August 31st 2014, The Fappening

Sunday was a pretty ordinary day for me. I slept in, cleaned out the crawlspace and around 4pm I finally put on some pants and went to Papa Murphys for a take n' bake. Just an ordinary day at casa de Newburn. Of course unbeknownst to me the internet was collectively losing it's shit.

Some time in the early afternoon a veritable buttload of celebrity nudes were posted onto 4chan. Then imgur and reddit and pirate bay and before you knew it the entire series of tubes was clogged with stolen cell phone pics. The event was quickly dubbed The Fappening.

Celebrities involved were pretty wide ranging and seemingly random from Kate Upton to Hope Solo to Jennifer Lawrence to other celebs I've both heard and never heard of. A couple of celebrities have confirmed the pictures were real, a few have denied it. A couple spokespeople have threatened lawsuits. Websites are taking them down as quickly as they're going up but you don't have to be a level 20 netwizard to find them. Literally the first thing that pops up on a google search for The Fappening is a reddit subreddit dedicated to the leak. Let's face it, this is the internet. Once something is out there it's out there for good.

Frankly, that's an old lesson. I think there's a new lesson to be learned here: Once it's "out there" on the cloud you don't control it anymore.

If the original leaker is to be believed, these pictures were acquired by a hacker/hackers resetting the passwords on iCloud accounts. Once he or she was able to reset the password they had unfettered access to whatever the celebs had been syncing. There's rumors floating around that the actual phones had been hacked through wifi hotspots but that seems like a lot of work. Easier to go to wikipedia find out someone's mother's maiden name and request a password reset over the phone. The crazy rumor hot from 4chan is that this is deepweb type stuff. A group of hackers that specifically trade in celebrity nudes. Sorry, I'm meandering.

The point here is that the cloud is really convenient but a terrible place to put things you want to keep secret. Great for uploading your grandma's chili recipe or pictures of your kids at Disneyland but a terrible place for financial records and keeping pictures of you boning MLB Allstar Justin Verlander. Remember that when the iPhone 6 comes out and they start touting it's new iWallet feature.