Ways We Talk About Hacked Stolen Photos SImilar to Discussions on Rape

I haven't, and will not, look at a single picture that has been stolen in this hacker attack. I think it's just as bad as buying a bicycle that you know is stolen. Just because a theft is committed on the internet doesn't make it any less damaging, or any less wrong.

And the comments I've been seeing around the internet that the celebrities "should have known better" than to take nude photos is just another symptom of blaming the victim and not the attacker who Broke The Law. Those people need to stop enabling that attitude. Wrong is wrong.

On Hacked Nude Photos and Stealing a Piece of the Soul
No means no, even in stolen photos.
By Luke O'Neil on September 1, 2014

There's a term for seizing access to a woman's sexuality without her permission when it takes place in the physical world, and yet most of the people who consume these types of images and trade them back and forth like young men might have done with prized baseball cards in a previous generation would scoff at the suggestion that there's any analogy to be made here to rape. Much like we've seen in nearly every other realm, however, our ethics here have not caught up to the technology. Very few of us would hide in the bushes outside of a woman's home in order to catch a glimpse of her getting changed, but how is that any different from this?

When you consider this is a generation who have divorced all sense of worth from intellectual property – music, movies and so on – it's easy to see why they might think of digital dissemination of a stolen image as a victimless crime. It's on the Internet, therefore it's mine for the taking. But unlike music, for example, in which the creator wanted people to have access to it in the first place, stolen photos like these were never meant to be seen.

The ways in which we talk about hacked photo scandals like this one are certainly very close to the ways we talk about rape.

Not that this makes me feel much safer, but...

Celebrity iCloud Accounts Compromised by Weak Passwords, Not iCloud Breach

So what if it wasn't weak passwords?

How I Hacked My Own iCloud Account, for Just $200
By Christina Warren

Over the course of the last few days, I've written a number of articles related to the celebrity photo thefts that surfaced Sunday. Many of those posts have focused on how safe — or unsafe — various cloud service providers are.

On Tuesday, while doing research into the origins of these thefts and the culture around them, I kept coming across references to Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker, a piece of software colloquially known as EPPB in various underground communities.

EPPB is a program that makes it possible for a user to download iCloud backups from Apple's iCloud servers onto a computer. Once there, the backups can be scoured for information including camera rolls, messages, email attachments and more.

In essence, the app reverse-engineers Apple's "restore iOS backup" functionality, only instead of downloading the backed up data to a physical device, it downloads it to the cloud.

The application, which costs between $79.99 and $400 depending on the version, can also be used to retrieve backups from Windows Live (now OneDrive) and to unlock access to BlackBerry, BlackBerry 10 and iOS backups.

Perusing through various image boards on 4Chan and AnonIB, it's clear that EPPB is the tool of choice for most individuals involved in the types of iCloud "rips" as they are known, that are believed to be at the center of the celebrity photo thefts.

EPPB even promises to let users access iCloud backups without a password. Yes, there are caveats, but that promise was intriguing.

Curious (and a bit concerned), I decided to figure out how this software works and try to theorize just how easy it would be for anyone to do their part to break into an iCloud account. My initial target was myself, though I soon found that it would be remarkably easy to use this type of software to access the iCloud backups of my colleagues, my spouse and many of my family members.

For just $200, and a little bit of luck, I was able to successfully crack my own iCloud password and use EPPB to download my entire iCloud backup from my iPhone. For $400, I could have successfully pulled in my iCloud data without a password and with less than 60 seconds of access to a Mac or Windows computer where I was logged into iCloud.

She goes into great detail on how she did this, if you want to read more (yes, I quoted quite a bit above, but it's still less than Fair Use calls for).

Since when is violating someone's privacy, whether they were smart about it or not, license to blame/condemn them for a crime being perpetrated against them? Yes, people need to be prudent and reduce risk, but what strikes me is that what I see is the majority of comments fall on the side of blaming the victims rather than the perpetrators/law-breakers. We talk about responsibility, but why don't we focus on the responsibility of the law-breaker to not make that choice in the first place? Who is more at fault? Are we really holding people accountable for their actions in the best possible way if, as a society, we focus on the victim "screwing up" than the a-hole taking advantage/breaking the law?

And no matter how "random" you think that string of characters that you think you just put together for a password is, chances are it's not really...(just fyi for your own password creations - make one up, then modify that in a way you normally wouldn't)
How Understanding Randomness Will Give You Mind-Reading Powers
Science writer William Poundstone gives practical advice on how to outwit just about anybody.
—By Indre Viskontas
| Fri Sep. 5, 2014

One night, Rhine met with Eugene Francis McDonald Jr., the CEO of the Zenith Radio Company. McDonald offered up his technology for what promised to be the largest and most impressive test of ESP yet: a nationwide experiment showing that telepathy is real.

"The idea was that they would have a bunch of people in a radio studio, and they would try to transmit their thoughts to the nationwide radio audience," explains science writer William Poundstone, author of the book Rock Breaks Scissors, on this week's Inquiring Minds podcast. "And then people at home could write down what they think they received and send that in, and scientists would look at it and decide if they had shown ESP or not."

The first few broadcasts were a dramatic success. Most listeners were correct in their guesses of what the "senders" in a radio station in Chicago were thinking.

But while it wasn't a coincidence, a young psychologist named Louis D. Goodfellow figured out that the experiment wasn't really measuring telepathy. Rather, it was demonstrating something far more interesting about human nature: our inability to behave randomly. In his own laboratory experiments, Goodfellow found that his subjects preferred certain types of sequences when they're trying to come up with random ones.

Sorry, I should've been a little more clear. I didn't necessarily mean about comments here blaming the victim, I mean the news stories from "out there" that I've been reading, and the comments from readers below them. And yes, I have seen a majority of comments blaming the victim and not even once mentioning the perpetrator(s).

We don't disagree that people need to reduce risk, and should take some measure of responsibility for that, my point is that I am seeing a disturbing trend more toward blaming the victim than the a-holes who broke the law. I just think that societal-level perspective is totally warped.