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"Church" of Scientology Manipultates Using Facebook

Magoo

Gold Meritorious Patron
You can always count on the "church" of $cientology to
lie, cheat, steal, destroy someone utterly---to quote
"Fair Game". (And those those lurking, yes, that PL
was Cancelled, however--on the bottom it says:

This cancellation does not apply to SPs" ---and or TRY to get as much information as they can, just to hopefully get innocent
victims suckered "in".

So check out what they've done, yesterday I believe, re Facebook
100 Million "Scraped Profiles"

http://gizmodo.com/5599970/major-co...-100-million-facebook-profiles-off-bittorrent

Naturally---the "church" of $cientology would be in
on this. Why am I not surprised?

And IF I'm missing something, please just explain it to me. It seems *very* odd to me.

Tory/Magoo
 

SuperPowers

Patron with Honors
Thanks Tory

Don't know the implications of this
- better be cautious about FB data.
Fake when possible!

Love Superpowers
 

Magoo

Gold Meritorious Patron
Which comment?

Did you mean this:
"What does this prove exactly? If the data is profile data, unless one has admitted to pedophilia or some other less than savory practice.

What was Ron Bowes primary objective? To "out" Facebook or promote his services?

I think it was the later."

Knowing them, I just thought it was interesting that they were, typically, the only "church" :eyeroll: on the list.

XENU rocks, as usual :)

Tory/Magoo
 

Smurf

Gold Meritorious SP
Which comment?

Did you mean this: "What does this prove exactly? If the data is profile data, unless one has admitted to pedophilia or some other less than savory practice.

What was Ron Bowes primary objective? To "out" Facebook or promote his services?

From this link in the article: "A 2.8GB torrent is floating around out there containing data from 100 million Facebook profiles. But don't freak out: all the data was already available publicly. Yes, hacker Ron Bowes from Skull Security created a crawler that pulled everything from Facebook's open access directory, essentially giving him all data that people had set to allow anyone to see.

Feel free to go download it, but if you're looking for juice on a particular person, you could just as easily get it by searching Facebook for them. You'll get the same info."

No personal or private information was released. The info grabbed on the torrent is the same info you could get doing a search on your own. Put the paranoid cap away.. you don't need it.
 

programmer_guy

True Ex-Scientologist
From this link in the article: "A 2.8GB torrent is floating around out there containing data from 100 million Facebook profiles. But don't freak out: all the data was already available publicly. Yes, hacker Ron Bowes from Skull Security created a crawler that pulled everything from Facebook's open access directory, essentially giving him all data that people had set to allow anyone to see.

Feel free to go download it, but if you're looking for juice on a particular person, you could just as easily get it by searching Facebook for them. You'll get the same info."

No personal or private information was released. The info grabbed on the torrent is the same info you could get doing a search on your own. Put the paranoid cap away.. you don't need it.

I agree with you somewhat but not entirely.
All of the organizations on that list, except ONE, are prospective employers that have an interest in whether they want to hire someone or not.
But I suspect that the CofS has another motive that is very different.
 

Dulloldfart

Squirrel Extraordinaire
Which comment?

Did you mean this:
"What does this prove exactly? If the data is profile data, unless one has admitted to pedophilia or some other less than savory practice.

There's one that says, "I looked at the torrent (didn't download it though), what's funny is it's literally a long list of account names, nothing more."

It also says the torrent is 2.8 GB. For 100 million users, doesn't that mean 28 bytes each? That's not an awful lot of room for shenanigans, as far as I can see. Have I mislaid a bunch of decimal points somewhere?

Paul
 

programmer_guy

True Ex-Scientologist
Well there is compression, which would probably save 15-20%.

I have used zlib compression in software programming at work and sometimes the compression ratio is 10 times that.
It depends on the data that is being compressed.

For example, I have used zlib to compress 112,000 bytes down to about 3500 bytes of info. And that is 3%.
 

Dulloldfart

Squirrel Extraordinaire
I have used zlib compression in software programming at work and sometimes the compression ratio is 10 times that.
It depends on the data that is being compressed.

For example, I have used zlib to compress 112,000 bytes down to about 3500 bytes of info. And that is 3%.

Um, a list of names? :)

Paul
 

Dulloldfart

Squirrel Extraordinaire
I have no idea what you are asking.
zlib is a software function library that programmers use.
Are you asking for a link for info on this?

