Dem
47
GOP
53
We actually have another "Unforced Errors" piece, on Jack Smith, in addition to the fourth (and final?) Minneapolis item. However, we are once again running pretty long, and this has been a pretty dense, and somewhat depressing, posting. So, we're going to hold the Smith item to Friday, and finish with something a little more dessert-y.
Some readers, perhaps many readers, will recall the fiasco with the dating site Ashley Madison. The premise of that site was, and is, that married men can connect with women for some no-strings-attached adulterous sex. In 2015, a massive data breach revealed that, in fact, there were something like a dozen actual women on the site, as compared to something like 100,000 men, and that the vast majority of the men were therefore trying to put the moves on bots pretending to be women. The identities of most of the male users were also revealed, which meant that spouses, pastors, co-workers, etc. often found out that their husband/congregant/colleague was, at very least, adultery-curious. Remarkably, Ashley Madison is still online, and claims to have 60 million members. Maybe that means they're up to TWO dozen actual women.
And that brings us to a site that, as remarkable as this may sound, is considerably more reprehensible than Ashley Madison. We speak of WhiteDate and its two affiliate sites, WhiteChild and WhiteDeal. You can probably figure out what kind of relationships these sites try to facilitate, but just in case, their stated purpose is to connect white supremacist men with "trad-wives." The sites' tagline is "Europids seeking tribal love," which actually sounds more like a Star Trek episode than a Nazi dating site.
Because Ashley Madison is a real company with real money, that hack took some real skill. WhiteDate, on the other hand, was cracked live, on stage, by German hacker Martha Root. She explained that the site's security settings were so amateurish, "they would make even your grandma's AOL account blush." Ultimately, Root and several helpers managed to get 100 GB of data and many thousands of user profiles, including personal information.
Like Ashley Madison, it turns out that the traffic on the site was almost entirely male, and was basically wannabe Klansmen and Nazis talking to bots pretending to be female bigots. It's actually kind of remarkable that anyone thought this arrangement could work. For a woman to join the site, she would presumably have to be:
That seems like a somewhat odd combination, and apparently it was. The male-to-female ratio was a little better than Ashley Madison, apparently, but not a lot better, such that nearly all of the incels remained incels. And after all, on Ashley Madison there was a big upside for the women: money, expensive gifts, etc. Unlike Ashley Madison, the hack appears to have been a fatal blow, as the site is now offline. So if any ladies out there were looking for the Klansman of their dreams, they're out of luck. If they'd moved quickly, they might have moved on to TrumpSingles, TrumpDating, DonaldDaters, or The Right Stuff, but all of those MAGA-centered sites have shut down, either because they didn't attract many users, or because their apps were booted from all the mainstream app stores.
Several politicians, including one woman, are in hot water, because they had profiles on the site. However, those folks are all in the U.K., where those kinds of attitudes are not acceptable to voters. In the U.S., well, the fact that Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) still has a job tells you all you need to know.
Still, several thousand narrow-minded jerks got hoisted by their petards—or, at least, their robes. And that is pretty terrific. (Z)