“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..
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.
The noise has always been about the UN private network which is apparently absolutely full of anything you might ever want.
and I assume this was just for content from Reality Labs. god knows how much other torrenting was done outside of Reality Labs IP
Sir, I accept your wager.
Law enforcement didn’t get involved and nobody did shit about it.
Not even the last time that company was massively hacked. ;)
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
Man, if Facebook is hiring people this dumb, it's going to make me feel a lot worse about getting rejected after interviewing there.
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.
> 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.
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 hope they drag Meta hard and get every penny for this.
Legal is usually the one initiating then engaging with HR to do enforcement.
Let me break out the world's tiniest violin for them.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...
Your ethics shouldn't be dictated by US copyright law
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.
"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...
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.
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.
This was mostly a hoarding thing. Hoarders gonna hoard.
It's about having the library, not about reading the books.
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.
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.
Maybe an ethically bankrupt company with a "move fast and break things" ethos looking for exactly the plausible deniability your comment hints at?
Backdoored dad's work computer, how diabolical. ;)
> 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.
Yeah they seem to be following the time-honored legal strategy of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks
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.
Of course legal professionals are always needed but so much of what is done today is just a kind of rent seeking.
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...
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.
but i ain't dumb enough to do it off work IPs
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.)
- 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.
Thats an assumption. the source is out of date https://vpntesting.com/no-logs/
but basically the point is, you are indellibly linking your machine to a service.
The difference between that an normal internet is because of NAT, you can argue that at home it wasn't your machine, it was someone else on the network.
No
> With a VPN the IP is a commercial server run by the VPN provider
That is not a requirement... anyone can run VPN server software on a computer they control, whether it's on a personal/residential connection or a VPS/VM you rent, or something else. Many privacy-conscious people do this regularly whether or not a commercial VPN provider is involved.
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.
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.
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 (:
> say the top ranked CS school
I'd agree that average shows a difference but I don't think it is nearly as big as people act. Even the intra-university variance isn't what people would think (top universities have a very narrow distribution while lower ranks have wider). The trend follows, but the variance of the variances is not that large.
But there's going to be a difference between the students who finished with the highest grades, and those who scraped through.
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...)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox_Communications,_Inc._v._So...
[2] https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/cox-communications-inc-v-so...
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'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.
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?
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.
Isn't that the dream of IPv6? Every member and device in your home trackable all the time?
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.
most residential wifi are not very secure, put the black hat on for a second, then send a message telling a user there is something they cant have; cant do; or will lose, unless they log in, or sign in. then you see the joe password, and many times its the same password for everything.
You know that there are places outside of England right?
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.
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.
This was an old Quid pro quo arrangement that predates the Patriot act.
Have a nice day =3
Tomorrow.
https://torrentfreak.com/meta-confirms-data-engineer-is-behi...
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.
Or not - still much is under the fog of reporting ongoing partial disclosures.
"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."
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.
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.
Usually, people who can make large decisions for the business without approval from higher-level employees.
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/ipv6-privacy-option-a...
If your ethics deem Meta ethical, they probably need recalibrating.
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.
None of these make him a good person any more than Meta’s occasional positive acts make it a good company.
Corporate lawlessness has no good outcomes for humans.
I think that’s more hopium ethics.
And I’m sure meta paid for some specific content but they generally wouldn’t want to set a precedent where they paid everyone.
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.
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?
My whole point was bad actor /= bad deed.
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.
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!
You are making the mistake of assuming someone can only have one monitor displaying porn at once. Have you never seen a real gooncave?
So is this what Zuck's bunker in Hawaii is all about?
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
And likewise if you distribute any sort of copy of the recording you made you are violating at least one if not more copyrights.
That's an odd hill to die own. Lots of despicable people use iPhones. Does that Apple is somehow complicit?
We talking tech or Hell's Angels' teddy bear runs. Oh, wait....
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
> I don't have to take a brain-dead shortcut of claiming every deed is bad.
What? Reconcile these seemingly opposing statements?
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.
> however I might violate their copyright by reconstructing that poem and then distributing it
My argument is that the recording itself is not a copyright violation, not that distributing such a recording couldn't be construed as one (however I disagree on principle with that being illegal as well, as it puts an undue burden on the exercise of free speech, which should include the ability to accurately and entirely recite what I had experienced in a public place).
Or you can just keep on making unfounded assumptions about my "moral grounding" if you'd like, you didn't leave a good first impression with me and I'm not terribly interested in discussing this with you if this is how it's going to be. Discussions are about finding common ground, but you seem to be looking for an argument.