Even 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.
This 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.
I'd bet that executive's VR headset is tied to a facebook account and there are logs of everything that was watched and when along with data collected from the device and the environment it was in. The discovery from this lawsuit could be very telling.
However, 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..
When 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.
Around that same time my own brother was working at the second largest record label in the world and their own servers were hacked and serving about 1/3 of global warez downloads.
Law enforcement didn’t get involved and nobody did shit about it.
Not even the last time that company was massively hacked. ;)
The raid being due solely to music copyright infringement is really the most likely situation. There's no need to imply it was anything else.
For example, in 2009 I worked at a record store that got raided due to such claims. The RIAA's informant claimed he had seen people selling hidden bootlegs, which absolutely wasn't happening, and that was all they needed to have cops raid the store, arrest several people and cart off boxes of not-bootlegged, sold-by-major-CD-distributors CDs. Court dates followed and the case was eventually dismissed (or settled due to being more convenient than continuing the case? I can't remember), but it still took time, money, and lawyers. And this was in 2009, when the recording industry wield less power than in 2001.
(I was running late for work that day or else I would have ended up arrested too, since I was one of the managers scheduled then. Thank god I was running late!)
I don’t know, rolled into work at 10 and only saw they were giving him the perp walk to the car and I only heard about the details from coworkers, wasn’t close to him.
The RIAA still has insane amounts of power both political and actual. They got away with successfully suing an ISP for billions over of what their customers downloaded and only lost on appeal. They've shaken down several other ISPs for settlement money to avoid going to court. Lately they've also been going after stream rippers, AI start ups, and archive.org
Cox v. Sony Music went all the way to the Supreme Court. The lawsuit started in a Virginia US District Court in 2018 and the Supreme Court opinion was in 2026. [1][2]
This is crazy. Worked at a national ISP/telecom and one of the directors openly had a seedbox and was torrenting massive amount of things. Chalked it up as the poors being held to different standards as this person had a close relationship with one of the executives.
I mean basically that. If you hit a corporate IP, unless they have flow level logging or you have very extensive timestamps, then the game ends, company says they've enacted new training or controls, but they can't identify a specific person and it's not their fault.
Essentially - this is not a suggestion.
Residential ip's map to a specific person, and it's a lot harder for them to deflect and say I'm not responsible for my own Internet connection
Since when does every household member have their own residential IP?
Even in single households that's not true (friends visiting, on-and-off partner, one night stands, helping the neighbor out cause their wifi is broken, ...)
And I don't know the logging + data retention requirements for CGNAT.
Most devices should be using temporary dynamic IPv6 addresses, for this exact reason. I believe this is the default on most Linux distributions, not sure about others.
I felt quite let down when I realised Fedora which bills itself as "free & private" didn't use temporary addresses by default and I had to go hunting for configuration files to enable it as it's not exposed in the UI either.
From the ISPs perspective, companies are still just as responsible for whatever takes place over their connection. From the law's perspective, the person responsible is whoever a jury can be convinced did it.
In cases where the company wifi is open or places like hotels the person who did it could be long gone. Unsecured residential wifi connections aren't much of a thing anymore, but I've seen a lot of people lending out their residential connection when they airbnb their vacation homes to strangers.
I doubt executives even go through the typical employee interview hazing. It's more vibes and "do you know the right people or go to the right prestigious school?"
Executive (and upper management) hiring is much more about owning and using risk, getting the management unit (your part of the org) all aligned and singing the same tune, and for executives showing that you've done this successfully across distinct business units (eg sales and engineering).
There's then a much more serious alignment pass.
Relationships can and do pre-vouch for big pieces of this such as alignment - if you've worked with someone for a decade, you are probably mission aligned.
man, that's grand, especially the last paragraph. I definitely should be less modest with my resume :)
"Stat reported that in 2017, Richard Graydon self-published a book titled The Genetic Risks of Cancer: The Effects of DNA, Genomics and Inheritance on Aging and Survival.” The book described Graydon as an oncologist who had served as a chief medical officer in the biotech and drug development industry. It had no reviews on Amazon.
