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Adult Film Producer Unmasks Prolific 'John DOE' Torrent Pirate as Meta Executive
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- SV_BubbleTime 1mo agoI would think a Meta Executive who was into torrenting would know they likely had enough to lose to use something other than their home IP address.
- cgannett 1mo agoIt is so easy to get lulled into a false sense of security.
- shadowgovt 1mo agoI'd put good money on him thinking the odds of him getting caught were negligible.
- staticman2 1mo agoThis reminds me of a stand up comedy routine about people being bad at hiding their porn collections because their brain doesn't work right when they are horny.
- SV_BubbleTime 1mo agoThat’s harder hitting psychology in comedy than I’ve ever seen an example of the other way.
- stevenwoo 1mo agoOne might think to call them “Careless People”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
- chad_strategic 1mo agoRead the book, you will never trust facebook again. (if you did before)
- ahartmetz 1mo agoYou need to be a dumb fuck to trust them. Hey, Zuck's words, not mine.
- tyre 1mo agoEven better, they used a corporate network. The plaintiff is alleging that this was actually for work, since they were an executive at Reality Labs (home of Oculus.) They contend that the executive was testing VR porn as part of their job.
- flerchin 1mo agoOr his kid, spouse, or other household member...
- eli 1mo agoHours after they alerted Meta that similar activity was happening from their corporate network?
- loeg 1mo agoRead to the end. It isn't really clear how much causality can be inferred from the hours after thing.
- shadowgovt 1mo agoThat's a very dedicated kid. Backdoored dad's work computer, how diabolical. ;)
- tyre 1mo agoThere was huge traffic from Meta's corporate networks.
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- kodoman 1mo agoVery dumb but what if he claims he was only using to train an AI model, what was that ruling on copyright material being ok to training AI models on. Would this hold up in court or not?
- horsawlarway 1mo agoThey might be in the clear if they were solely downloading (might) but if he's also seeding then it's just copyright violations.
- hackingonempty 1mo agoDownloading it and making a copy on your disk are separate potentially infringing events from copying into memory and a model.
- gorbachev 1mo agoI don't know a single company where an executive would be downloading training data themselves. The only exception would be a very small startup, which isn't the case here, or all IT, admin and engineering staff told the company they aren't doing anything illegal for Zuckerberg. That's not going to happen at Meta either.
- ElProlactin 1mo ago> I don't know a single company where an executive would be downloading training data themselves. Maybe an ethically bankrupt company with a "move fast and break things" ethos looking for exactly the plausible deniability your comment hints at?
- 12_throw_away 1mo ago> the plausible deniability Well now I'm hoping this makes it to a courtroom, so that the plaintiffs can ask, on the court record and under penalty of perjury, exactly what he was using that quantity of pornography for. When, how often, and so on. (Not that there's anything wrong or shameful about that, in general, but it would confirm my biases about what executives do all day.)
- drewg123 1mo agoHowever, Strike 3 argues that this is no ordinary home pirate, using the timing of the downloads as evidence. On March 20, 2025, the porn producer’s general counsel first emailed Meta’s lawyers with forensic evidence of BitTorrent activity on the tech giant’s corporate IP addresses. “Just hours later, Strike 3 first recorded BitTorrent infringement on John Doe’s residential IP Address,” the motion reads. “This may suggest that Meta desired to shift infringing activity to this hidden residential IP Address in order to prevent further detection,” Seems like there are 2 different reads to that. (a) is like they say, and Meta was using porn for AI training or something else official. Or (b) that he was personally downloading porn either at the office or a corp VPN and was told to stop by their corp It folks..
- mc32 1mo agoIT is usually not the one doing the enforcement. They typically only do the monitoring and may report some activity above thresholds. Legal is usually the one initiating then engaging with HR to do enforcement.
- stevenwoo 1mo agoWhen I worked for office with about 40 employees in 2001 or so, the FBI came to our office to arrest a guy using I think Limewire over our high speed internet access to share music and videos. It may be so common these days they only crack down like that on really egregious abuse.
- bravoetch 1mo ago1 - How are people torrenting and not using a VPN? 2 - How are judges still allowing this business model of sharing files then trying to shake down people that download them?
