Last month, hackers dumped the account database for online spouse-cheating website Ashley Madison. Incredible as it sounds, that website is built upon creating illicit connections between married adults, and not with their spouses.
I had no idea what Ashley Madison was before the hack attack. I know about sites and apps like Tinder, which are used for the most part to connect couples for some bonky-bonky. In fact, I find Tinder to be the ultimate in rude dating: Look at a picture and swipe left to dismiss or right to connect. How more shallow can you get?
Tinder has generated some interesting dialog on the Interwebs. The video below is titled Fat Girl Tinder Date, and it pretty much sums up my thoughts about the service.
The purpose behind Ashley Madison was more deliberate than Tinder. It specifically advertised to cheating spouses. On ad said, “Her face may belong to her husband, but her body will belong to you.”
Ick.
Bottom line: The web page appealed to scumbags who desired to cheat on their wives. Apparently bars and random hookups are too 20th century, so millions of bimboys risked digital exposure on the web by signing up for Ashley Madison’s service. And with the hack attack, they got what’s coming to them.
I don’t condone what the hackers did. Even when someone is doing something unethical, if it’s unethical to expose them, I wouldn’t do it. To me, such action cheapens the end result, although in this case most of the public ire is on the bastards who used the Ashley Madison service and not the dweebs who broke into the site.
That’s all the moral grandstanding I’m going to do.
What’s funny to me is some of the follow-up investigations into the Ashley Madison service. Apparently it wasn’t the massive Roman orgy people might have suspected. In fact, it was pretty much a rip-off.
According to Gizmodo, only a slim number of Ashley Madison subscribers identified as women, and few of them actively participated in the service.
Of the nearly 37 million subscribers, 31 million were men. Of the women, most accounts appear to be bogus. In fact, only a few thousand women ever checked their messages or participated in a chat. That begs the question of whether the service offered anything substantial to its subscribers — well, other than the rude shock of the hacking exposure.
I don’t pity the poor guy who’s now getting a divorce because his name was found in that database. Statistically speaking, he most likely never connected with anyone on the site. That doesn’t change the fact that he’s a scumbag who wanted to.