In October 2022, Atossa Therapeutics, a Seattle-based biotech, announced it had hired Richard Graydon as its interim chief medical officer.
“We are privileged to welcome Richard to Atossa, where his deep experience in CAR-T cell therapy fits well with our current strategic direction as we explore our opportunities in cell therapy,” Steven Quay, Atossa’s CEO, said in a statement at the time.
In March, Immix announced hiring Graydon, calling him a “board-certified hematologist-oncologist with over 20 years of experience in clinical development, most recently at Merck & Co. and Johnson & Johnson, where he led new and supplemental new drug applications and biologics license applications for 7 approved drugs including Darzalex, Carvykti, Keytruda, and Imbruvica.” Stat noted that these are some of the bestselling cancer medicines in the world."
is "executive" a well defined term for american corporate law? like "a person who can allocate funds from the master bank account without approval" or something like that?
Not really, It's just another term for upper management. It's just shorthand for any employee whose title begins with "Chief" or has "Executive" in it (among others like Chairman, President, etc).
Usually, people who can make large decisions for the business without approval from higher-level employees.
Today's Torrentfreak article is about "an executive" and references the article you have linked thus:
This is not the first time a Reality Labs employee has surfaced in the case. Earlier this summer, Meta confirmed that a former data engineer at the division was behind a Comcast connection linked to 97 films.
Close reading of both allows for a not spelled out possibility ... that "the data engineer" is also the son of the first mentioned "an executive".
Or not - still much is under the fog of reporting ongoing partial disclosures.
Does anyone honestly believe that Zuck doesn't have his own history with filesharing? Any computer nerd from that time would have deep knowledge of filesharing.
I've lived in and around Cambridge for a very long time now. I've met a lot of Cambridge undergrads and graduates. Let me tell you: they are a mixed bag.
Don't misunderstand me: there are some very smart people at Cambridge University. Very smart indeed. And I think if you took any cohort from Cambridge Uni versus a similar cohort from another university you'd certainly find that, against most universities, the Cambridge cohort would be smarter on average. In fact the place is genuinely awash with very smart people literally everywhere.
But that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of people that went to Cambridge who clearly found a way to blag their way through the interview process that may not have been particularly closely correlated with their intellect. The same will be true of Meta, Google, etc. I swear, the interview processes at these companies are probably more of a sop to the egos of company leadership and people who already work there than they are any more effective at filtering down to good talent than less byzantine and overwrought hiring processes.
I went to a similar school. It depended on major. If it was a major that the school was known for, say the top ranked CS school...then it was 100% that a grad was someone who was noticeably much, much smarter than most people. If they were at the same school but in a much less well recognized major (at my school...let's say history), then they were much closer to the average. If you are seeing students at Cambridge who are in prestige majors but without obvious skills...something else is happening and it isn't good. Otherwise, you are probably just seeing the differences between different majors.
> ...you need average folks who are going to STFU and get the unfun, unsexy tasks done.
This task might have been the sexiest work available at Meta, and there's nothing average about a guy that can single-handedly "process" 2,973 porn vids.
20 years ago, this wasn't the case (at least in tech in SV). If you are seeing this today, its because of something (or somethings) specific. Could be the general increase in size of the companies or industry, a problem with recruiting or a problem with the universities that feed into that industry. Maybe a combination of those things. But 20 years ago, you could tell who worked in tech and who didn't.
I still hold the line on interviewing. Maybe some don’t. I am sure it is true. My team us too small with too much responsibility to tolerate mediocrity to any real extent
Just tell yourself that they rejected you because they thought you had too strong a moral compass and you wouldn't click with the company's overall lack of ethics
From TFA: "Strike 3 suggests the downloads are consistent with work to make the headset compatible with adult films"
> The company logged all BitTorrent activity detected from the executive’s connection, which was nearly 20,000 files.
> This includes VR adult titles made for Meta’s Quest headset. Strike 3 suggests the downloads are consistent with work to make the headset compatible with adult films.
> 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.
Why was torrenting needed anyway? Meta could’ve easily reached out to adult media providers to work on VR headset compatibility under an NDA. Or hired a third party contractor to do it.