- kodoman 1mo agoyeah everyone knows the losses they argue for are bullshit, I really think people should see how many times lawyers and other legal professionals give each other jobs by creating a world in which they are more and more needed. Of course legal professionals are always needed but so much of what is done today is just a kind of rent seeking.
- sanex 1mo agoCompany I work for got sued because someone filled out a form to get contacted, got a phone call as is expected after filling out said form, then sued because they're on the do not call list. Why did you fill out the form then?
- RealityVoid 1mo agoIn countries with lax enforcement VPN use is not really needed.
- tonyedgecombe 1mo agoIn the UK you get a stern letter from your ISP and that's it.
- ranger_danger 1mo agoHow do you know the IP in question was not the final hop of someone's VPN connection?
- nostrademons 1mo agoAre you confusing Tor with a VPN? With a VPN the IP is a commercial server run by the VPN provider, and there's usually just one hop (you run an encrypted connection between yourself and the VPN provider that all your traffic is routed over, then the VPN provider makes outgoing connections on your behalf). You're relying on the VPN provider's promise to not log customer connections, but if they are honest, all connections seem like they're coming from the VPN provider and aren't traceable beyond that. With Tor, you connect to a random Tor node (which may be another residential computer), which connects to a node in the middle, which connects to an exit node, which forwards your requests on to their final destination. All connections look like they come from the exit node, which might be someone's residential IP.
- WaitWaitWha 1mo agohow long are these videos? 2,973 of them (and not even the 20,000 count)? even at 15 minute clips that is like... five years?! watching non-stop. I am hard pressed to believe that this was for the exec. what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander I just wnat to know what bandwidth this exec has at his house. I want it.
- hackingonempty 1mo agoI doubt many consumers of these videos are watching them straight through like a normal movie.
- Hamuko 1mo agoDon't know how they're keeping up with the plot like that.
- hiccuphippo 1mo agoHoarders gonna hoard
- wvbdmp 1mo agoumm it’s called archiving, thank you very much.
- tonyedgecombe 1mo agoI've heard the same about pirated software, people who have downloaded thousands of programs. People are strange.
- well_ackshually 1mo agoA few decades back, someone I know had entire CD towers worth of burned CDs & DVDs of porn. Easily onto the thousand discs. This was mostly a hoarding thing. Hoarders gonna hoard.
- nostrademons 1mo agoIt said it was AT&T, which probably implies AT&T Fiber. Gigabit fiber.
- modeless 1mo agoPretty sure you could unredact this based on the length of the name in this font. People who redact things don't really think very hard.
- red-iron-pine 1mo agoi'm waiting for a name, then...
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- loeg 1mo agoBetween that and the tenure, yeah.
- pier25 1mo ago“I only broke the law to train AI your honor”
- mirekrusin 1mo agoSaid Muse in metallic voice.
- hackingonempty 1mo agoStrike 3, the studio involved, files more lawsuits in the USA than anyone else. I think that makes them the biggest Copyright Trolls of all time. They run their own BitTorrent monitoring operation.
- fn-mote 1mo agoThe company that owns the copyright should be allowed to enforce it. I don't see how that can be called trolling.
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- mullingitover 1mo agoMeta, the other company involved, engaged in industrial scale piracy in pursuit of training data[1]. Let me break out the world's tiniest violin for them. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-over-81-7tb-of-pirated-books-to-train-ai-authors-say/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...
- sureMan6 1mo agoThey downloaded pdfs (shock and horror) to create and publish the first open weights LLM Your ethics shouldn't be dictated by US copyright law
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- ceejayoz 1mo ago> Your ethics shouldn't be dictated by US copyright law If your ethics deem Meta ethical, they probably need recalibrating.
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- lisp2240 1mo ago[flagged]
- petesergeant 1mo agoWhat if the moon is secretly made of cheese?
- lisp2240 1mo agoYour comment is rude, obnoxious, and uncalled for.
