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Thread: Major Corporations Are Downloading Those 100 Million Facebook Profiles off BitTorrent

  1. #1
    Darth Sushi's Avatar Sushi Lord
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    Major Corporations Are Downloading Those 100 Million Facebook Profiles off BitTorrent
    Jul 29, 2010 - By Jason Chen - Source : Gizmodo

    "

    Remember that torrent yesterday that contained the personal information off of 100 million scraped Facebook profiles? I thought it was strange that the guy didn't sell this information, since many companies would be interested. Turns out they are interested.

    Reader Clint discovered that all you had to do is use something like Peer Block, which grabs the IPs of the other users also downloading the torrent and identifies which company or university or organization they belong to. You can check this yourself by hopping on the torrent and doing the same thing.

    Here are the major companies that are downloading the torrent. A couple caveats to these. Just because a company is on the list, doesn't mean that it's a sanctioned download by the company itself to grab the user information for some purpose. It could easily just be some dude at the company who wanted to download the torrent himself to check it out. Also, the IP addresses assigned to a company might fluctuate (they usually don't, much, unless major companies change their connection to the internet, so it should be mostly accurate).

    A.C. Nielsen
    Agilent Technologies
    Apple Computer
    AT&T - Possible Macrovision
    Baker & McKenzie
    BBC
    Bertelsmann Media
    Boeing
    Church of Scientology
    Cisco Systems
    Cox Enterprises
    Davis Polk & Wardwell
    Deutsche Telekom
    Disney
    Duracell
    Ernst & Young
    Fujitsu
    Goldman Sachs
    Halliburton
    HBO & Company
    Hilton Hospitality
    Hitachi
    HP
    IBM
    Intel
    Intuit
    Levi Strauss & Co.
    Lockheed-Martin Corp
    Lucasfilm
    Lucent
    Lucent Technologies
    Matsushita Electric Industrial Co
    Mcafee
    MetLife
    Mitsubishi
    Motorola
    Northrop Grumman
    Novell
    Nvidia
    O'Melveny & Myers
    Oracle Corp
    Pepsi Cola
    Procter and Gamble
    Random House
    Raytheon
    Road Runner RRWE
    Seagate
    Sega
    Siemens AG
    SONY CORPORATION
    Sprint
    Sun Microsystems
    Symantec
    The Hague
    Time Warner Telecom
    Turner Broadcasting system
    Ubisoft Entertainment
    Unisys
    United Nations
    Univision
    USPS
    Viacom
    Vodafone
    Wells Fargo
    Xerox PARC
    "

    Source: http://gizmodo.com/5599970/major-cor...off-bittorrent
    Last edited by Skiz; 07-30-2010 at 03:41 AM.

  2. News (Archive)   -   #2
    Nissouri's Avatar Poster
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    Guess you can start expecting spam and friend requests from a lot of these companies if you're one of the 100 million Fecesbook members who ended up on the list. I could see AC Neisen happy to anayze the data; Xerox PARC wanting to experiment with it; or Levi Strauss or P&G wanting to try and do marketing with it; but I'm not sure what Northrop Grumman or Halliburton need this type of consumerish data for. Plus a few of the names look like law firms... maybe they see the potential for some kind of juicy class-action lawsuit coming up!
    Last edited by Nissouri; 07-30-2010 at 03:57 AM.

  3. News (Archive)   -   #3
    I don't belong to facebook or twitter, but I have registered for sites like this and I wish it were not a necessity. Any site you sign up or register for will at the least have a good e-mail address on you, and if the site goes down, is maliciously hacked, or just gets sold into the hands of some moron, your data is at risk. In the early days of my torrenting I signed up to MegaNova, IsoHunt and MiniNova. I'm still visiting MiniNova but I wish I could close out my account and clear the info. With crap like this happening all over, any site worth a darn should offer that option if they really wish their friends and associates to have some safety in the registration process. Heck, when a new guy bought the rights to uTorrent I refused to use the newer versions for fear they were really tracking me so I still uise 1.6 to this day even though many have said its safe to update. The guy who took over uTorrent was a known MPAA RIAA friend or in the least had worked for them in some capacity previously.

  4. News (Archive)   -   #4
    So, really, can someone tell me what the big f'ing deal is on this? Someone wrote some code to gather all the names and associated urls for those names. Yes, I did download this because I wanted to see what, if any, information there was about me. The names on this this are publicly available via a search on the site, so what? It doesn't give any more info, like addresses, friends, interests, etc.
    Post something relevant that adds value, or keep yer trap shut like you was avoidin a sistaboy in prison.

  5. News (Archive)   -   #5
    I guess its more a "what if" thing. What if this guy is practicing, so later on he can hack a banks data base and get your account numbers, social security and passwords and empty your aaccount. No data stealing is completely innocent. Just your e-mail would allow me to spam the heck out of you and possibly trick you into opening a poisoned one and turn your PC into a bot slave to spam all your friends in your contacts folder, and just generally use your machine to do my dirty work. Don't be fooled, the world is loaded with unscrupulous characters who would sell their mother for a buck. And it gets worse every day as little tykes learn to code and make trojans and viruses as their criminal friends egg them on. I'd imagine there are several on this site right now.

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