It’s much more expensive. You as a consumer can buy a movie for $5 with a DVD on sale. But tos generally don’t include commercial activities. If you reach out to the film studio to get their permission, they can charge you anywhere from $10K to $1M+ for same thing.
And I’m sure meta paid for some specific content but they generally wouldn’t want to set a precedent where they paid everyone.
Meta wants to make their service compatible with meta vr headsets. They don’t require ongoing access to the content. The media vendor would also benefit from this, so an agreement is in the interest of both parties.
> But tos generally don’t include commercial activities
I can't think of any ToS that prohibit a device manufacturer from testing whether the content plays on their device. That's literally why anyone buys content - to play it on their device.
How would they enforce those anyway? And how would being sued for that be worse than being sued for torrenting?
Seems plausible. The material contains many hours of highly detailed human interaction plus I don’t expect Meta would have moral objections given their track record.
I'm not a lawyer, but in my view copyright violations center around distribution, not necessarily the method by which a work is obtained
e.g. if someone is reciting a poem they wrote in a public park, and I make a recording of that recitation, I have not violated their copyright in doing so, however I might violate their copyright by reconstructing that poem and then distributing it
Which is why torrenting is the dumbest way to do this, since every downloader is also an uploader. That is what gets torrenters locked up. It is possible to leach only, but its not the default mode, and if this guy was broadcasting his IP address, then he was seeding... distributing.
As in all cases it depends on jurisdiction. For example where I am performers have a right to not be recorded so you may in fact not make such recording, you didn’t not necessarily violate copyright but you violated related rights.
And likewise if you distribute any sort of copy of the recording you made you are violating at least one if not more copyrights.
where I live, anything in public view is allowed to be filmed/recorded, which is how the news can record things on the street without getting a release from those that they filmed, and they certainly distribute those recordings
I'm not a fan of joking about those efforts. The people doing that work to catch predators and prevent their evil from reaching the general public are heroes.
The potential output. You train on movies and animation and you get a model that can
- produce your own movies/animation
- identity movies/animation from context
- identify actors/characters and cross-reference them in other works
You apply these parallels with porn, a more anonymous and intimate setting, and you can see how the kinds of results can be more morally dubious. And that's before getting into if the kinds of porn being trained on is even legal in your given jurisdiction.
> "In short, this is a lot for one person to torrent on an average day, particularly one who has a demanding job," Strike 3 writes. The company believes the pattern makes more sense as AI training data or research.
I hope they drag Meta hard and get every penny for this.
It's Meta so no doubt they're lying and used it to train virtual girlfriends for adolescents or something heinous.
But I wonder if there is software like Sonarr / Radarr / Lidarr / etc for this media... I made Radarr automatically download insane quantities of movies by following actors on it, I had to stop doing that!
I've seen anti terrorist police appear at offices because certain executives were trading so much porn they assumed there must be messages hidden in it.
The noise has always been about the UN private network which is apparently absolutely full of anything you might ever want.
The second read, (b), is irrelevant with respect to Meta's liability for the downloads before the switch to a residential IP, i.e., the downloads that prompted the email to Meta's lawyers
1 - 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?
yeah 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.
Company 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?
Are 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.
Sure, that's plausible... a facebook exec so dumb that they're using their personal ISP connection to run a VPN for others, and even dumber that they don't notice or don't care about a massive amount of torrent traffic through that VPN.
It's not really a VPN for piracy purposes unless it's a commercial, no-log VPN. Since when a VPN is used to move the point at which traffic enters the internet, the owner of the VPN exit will be held to account.
They can try to claim they were running a "private" VPN and gave random people (from reddit and discord) internet access through it. They can try to claim they don't keep logs. Meanwhile, for a facebook VP with suspected activity tied to facebook corporate, the rightsholder will subpoena every digital device in the person's home, depose all their family and close friends, subpoena their facebook email...
When I use the VPN, I am connecting to an endpoint that 40 other people are also connected to. Did I download that file, or did one of the other 39 download it? Even the VPN provider can't tell... they keep no logs. I wouldn't want to use the VPN to phone in some bomb threat, that wouldn't even hide me 5 minutes from the feebs, but it's like an impenetrable shield for copyright troll lawyers. Smooth sailing for the last 13 or 14 years, for $3/month.