Not at all. This thread is about the CofS supposedly invading the privacy of Facebook users. I posted that it seems to me that the "leak" involves 28 bytes per person, which doesn't seem like much data at all, and might well match the comment about the torrent being merely a list of names.

It was mentioned that this could be compressed by 15%. I take that to mean that uncompressed it might mean 33 bytes per person. Whoop-de-doo.

Then you come along and talk about something disrelated, and I was trying to figure out the point as it applies to this thread.

Paul
 

programmer_guy

True Ex-Scientologist
Paul said:
It also says the torrent is 2.8 GB. For 100 million users, doesn't that mean 28 bytes each?

Well, I don't know ... maybe you can tell me.

All I was saying was according to my experience in using data compression that it can be squashed down to a very small file depending on the data.

How is this unrelated to your post?
 

thetanic

Gold Meritorious Patron
I have used zlib compression in software programming at work and sometimes the compression ratio is 10 times that.
It depends on the data that is being compressed.

For example, I have used zlib to compress 112,000 bytes down to about 3500 bytes of info. And that is 3%.

It probably mostly consists of names, which means Huffman may be able to do better than typical. Huffman is a part of the DEFLATE algorithm.
 

programmer_guy

True Ex-Scientologist
It probably mostly consists of names, which means Huffman may be able to do better than typical. Huffman is a part of the DEFLATE algorithm.

I only know Huffman encoding as being in the spec for non-lossy encoding for JPEG-8 used in storing image data.
zlib doesn't use Huffman encoding.
 

lionheart

Gold Meritorious Patron
What sort of a "church" has any interest whatsover in data about 100 million people?

Suely that's the point, not how much data per person and how much it can be squished.

Why would a church want ANY personal info on the public? :confused2:

I notice other downloaders included the BBC. One could understand them doing it for news research reason, but a CHURCH!:omg:

Possible reasons for downloading the data:

  • Marketing info
  • Spying info

Any other possible reasons?

Why would a church that respects it's own religious nature want to do either of the above and collect data on the public?

For example: Reigious Freedom Watch used personal searchable internet data on someone I know to "Fair Game" them and to publically indicate to them on their website that they knew where he/she lived.

An example of spying on the internet in order to intimidate.

Nice "Church"! :duh:

Fortunately this person had been sharp enough to lay false info on the web about where they lived, so the RFW site even got the wrong country! :roflmao:
 

programmer_guy

True Ex-Scientologist
What sort of a "church" has any interest whatsover in data about 100 million people?

Suely that's the point, not how much data per person and how much it can be squished.

Why would a church want ANY personal info on the public? :confused2:

I notice other downloaders included the BBC. One could understand them doing it for news research reason, but a CHURCH!:omg:

Possible reasons for downloading the data:

  • Marketing info
  • Spying info

Any other possible reasons?

Why would a church that respects it's own religious nature want to do either of the above and collect data on the public?

For example: Reigious Freedom Watch used personal searchable internet data on someone I know to "Fair Game" them and to publically indicate to them on their website that they knew where he/she lived.

An example of spying on the internet in order to intimidate.

Nice "Church"! :duh:

Fortunately this person had been sharp enough to lay false info on the web about where they lived, so the RFW site even got the wrong country! :roflmao:

I think that was Tory's major point. And I agree with that.
 

Freeminds

Bitter defrocked apostate
Compression experiment

I just copied a list of the presidents and vice presidents of the USA, and the years they were in office.

Saved in (a rather wasteful) Rich Text Format, it occupied 3,251 bytes. Then I zipped it, and now it weighs in at 1,952 bytes - 60% of the former size, for names and numbers. I'd imagine the Facebook data would compress about the same amount. That doesn't give you enough space to record who's friends with who, still less their public life story.

CofS is doing creepy, manipulative things with Facebook, but they do it on-line, not with saved data.
 

programmer_guy

True Ex-Scientologist
I just copied a list of the presidents and vice presidents of the USA, and the years they were in office.

Saved in (a rather wasteful) Rich Text Format, it occupied 3,251 bytes. Then I zipped it, and now it weighs in at 1,952 bytes - 60% of the former size, for names and numbers. I'd imagine the Facebook data would compress about the same amount. That doesn't give you enough space to record who's friends with who, still less their public life story.

CofS is doing creepy, manipulative things with Facebook, but they do it on-line, not with saved data.

Yes, as I said, it depends on the repetiveness pattern of the data and the compression algorthym (lossy or loss-less and which method).
 
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