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.
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.
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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday September 02 2014, @02:54AM
I am not one of those guys who hunts for the Kim Kardashian sex tape or that sort of thing. I once ran IT for a major awards show and interacted with a whole bunch of celebrities in the after-party, and boy did it take the shine off that entire class of human. I found them intensely boring and narcissistic. Stands to reason, right?
But I did look these up out of curiosity to see if they were real, ie., "cloud" computing is generally unsafe and something like this could happen, but it could also have been faked as part of a viral marketing campaign for something. My impression of the videos and stills is that they are genuine, because they contain human moments I have witnessed many times with the women in my life. The shots where they're holding their breasts with a pouty face, because they think they're flawed somehow. The casual nudity of a lazy afternoon in bed. The shots of them trying on different bathing suits in a dressing room for their boyfriend's opinion. So ultimately I didn't find them titillating but human. As such, there's not a whole lot for any of them to be ashamed of, especially when you consider that they are exhibitionists by nature, being models and actresses.
Perhaps that demystification is the biggest offense, in their minds. They like to weave a mystique around themselves that has a direct connection to their paychecks. Being revealed as merely human, without makeup on, trying on a bikini that makes her tummy look saggy, might hurt their bottom line.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by gallondr00nk on Tuesday September 02 2014, @11:02AM
Absolutely right, this is demystification - human beings in being human shocker. It cuts through the mythos and aura of being a celebrity, but we base entire newspapers around that now, so it's nothing new.
There's an Ars article [arstechnica.com] that surprised me in just how preachy and puritanical it was. It takes the attitude that "well, you shouldn't take naked photos on your phone".
Why? Because cloud services (unless you use something like Tarsnap) are inherently flawed? Surely that's a criticism of the services themselves, not how people use them.
We expect celebrities to be perfect, and when they aren't it's sprawled across the gutter press for our own titillation or righteous indignation. The whole circus is pathetic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2014, @07:36PM
> Perhaps that demystification is the biggest offense, in their minds.
You wrote all that about how these photos prove that these woman are humans just like any other woman, but then your conclusion is some hardcore objectification rather than the obvious conclusion that, just like any other human, they don't like losing control of their private lives. That just like anyone else who were to have photos of them at their most intimate and unguarded shown to the rest of the world, they are unhappy with the simple fact that someone took something close and personal from them without their permission.
What is wrong with you?