I'd be shocked if anyone in the United States is still downloading stuff without a VPN. There are entire countries that don't have to worry about it, but none in Europe or North America where that is the case.
What cases are you talking about?
My general understanding is that if the VPN provider does not keep any logs, all that is left is timing / bandwidth correlation. If the endpoint you are connecting to isn't compromised and you connect to a high traffic node wouldn't this be essentially impossible?
Unless you do some user error stuff like logging into accounts tied to your public persona?
Very 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?
I 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.
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.)
Rulings have said that reproduction of AI models which were trained on copyrighted material are not violating the copyright on those materials. The initial copying of those materials without paying is illegal regardless. You still have to buy or otherwise legally view a copy of the book/movie/photo to train your model on it.
Strike 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.
The actor is bad, the deed is good. Though, the open sourcing of llama 2 and beyond was pushed by Yann Lecun and others, some of whom have moved on from the company. Zuckerberg supports the AI initiatives but he's hardly leading them himself.
What argument do you have that releasing llama was actually good? They gave AI access to terrorists and criminals as much as they did to independent researchers. Arguably they are partially responsible for escalating blackhat cyber capabilities that are contributing to the rapid rise in attacks. Open source is neither inherently good or bad. The most you could really say is that it was accelerationist
Adolph Hitler is often credited (with varying accuracy) with the Autobahn, fixing Germany’s unemployment and launching Volkswagen to produce affordable motor vehicles.
None of these make him a good person any more than Meta’s occasional positive acts make it a good company.
Good action can also be a way for bad actors to buy good will so they can extend their other bad actions. Plus some of these actions are done on the interest of furthering the interest of the bad actors.
An example is Meta striking deals with telecom operators to offer unmetered access to Meta services making Facebook synonymous with the Internet in some countries.
The second sentence of the first post was explication of the sentiment described and criticized by the preceding sentence. It is the sentiment I am calling out.
The first post could or should have been more clearly written with an em-dash, but then people would start calling me a clanker. /s
> Actor and action conflation is incredibly common these days — If someone is bad and worth condemnation, all their actions must also be bad.
My position: Bad person can do good thing for bad motives.
example: The evil wife beating doctor who saves a baby just because they get paid for it.
My "autistic" brain can recognize that saving babies is still a good thing. I don't have to like the doctor, or their reasons. For whatever reason, a large portion of people see a comparable situation and instantly start arguing that saving babies is bad.
The 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.
I'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.
"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"
> 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.
Lots 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 - 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.
SV_BubbleTime | 10 hours ago
cgannett | 10 hours ago
shadowgovt | 10 hours ago
stevenwoo | 10 hours ago
chad_strategic | 10 hours ago
ahartmetz | 6 hours ago
tyre | 10 hours ago
staticman2 | 10 hours ago
SV_BubbleTime | 4 hours ago
flerchin | 10 hours ago
eli | 10 hours ago
shadowgovt | 10 hours ago
Backdoored dad's work computer, how diabolical. ;)
novok | 9 hours ago
pjl0 | 8 hours ago
flerchin | 8 hours ago
loeg | 9 hours ago
tyre | 10 hours ago
autoexec | 4 hours ago
drewg123 | 10 hours ago
“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 | 10 hours ago
Legal is usually the one initiating then engaging with HR to do enforcement.
stevenwoo | 10 hours ago
busterarm | 9 hours ago
Law enforcement didn’t get involved and nobody did shit about it.
Not even the last time that company was massively hacked. ;)
sandworm101 | 9 hours ago
axus | 9 hours ago
sandworm101 | 9 hours ago
joemi | 8 hours ago
For example, in 2009 I worked at a record store that got raided due to such claims. The RIAA's informant claimed he had seen people selling hidden bootlegs, which absolutely wasn't happening, and that was all they needed to have cops raid the store, arrest several people and cart off boxes of not-bootlegged, sold-by-major-CD-distributors CDs. Court dates followed and the case was eventually dismissed (or settled due to being more convenient than continuing the case? I can't remember), but it still took time, money, and lawyers. And this was in 2009, when the recording industry wield less power than in 2001.
