting is that they're owned by a celebrity who's pissed off about it, I'm not seeing much of a loss. Ugly chick don't want free publicity, we can arrange that... Now if they banned some amateurs like thediggitydank... or ginger... whatever their exact full names are, that would be a loss to humanity as they are something like the Platonic ideal form of the goddess Venus brought to life on the earth or whatever. Or at least whoever does their photoshopping is a genius level artist. The celebrity chicks are kind of "eh" in comparison, sure they're solid 8/10 or 9/10 but in competition with a flood of 10/10 and all kinds of legal problems with the celebrities, eh, who cares, zap the celebrities, they just don't look that hot. Here's some topless chick who can lipsync on stage and teens like her music which means it probably sucks, but she's only a 8/10 at best, well whatever, bye bye no huge loss. Times a hundred pix or so.
I mean if the pix were of 10/10 women would it be worth some effort to keep them up with all the other 10/10 women pixs? Maybe. But they're not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 08 2014, @07:30PM
A few years Anderson Cooper had a big thing where he exposed a bunch of the underaged girls subreddits. It took a while, but after enough media attention, Reddit bowed to them and removed a few of them. News is definitely there if you look, which you obviously didn't. Like, this wasn't coming from a little blog somewhere, but a national news anchor.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday September 08 2014, @08:05PM
"A few years Anderson Cooper had a big thing"
Oh I see, thanks for that data point, that would have been before my time on Reddit, so I might have to correct my remarks with a prefix of something like "After 2011, ...". I believe based on lots of observation that that my comments are 100% on the mark for "modern reddit" as of today. I can have no comment about what went on in like '06 on reddit.
I'm not a big legacy TV network watcher, so it could have been last year, I wouldn't know.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday September 08 2014, @07:46PM
Sounds like some science desperately in need of peer review.... *cough* *cough*
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday September 08 2014, @08:16PM
"Sounds like some science desperately in need of peer review.... *cough* *cough*"
What can I say, I'm a slave to the statistical analysis equations on :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_uncertainty [wikipedia.org]
where extensive repeated observation and quantification is required to reduce the standard deviation of a result to acceptably low values.
Oh the suffering I endure for Science! And yet bravely I go forth once again gathering another set of data!
(Score: 2) by TGV on Monday September 08 2014, @09:03PM
Are you seriously saying that it's ok because they were ugly anyway?
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Monday September 08 2014, @09:59PM
I wrote an overly verbose multi paragraph essay in response, but brevity being the soul of wit, I'll condense it to some of the alternative rationalizations, with all due respect to the applicable rationalizers, based on my apparently being the only reddit user here on SN who looks at "those kind of subreddits", leads me to laughter.
There is some truth in my parody. Some of the subreddit mods are hyper aggressive, and the only thing that could lead the imperial corporate overlords to be so stupid as to think that censoring one subreddit will keep the pixs out of the other one zillion "pr0n-ish" subreddits is, yes, as I claim, the "celebrities" are not as hot as the local talent in /r/GW or /r/blonde or many other subreddits so the hyper aggressive mods plus natural selection against the superior locals will quite easily keep the celebrity pixs out. Or even shorter, yes, I'm claiming its OK because they were ugly anyway. I saw the pixs on 4chan the night they came out and they are not going to beat the local talent in votes. Celebrity isn't quite what it used to be, and having an army of teenage girls watch you lipsync and wiggle on MTV doesn't guarantee as many votes as you'd think in the pr0n subreddits where I don't think teenage girls are demographically relevant as subscribers.