- jaredhansen 1mo agoFar from it. "What if [inflammatory proposition presented without evidence]?" is not contributory to truth-seeking. As Hitchens' Razor puts it: "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." u/petesergeant was pointing that out to you, fairly gently if slightly obliquely.
- lisp2240 1mo agoI didn’t accuse anyone of anything. Does this site not have a policy against incivility?
- mirekrusin 1mo agoDidn't hear that on last earnings call, but if they'd mention it they'd probably say it's going to be face swap as it's way cheaper, no?
- lisp2240 1mo agoYour comment is rude and uncalled for.
- mirekrusin 1mo ago
- loeg 1mo agoThe idea that you'd get notified of infringing activity on corporate network and deliberately shift to residential without changing the activity is crazy. Like, it's hard to believe anyone is that dumb. > Meta also flags a contradiction in Strike 3’s theory that downloads were switched to the home connection hours after the March 2025 warning. Strike 3’s own complaint alleges that Meta’s “off-infra” activity started in 2018, and that downloads on corporate IP addresses continued long after the notice. Oh. The connection is maybe more tenuous than Strike 3 claims.
- mewse-hn 1mo ago> Oh. The connection is maybe more tenuous than Strike 3 claims. Yeah they seem to be following the time-honored legal strategy of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks
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- leni536 1mo agoI'm torn on this. While I can imagine Meta being morally corrupt enough to do all of this, I just can't imagine an exec taking on personal liability for the company.
- stewartadam 1mo agoWhen they start torrenting on residential IP addresses and bring the content to work to train their AI, they should be.
- paxys 1mo agoThat's a lot of ifs. Equally likely that the guy was just running a seedbox.
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- drooby 1mo agoI don't believe, but this feels a bit like: "Hey... we need to improve our porn detection AI... but we want to avoid paying for all that porn... is anyone open to taking on some personal liability for a nice bonus this year" I'm just saying... maybe...
- fckgw 1mo ago> As recently as August 25, Strike 3 says it recorded more than 150 daily downloads, from multi-language “Mega Packs” of TV shows, movies, software and books to what it describes as AI-generated pornography and VR adult films. That included nearly a dozen of its own titles. It sounds like this person/IP was just downloading a ton of different content, of which these VR videos were are part of. Doesn't that water down their complaint a bit? If they are trying to say they moved to a residential IP to specifically download VR content for training data, why are they also downloading unrelated eBook and other media? Seems like VR content made up a pretty small percentage of overall downloaded content.
- foolfoolz 1mo agobut they allege $446M in damage. not all 20,000 files were porn, but they also don’t say where that number comes from
- meindnoch 1mo agoMy hero.
- subarctic 1mo ago> arguing that a Reality Labs executive downloaded nearly 20,000 files at his home for work purposes, not for personal use So is it a Reality Labs executive or a Meta executive? Is the headline lying?
- jnwatson 1mo agoReality Labs is a division of Meta...
- Arcuru 1mo agohttps://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=162.192.7.34 https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=162.192.7.34
- kotaKat 1mo agoLots of GDP entries there. Uh. Like terabytes of it downloaded. I would quite like to think that GDP references... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GirlsDoPorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GirlsDoPorn - where "six people involved with the website were charged on counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud, and coercion". A little yikes on that card today. Dude was ripping hundreds of videos of assault and coerced rape pornography for training.
- paxys 1mo agoLet the man run a porn seedbox in peace
- Seattle3503 1mo agoI wonder if they were using the porn to train moderation filters.
- omegadynamics 1mo agohigh functioning
- treetalker 1mo agoJackie Treehorn knows which Lebowski you are, Lebowski. Jackie Treehorn wants to see the deadbeat Lebowski.
- negura 1mo agoNot a week goes by without Meta reconfirming it's the company of choice for scumbags.
- jnaina 1mo agoam surprised Meta doesn't know about usenet
- pmkary 1mo agoRemember that tech used to be great people making things? And just look how good we progressed, speculating about porn use...
- hashstring 1mo agoGetting paid meta exec money and not using a VPN for this, lol, good riddance.
- iamflimflam1 1mo agoSeems likely (to me) that he was probably using his company laptop and it was connected to the corp VPN most of the time.