(I was running late for work that day or else I would have ended up arrested too, since I was one of the managers scheduled then. Thank god I was running late!)
stevenwoo | 2 hours ago
autoexec | 5 hours ago
I think the MPAA has more money to throw around these days, but don't let the RIAA tell you that piracy is killing them. They're doing just fine (https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/2026-Mid-Yea...)
Brybry | 4 hours ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox_Communications,_Inc._v._So...
[2] https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/cox-communications-inc-v-so...
shimman | 9 hours ago
abofh | 8 hours ago
Essentially - this is not a suggestion.
Residential ip's map to a specific person, and it's a lot harder for them to deflect and say I'm not responsible for my own Internet connection
teiferer | 6 hours ago
Since when does every household member have their own residential IP?
Even in single households that's not true (friends visiting, on-and-off partner, one night stands, helping the neighbor out cause their wifi is broken, ...)
And I don't know the logging + data retention requirements for CGNAT.
autoexec | 6 hours ago
Isn't that the dream of IPv6? Every member and device in your home trackable all the time?
b112 | 4 hours ago
bityard | 4 hours ago
cube00 | 4 hours ago
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/ipv6-privacy-option-a...
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2280924#c3
autoexec | 6 hours ago
In cases where the company wifi is open or places like hotels the person who did it could be long gone. Unsecured residential wifi connections aren't much of a thing anymore, but I've seen a lot of people lending out their residential connection when they airbnb their vacation homes to strangers.
alex7o | 6 hours ago
ryandvm | 10 hours ago
Man, if Facebook is hiring people this dumb, it's going to make me feel a lot worse about getting rejected after interviewing there.
dozerly | 9 hours ago
drewg123 | 9 hours ago
ryandrake | 9 hours ago
vorpalhex | 8 hours ago
There's then a much more serious alignment pass.
Relationships can and do pre-vouch for big pieces of this such as alignment - if you've worked with someone for a decade, you are probably mission aligned.
ChrisMarshallNY | 7 hours ago
trhway | 5 hours ago
"Stat reported that in 2017, Richard Graydon self-published a book titled The Genetic Risks of Cancer: The Effects of DNA, Genomics and Inheritance on Aging and Survival.” The book described Graydon as an oncologist who had served as a chief medical officer in the biotech and drug development industry. It had no reviews on Amazon.
In October 2022, Atossa Therapeutics, a Seattle-based biotech, announced it had hired Richard Graydon as its interim chief medical officer.
“We are privileged to welcome Richard to Atossa, where his deep experience in CAR-T cell therapy fits well with our current strategic direction as we explore our opportunities in cell therapy,” Steven Quay, Atossa’s CEO, said in a statement at the time.
In March, Immix announced hiring Graydon, calling him a “board-certified hematologist-oncologist with over 20 years of experience in clinical development, most recently at Merck & Co. and Johnson & Johnson, where he led new and supplemental new drug applications and biologics license applications for 7 approved drugs including Darzalex, Carvykti, Keytruda, and Imbruvica.” Stat noted that these are some of the bestselling cancer medicines in the world."
jjtheblunt | 8 hours ago
SmasherEpilepti | 8 hours ago
Usually, people who can make large decisions for the business without approval from higher-level employees.
phonon | 8 hours ago
red-iron-pine | 7 hours ago
e.g. they own all of Finance (or Ops, or Legal, or whatever), and have the ability to hire, fire, and use their own budget, albeit it with strings.
eyepea2007 | 7 hours ago
https://torrentfreak.com/meta-confirms-data-engineer-is-behi...
defrost | 3 hours ago
Today's Torrentfreak article is about "an executive" and references the article you have linked thus:
Close reading of both allows for a not spelled out possibility ... that "the data engineer" is also the son of the first mentioned "an executive".Or not - still much is under the fog of reporting ongoing partial disclosures.
mcmcmc | 9 hours ago
sandworm101 | 9 hours ago
red-iron-pine | 7 hours ago
but i ain't dumb enough to do it off work IPs
gammarator | 5 hours ago
ElProlactin | 9 hours ago
bartread | 9 hours ago
I've lived in and around Cambridge for a very long time now. I've met a lot of Cambridge undergrads and graduates. Let me tell you: they are a mixed bag.
