The talk has been covered by articles in Swedish and English-speaking press. Katie Collins wrote a great summary of the talk on Wired. There might be a few of you out there gleefully rubbing your hands about cheaters getting their come-uppance. On Reddit, a man from Saudi reached out for help :. I studied in America the last several years and used Ashley Madison during that time⦠I was single, but used it because I am gay; gay sex is punishable by death in my home country so I wanted to keep my hookups extremely discreet.
Howard Oakley wrote a wonderful piece explaining how the Ashley Madison leaks exposes the lack of modern legislation protecting our data. Long before the Internet was widely accessible. Howard also explains how tricky anonymisation can be in a web of endless datasets. It is common practice that, once personal identifiers are removed from databases such as the Electoral Register, legal constraints on their use are relaxed.
However it is extremely easy for an organisation to acquire other databases with some or all personal identifiers removed which they can merge with the information, say, from the Electoral Register, and process to enable identification of individuals. Events like this show the key problem with centralised datasets. In a long look at archetypes, outliers, and hacker culture, Brett Scott on Aeon has written about the gentrification of hacking.
Characterising themselves as cool hackers serves Silicon Valley well. The drive for individual empowerment is similar to the drive for entrepreneurship.
However it is also deceptive:. Brett looks at Hackathons and how they embody the hacker ethic employed to serve corporate needs. This adoption has made the term hacker hollow and affected. Hacking, in my world, is a route to escaping the shackles of the profit-fetish, not a route to profit.
