patrick.net

Who registers for porn?

Who, in the motherfuck, registers for porn!?

lostand confused says

Data of 800,000 registered porn users hacked

What, PatNet hacked?

BayArea says

Who, in the motherfuck, registers for porn!?

Good question. Isn't porn free?

I am also having trouble believing that 800,000 people actually pay for porn.

The dump of data includes email addresses, user names and passwords spelled out in plain text. Many firms typically digitally scramble or encrypt passwords to protect them even if they go astray.

Shitty programmers handling passwords incorrectly. Shitty reporters reporting false things.

No competent programmers stores passwords anywhere. Not in the database, not in a file system, not anywhere. And we don't store "encrypted passwords" or "scrambled passwords" either. We store salted hashes of passwords which allow us to confirm that you know the password even though we don't.

Here's a simplified version of how it works. You create a password "i love ponies" and send it to me. I run it through a formula to come up with the number 42389472390734902. Then I forget the password. When you log in again and give me your password, I run it through the same formula and either come up with the exact same number, in which case you proved who you are, or I come up with a different number in which case I say the username and password don't match. I do not have to know what your password is in order to confirm that you gave me the correct password.

Is it really too much to ask reporters to understand minor technical concepts before reporting stuff to readers? It's not that hard to understand.

Dan, Jazz, it's free on pornhub.com

zzyzzx says

I am also having trouble believing that 800,000 people actually pay for porn.

It was a goat porn site, so CIC probably had a few thousand of those accounts.

There goes Dan's account.