Don't misunderstand me: there are some very smart people at Cambridge University. Very smart indeed. And I think if you took any cohort from Cambridge Uni versus a similar cohort from another university you'd certainly find that, against most universities, the Cambridge cohort would be smarter on average. In fact the place is genuinely awash with very smart people literally everywhere.
But that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of people that went to Cambridge who clearly found a way to blag their way through the interview process that may not have been particularly closely correlated with their intellect. The same will be true of Meta, Google, etc. I swear, the interview processes at these companies are probably more of a sop to the egos of company leadership and people who already work there than they are any more effective at filtering down to good talent than less byzantine and overwrought hiring processes.
You just have to make your peace with it.
foobarbecue | 8 hours ago
hunterpayne | 5 hours ago
throwyawayyyy | 9 hours ago
morkalork | 8 hours ago
dfxm12 | 7 hours ago
red-iron-pine | 7 hours ago
this has happened at two (2) orgs I've been at.
executives take risks and responsibility, so the CTO/CISO got sign offs from everyone and took it to the board and got full CYA in both cases, too.
kotaKat | 6 hours ago
also all the incident reports i used to file about doctors getting malware went to the circular file.
maybe that's why they got nailed with ransomware years later (:
dgellow | 8 hours ago
doublerabbit | 8 hours ago
dgellow | 7 hours ago
itronitron | 8 hours ago
dgellow | 7 hours ago
red-iron-pine | 7 hours ago
you don't need 75k generals or fighter pilots, you need average folks who are going to STFU and get the unfun, unsexy tasks done.
you go trying to hire a Stanford/MIT hot-shot rockstar type and they'll either crash out or jump ASAP once they realize they got nailed with drudgery.
ElProlactin | 4 hours ago
This task might have been the sexiest work available at Meta, and there's nothing average about a guy that can single-handedly "process" 2,973 porn vids.
If Mark ever needs a right hand, this man is it.
anonym00se1 | 7 hours ago
echelon | 7 hours ago
Which interviewers you get, vibes, which team is hiring, whether the folks in your hiring bar are grumpy, ...
Best thing you can do is know several people who can act as direct hiring manager.
hunterpayne | 5 hours ago
bitexploder | 2 hours ago
giancarlostoro | 7 hours ago
bluefirebrand | 6 hours ago
read_the_articl | 9 hours ago
> The company logged all BitTorrent activity detected from the executive’s connection, which was nearly 20,000 files.
> This includes VR adult titles made for Meta’s Quest headset. Strike 3 suggests the downloads are consistent with work to make the headset compatible with adult films.
> 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.
chorizo | 7 hours ago
darth_avocado | 7 hours ago
And I’m sure meta paid for some specific content but they generally wouldn’t want to set a precedent where they paid everyone.
chorizo | 7 hours ago
fn-mote | 6 hours ago
Are you? I don’t understand why you think this. It seems like the only payments in this area are settlements after the fact.
Counterexamples welcome.
triceratops | 5 hours ago
I can't think of any ToS that prohibit a device manufacturer from testing whether the content plays on their device. That's literally why anyone buys content - to play it on their device.
How would they enforce those anyway? And how would being sued for that be worse than being sued for torrenting?
LoganDark | 7 hours ago
chorizo | 6 hours ago
huijzer | 8 hours ago
Seems plausible. The material contains many hours of highly detailed human interaction plus I don’t expect Meta would have moral objections given their track record.
infinite_spin | 8 hours ago
overtone1000 | 8 hours ago
infinite_spin | 8 hours ago
e.g. if someone is reciting a poem they wrote in a public park, and I make a recording of that recitation, I have not violated their copyright in doing so, however I might violate their copyright by reconstructing that poem and then distributing it
irthomasthomas | 6 hours ago
infinite_spin | 6 hours ago
jpc0 | 6 hours ago
And likewise if you distribute any sort of copy of the recording you made you are violating at least one if not more copyrights.
