A friend of mine ( I call him a friend, but really he's more of a giant than anything else and the laws of physical comedy almost demand that there be a emotional closeness between us as a counterweight to the physical variance) is getting ready to move to Hong Kong. He'll be working a lot and I'm concerned that the comings and goings of American life will go unnoticed or unresearched by him, so I'm repurposing the blog to provide a one stop shop of the most important news in America.
I'm going to bury today's lead for a post with a more somber feel and move onto the b story of the ongoing fallout from the Ashely Madison hack.
Ashley Madison is a website on the internet in and around your computer. The reasons you might visit that website includes at least two scenarios (1) you went to school with a girl named Ashley Madison, and now you are trying to see where she ended up and the BinGle engines sent you there (2) you married someone, but also you are kind of the worst and watch a lot of tv and think that just one or two affairs will have no long term repercussions other than the callouses on your hand from high-fiving all of your buddies.
Unfortunately, the premise is incorrect in both scenarios. In scenario one, you should be looking for Ashely on facebook: she is married and living in Fort Collins. In scenario two, you relied on anonymity after providing someone your name, address, and credit card and trusted them to take better care of that information than you took of your wedding vows.
Anyways, a group of hackers (computer scientists who use the internets and energy drinks to access other people's computer boxes without permission) retrieved the user information and let it run free on the internet.
As a newly minted journalist, I am covering this impartially so I'll reserve judgement on the morality of the hackers or the alleged cheaters. But there are lessons in this story for those of us who fall outside of either group
Lesson the First: never do anything on the internet that you are not comfortable sharing with the entire world. This may seem unfair, but fair has nothing to do with it. I am just now coming to grips with the fact that one day my entire Netflix viewing history will be made public and everyone will know that I have tried no fewer than 5 separate times to watch Gilmore girls, but could never get more than 30 minutes into an episode. I encourage you all to try to get out in front of these eventual embarrassments.
Editor's Note: A car alarm is going off outside and has been for about 5 minutes now. Ideally car alarms would have a time limit and if no one had come to see about the car in that time it would automatically unlock and start itself so the thief could remove the annoyance from everyone's ear shot.
Lesson the Second: I can't remember what this one was now. That alarm drove it right out of my head. I guess the lesson here is to make a note of what you want to write before tangentially writing a ridiculous editor's note.
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