I don't think people that don't use reddit really understand that banning one subreddit doesn't magically ban the topic from the site, its not like banning a hash tag on twitter, at least from what I understand of hash tags. And another topic I don't think non-redditors understand that the mods in some of the pr0n subreddits are almost ADD or hyperactive aggressive, I have no idea why the guy in charge of /r/realgirls can't simply be placed in charge of the fappening reddit as he seems quite ... energetic when it comes to banning the "wrong" content (rest assured its real"girls" but he's quite enthusiastic about making sure its girls as in plural women not girls as in kids). And another thing I don't think non-redditors understand is this isn't the first time a pix of a boob has been posted on reddit, or even a celebrity one, believe it or not, and the existing posters are of a tier of physical beauty somewhat beyond these celebrities, which is highly comical to watch.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by zafiro17 on Monday September 08 2014, @12:51PM
Face it - Reddit is no longer a community site. When it got bought out by Conde Nast they became instantaneously subject to a team of corporate lawyers. That's the way buy-outs work! And said lawyers have to worry about things like brand impact, lawsuits by movie stars with even better/more influential lawyers, and the like.
Reddit is going to have to keep to a relatively straighter and narrower path these days. They've got corporate overlords - it's just part of the territory.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2) by TGV on Monday September 08 2014, @02:22PM
Then they should just say so: "We're in it for the money. You can do whatever you like, but when the costs threaten to overrun the revenues, we step in."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by WillR on Monday September 08 2014, @02:53PM
The only principle at work here is that people who can pay a lawyer to spend a solid week watching reddit and 4chan and sending takedowns of their nude photos get a different sort of "justice" than Jane Blow whose ex-boyfriend dropped her photos in /r/revengepr0n.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MrGuy on Monday September 08 2014, @03:08PM
I see a lot of people crying "corporate overlords are evil!" and "OMG you're inconsistent you hypocrites!" at Reddit's actions. Both of which are certainly at least reasonably true - Reddit DOES have more corporate management than it used to, and there are certainly other sub-reddits that did NOT get banned.
But that said, let's assume Reddit was still independent and wanted to be "fair" (for some definition) to all sub-reddits. What would you have them do instead? Leave this sub-reddit in place? Close all objectionable sub-reddits? Something else?
Reddit is an example of a site where most content is user generated. Left to their own devices, users will sometimes post items that are objectionable, immoral, or even illegal. What do you do when your users generate problematic content?
Whatever you think of the DMCA, it's the law in the US, and takedown requests need to be processed in accordance with the law. When one site is generating hundreds of requests an hour, all of which need to be reviewed and processed, should it be Reddit's job to just "suck it up and deal - that's your job!" and continue to deal with the requests piecemeal, no matter how long it goes on or however many requests they get? Should they "stick it to the man!" and refuse to honor DMCA requests (even in a case where there's really no legitimate fair use or other "safe harbor" question at play?
Would you rather have them IP ban specific users instead of closing the sub-reddit (even though IP-bans almost always have collateral damage)?
For those claiming hypocracy, would you rather have them close all potentially objectionable sub-reddits?
What would you want Soylent News to do if (for example) a thread here became well known as a place for "post your CD keys for cracked software here!"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 08 2014, @03:58PM
What would you have them do instead?
Move the servers to a country not subject to draconian copyright laws.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 08 2014, @05:36PM
> Move the servers to a country not subject to draconian copyright laws.
You aren't thinking very far ahead.
Countries like that tend have really draconion laws about much of the other stuff that is on reddit.
It isn't like you can to somewhere modern and western like the netherlands - they chased out the piratebay just for magnet links.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday September 08 2014, @05:56PM
"What would you want Soylent News to do if (for example) a thread here became well known as a place for"
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
That other site had to deal with this about six years ago maybe?
If you forget what that is, its whats known however inaccurately as an "illegal number" and the acronym AACS should jog your memory.
Sooner or later someone will post something like this, some other key, you know. May as well start thinking now.
(Score: 1) by khedoros on Monday September 08 2014, @05:46PM
That site has thousands of communities with varying degrees of separation. If one starts looking like it will cause the corporation legal problems, it makes sense to shut it down, rather than risk it becoming a bigger problem to the more-legal (or more quietly illegal) communities that are on the site.