infinite_spin | 5 hours ago
cucumber3732842 | 7 hours ago
infinite_spin | 7 hours ago
_trampeltier | 7 hours ago
infinite_spin | 7 hours ago
mmsc | 8 hours ago
johnnyanmac | 5 hours ago
- produce your own movies/animation - identity movies/animation from context - identify actors/characters and cross-reference them in other works
You apply these parallels with porn, a more anonymous and intimate setting, and you can see how the kinds of results can be more morally dubious. And that's before getting into if the kinds of porn being trained on is even legal in your given jurisdiction.
jasonlotito | 8 hours ago
I hope they drag Meta hard and get every penny for this.
gchamonlive | 7 hours ago
I wonder how much porn you have to personally download to be considered prolific.
EDIT: "Reality Labs executive downloaded nearly 20,000 files at his home for work purposes"
Yeah, you can't consume that much porn for your own amusement.
paimapi | 6 hours ago
and I assume this was just for content from Reality Labs. god knows how much other torrenting was done outside of Reality Labs IP
Lammy | 6 hours ago
You are making the mistake of assuming someone can only have one monitor displaying porn at once. Have you never seen a real gooncave?
notahacker | 6 hours ago
ElProlactin | 6 hours ago
So is this what Zuck's bunker in Hawaii is all about?
gchamonlive | 6 hours ago
benoau | 5 hours ago
But I wonder if there is software like Sonarr / Radarr / Lidarr / etc for this media... I made Radarr automatically download insane quantities of movies by following actors on it, I had to stop doing that!
gchamonlive | 5 hours ago
LtdJorge | 2 hours ago
RaftPeople | 4 hours ago
You could run them in parallel, like a Zoom or Teams mtg, but with each square a different movie.
Would be more entertaining than the next status mtg.
jnwatson | 5 hours ago
gchamonlive | 5 hours ago
jasonfarnon | 4 hours ago
fhn | 3 hours ago
fidotron | 4 hours ago
The noise has always been about the UN private network which is apparently absolutely full of anything you might ever want.
torginus | 3 hours ago
fhn | 3 hours ago
testing22321 | 3 hours ago
Sir, I accept your wager.
gchamonlive | 2 hours ago
1vuio0pswjnm7 | 4 hours ago
bravoetch | 10 hours ago
kodoman | 10 hours ago
Of course legal professionals are always needed but so much of what is done today is just a kind of rent seeking.
sanex | 7 hours ago
RealityVoid | 9 hours ago
tonyedgecombe | 8 hours ago
ranger_danger | 9 hours ago
nostrademons | 8 hours ago
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.
harshreality | 8 hours ago
It's not really a VPN for piracy purposes unless it's a commercial, no-log VPN. Since when a VPN is used to move the point at which traffic enters the internet, the owner of the VPN exit will be held to account.
They can try to claim they were running a "private" VPN and gave random people (from reddit and discord) internet access through it. They can try to claim they don't keep logs. Meanwhile, for a facebook VP with suspected activity tied to facebook corporate, the rightsholder will subpoena every digital device in the person's home, depose all their family and close friends, subpoena their facebook email...
KaiserPro | 8 hours ago
because in some cases VPNs tie to you neatly to an action better than just home internet.
With a VPN, you have much less deniability, because its tied to a device often with a username and password.
throw03172019 | 7 hours ago
NoMoreNicksLeft | 7 hours ago
I'd be shocked if anyone in the United States is still downloading stuff without a VPN. There are entire countries that don't have to worry about it, but none in Europe or North America where that is the case.
Joel_Mckay | 4 hours ago
NoMoreNicksLeft | 4 hours ago
Are they going to commit treason and start snitching on me to Hollywood lawyers for shits and giggles? How would that play out do you think?
Joel_Mckay | 4 hours ago
This was an old Quid pro quo arrangement that predates the Patriot act.
Have a nice day =3
CatchACode | 7 hours ago
dymk | 7 hours ago
kodoman | 10 hours ago
horsawlarway | 10 hours ago
hackingonempty | 9 hours ago
gorbachev | 9 hours ago
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 | 9 hours ago
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 | 8 hours ago
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.)
mminer237 | 6 hours ago
aeon_ai | 4 hours ago
If the materials were publicly available on a site and scraped? Fair use.
