Ashley Madison leak: Is this newsworthy?

A few years ago, I read that Utah led the nation in porn sales per capita.

They don't do caffeine, though.

 

That funny underwear must stimulate their private parts.

 

It's just a fantasy.
It's not the real thing.

What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place than anyone had realized. This isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on their wives. It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots.

Those millions of Ashley Madison men were paying to hook up with women who appeared to have created profiles and then simply disappeared. Were they cobbled together by bots and bored admins, or just user debris? Whatever the answer, the more I examined those 5.5 million female profiles, the more obvious it became that none of them had ever talked to men on the site, or even used the site at all after creating a profile. ...

Ashley Madison employees did a pretty decent job making their millions of women’s accounts look alive. They left the data in these inactive accounts visible to men, showing nicknames, pictures, sexy comments. But when it came to data that was only visible on to company admins, they got sloppy. The women’s personal email addresses and IP addresses showed marked signs of fakery. And as for the women’s user activity, the fundamental sign of life online? Ashley Madison employees didn’t even bother faking that at all. ...

We’re left with data that suggests Ashley Madison is a site where tens of millions of men write mail, chat, and spend money for women who aren’t there.

Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site

 

I looked at the list for the state where I grew up, and until about a year-and-a-half-ago, lived and worked. Among those on there were:

1. The father of a high school basketball star I covered who is now in the NBA
2. The youth minister at a church near my old house who was chaplain for the high school football team (he went on Facebook and claimed he was hacked)
3. A local youth baseball coach who also did radio for the high school team, on which his son was a star player
4. The husband of a woman I went to high school with (she later went on Facebook and claimed he was doing it for work purposes)
5. The ex-husband of one of my lifelong friends.

 

And do you feel better about yourself for knowing all that?

 

Yes. It was the greatest moment of my life.

 

If I didn't know you real life, I would think you were serious.

 

A coach in our area has "unexpectedly" stepped down after his name was found on the list. Took about 5 minutes of checking to find that being on Ashley Madison might be the least of his worries - the old "inappropriate relationship with a player" phrase also got thrown into the mix. Lovely.

 

Such a witch hunt this has become.

 

Sundays will soon be a day of rest for many pastors:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ed...y-pastor-is-on-ashley-madison-list.html#bmb=1