I do so love Bill Donohue!

"The idea of two men getting married is the most bizarre idea in human history...The whole purpose of marriage is to have a family. It's not about making people happy. It's not about love."
—Catholic League president Bill Donohue

Of my married friends, the ones who are childless vastly outnumber those with children. I'd peg the numbers at four couples with children out of 15-20, and two of those marriages ended in divorce, so they're now broken homes. The reasons for no progeny vary from family history of schizophrenia to a dismal view of where the world is heading. My wife and I tried to have children but it didn't happen. So I guess according to Bill, we're not really married.

I'm also amused by his specific 'two men'. No mention of women. So I guess he's okay with IVF but not adoption?

Have you been pwned?

This web site is interesting for two reasons.

First, it is operated by a security researcher who downloads all of the major web site dumps that he can get his hands on and extracts email addresses and aggregates them here. You can enter your email address and it will tell you if your email appears in any dump that he's been able to get his hands on, including Ashley Madison.

Two of my regular email addresses have been compromised, both thanks to Adobe. I was happy to see that my PayPal email address has not been compromised. And you can register your email address with him and he'll tell you if it appears in a future dump.

Second, it's a Microsoft SQL Server Azure project and he blogs about how well Azure is working as a platform for him. Interesting if you're in to super geeky stuff.

https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Not to dwell on the Ashley Madison hack, but there are some interesting facets since their entire email server was compromised and published. First, there was email traffic that AM HACKED another online dating site! They pulled all of their subscribers and plugged them in to AM! So even if you didn't register with AM, it's possible that your email address appears there! It'll be interesting to see if the Feds investigate this off-shoot.

There was news that a man, on a spur of the moment thing, looked for his address in the AM dump. And he found it. He immediately went to his wife and said 'I did not do this!' His wife accepted what he said. They dug further and found that someone with a similar name (Smithe instead of Smith, like that) had registered. They had a vaguely similar description but vastly different physical builds. The man who was wronged is going after the other guy to get a certified statement saying that he created the AM account impersonating the first guy. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

AM is not the first adult dating site to be compromised, Adult Friend Finder was also hacked a couple of years ago. One thing that was found in both hacks is that an overwhelming majority, like 95%, of the accounts are men. And an overwhelming majority of accounts for women are fronts for people in the company, just to bring the numbers up.

I personally don't know anyone who's used these adult sites for a hook-up, but I did meet my wife on a (now defunct) dating site, so they do have a chance of working.


There are companies preying on people who registered at AM, and as shown above, they might not have registered there in the first place. There are reports of blackmail, people being solicited for class-action lawsuits, etc. So basically the vultures are circling. But the part that I find the most ridiculous is that people registered using GOVERNMENT AND MILITARY EMAIL ADDRESSES! One of the concerns of security clearance background checks is that you have not done things that could make you vulnerable to blackmail by a foreign power. GUESS WHAT. I have a feeling a lot of security clearances are going to be revoked in a few months, and a definite chance of people losing jobs over this. There have already been two reported suicides of people who were uncovered in the dump, but I don't know if they've established a positive link between being exposed and the suicide. It might just be a coincidence.