If they were distributed illegally and acquired through that distribution? Cooked.
If you scraped it AND saved it? Cooked.
WaitWaitWha | 9 hours ago
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 | 9 hours ago
Hamuko | 9 hours ago
hiccuphippo | 9 hours ago
wvbdmp | 9 hours ago
tonyedgecombe | 8 hours ago
well_ackshually | 9 hours ago
This was mostly a hoarding thing. Hoarders gonna hoard.
nostrademons | 8 hours ago
boomboomsubban | 7 hours ago
brnt | 7 hours ago
It's about having the library, not about reading the books.
red-iron-pine | 7 hours ago
modeless | 9 hours ago
loeg | 9 hours ago
red-iron-pine | 7 hours ago
pier25 | 9 hours ago
mirekrusin | 7 hours ago
hackingonempty | 9 hours ago
fn-mote | 9 hours ago
mullingitover | 9 hours ago
Let me break out the world's tiniest violin for them.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...
sureMan6 | 8 hours ago
Your ethics shouldn't be dictated by US copyright law
ceejayoz | 8 hours ago
If your ethics deem Meta ethical, they probably need recalibrating.
s1artibartfast | 8 hours ago
throwway120385 | 8 hours ago
s1artibartfast | 5 hours ago
ceejayoz | 8 hours ago
nkrisc | 7 hours ago
soulofmischief | 7 hours ago
mcmcmc | 7 hours ago
bitpush | 6 hours ago
That's an odd hill to die own. Lots of despicable people use iPhones. Does that Apple is somehow complicit?
mcmcmc | 6 hours ago
soulofmischief | an hour ago
bigfatkitten | 7 hours ago
None of these make him a good person any more than Meta’s occasional positive acts make it a good company.
s1artibartfast | 5 hours ago
My whole point was bad actor /= bad deed.
pibaker | 5 hours ago
An example is Meta striking deals with telecom operators to offer unmetered access to Meta services making Facebook synonymous with the Internet in some countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org
Actions and actors live in a context. Stop being so autistic and start looking at the bigger picture. You are not immune to propaganda.
s1artibartfast | 5 hours ago
I don't have to take a brain-dead shortcut of claiming every deed is bad. Not even every deed that is self-serving is bad O_O
Henchman21 | 4 hours ago
> I don't have to take a brain-dead shortcut of claiming every deed is bad.
What? Reconcile these seemingly opposing statements?
s1artibartfast | 3 hours ago
The first post could or should have been more clearly written with an em-dash, but then people would start calling me a clanker. /s
> Actor and action conflation is incredibly common these days — If someone is bad and worth condemnation, all their actions must also be bad.
My position: Bad person can do good thing for bad motives. example: The evil wife beating doctor who saves a baby just because they get paid for it.
My "autistic" brain can recognize that saving babies is still a good thing. I don't have to like the doctor, or their reasons. For whatever reason, a large portion of people see a comparable situation and instantly start arguing that saving babies is bad.
Henchman21 | 3 hours ago
doc_ick | 8 hours ago
I think that’s more hopium ethics.
overfeed | 7 hours ago
Corporate lawlessness has no good outcomes for humans.
efficax | 6 hours ago
tencentshill | 5 hours ago
loeg | 9 hours ago
> 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 | 8 hours ago
Yeah they seem to be following the time-honored legal strategy of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks
leni536 | 8 hours ago
stewartadam | 7 hours ago
paxys | 5 hours ago
drooby | 5 hours ago
"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 | 8 hours ago
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 | 3 hours ago
meindnoch | 7 hours ago
subarctic | 6 hours ago
So is it a Reality Labs executive or a Meta executive? Is the headline lying?
jnwatson | 5 hours ago
Arcuru | 6 hours ago
kotaKat | 6 hours ago
I would quite like to think that GDP references... 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 | 5 hours ago
Seattle3503 | 5 hours ago
omegadynamics | 3 hours ago
treetalker | 3 hours ago
negura | 2 hours ago