The high-stakes lawsuit between adult content producers and tech giant Meta over the alleged downloads of copyright-infringing videos is heating up. In a new filing, Strike 3 claims that a Meta employee allegedly deleted over 9 terabytes of torrented files. Meta notes that this claim, which originates from an unrelated case, is mischaracterized and irrelevant. Regardless of the outcome of these and other ongoing discovery disputes, both parties aim for a trial in 2028.
I don’t think I really care who wins that one, but :
Meta responded in October by filing a motion to dismiss, arguing the sporadic downloads were consistent with ordinary ‘personal use’ by employees and visitors on the corporate network.
Oh, yeah, just your ordinary downloading porn on the corporate network of a tech giant megacorp, as you do.
Either a lie or an admission of baffling incompetence.
To be fair, if I had the money, I would make my own porn NAS too. I would call it “the NASS” or something.
It wasn’t 9TB of porn, the title is very misleading. Strike3’s formal complaint is about 157 downloads over a period of 7 years.
9 TB of work porn.
Considering it was Meta, it’s probably 90% CSAM anyway.
Do you think tech companies filter their employees’ internet?
They have tens of thousands of employees, a few of them are bound to download some porn at some point. And the amount downloaded is about 20 files per year on average.
Not a company since I’m in public administration, but my structure has a few thousands workers, most of them having access in some form to the network.
They do filter our internet. I don’t give a fuck whether people consume porn with their own devices and connections. But if you can download porn, you can download anything, including malware. And a bad actor having access to data on our network would be disastrous.
Unfortunately, meta has that kind of data too. In fact hoarding private data is what their business is about. Not securing their network is criminal.
Tech companies, as a general rule, do not filter the internet of their employees, because those employees generally need to do a lot of stuff with the internet (or networking besides the internet) and filtering it would cause a lot of problems.
Production machines (where the data lives) can be much more restricted than work machines. Strong access controls mean that compromising a work machine doesn’t give you access to production data.
Too early for the Metaverse, just in time for Metawankers.
Meta has such nice work benefits. They offer a special room for viewing too or just have a wank at desk?
At first I was like “9TB!? That’s like a billion bajillion. It’s like Dr Evil demanding $100 billion in 1969!”
And then I realized I have over 9TB of liberated media on my NAS. I really need to adjust my concept of technology, not to mention the passage of time.
I mean, 911 was only ten years ago, right? Right!?
As of 9-11 I had a gig and a half of liberated media collected from Usenet. I know because I was running out of space on my external hard drive (connected by the printer port) and the bios was limited to two gb.
It’s amazing how far we have come in just, checks notes, 10 years.
You had an external hard drive on a parallel port? I’ve never heard of such a thing. You sure it wasn’t scsi? Or maybe even centronics?
It was most definitely parallel port. It was one of those rare relics of history that hardly anyone ever owned. That laptop was not capable of scsi. The read time was horrible. The write time was worse.
I’m surprised you didn’t have a series of backup tape drivers connected by SCSI lol
Oh wait, that’s more like twelve year old technology
12 years ago I was the proud owner of a half a terabyte USB drive.
From the article, the 9tb are related to the other case, which is about book data.
Meta’s response that this is personal use is actually a pretty good argument. This case mentions something like 157 downloads over the last seven years. That does sound like it could be random employees. Plausibly.
But wouldn’t their IT infrastructure block random employees from running torrents on the network? If it was company directed, wouldn’t they use like a VPN from some regular common VPN provider so that this all looked like some random Joe downloading porn rather than Meta? It does mention they allegedly have some “secret” IPs on AWS, which is also funny to me.
But wouldn’t their IT infrastructure block random employees from running torrents on the network?
Not if the employees in question control the IT infrastructure.
Nah, for a company that size they’d get DMCA notices and legal would shut it down. That’s why my job finally blocked torrenting.
It’s possible that this is what happened.
9TB of torrents isn’t a huge amount, I seed more than that in just a few weeks on a personal/small group seedbox. You could download 9TB in an hour or two if you had a datacenter’s link speed and hardware.
I don’t know any self respecting sysadmin that doesn’t block P2P in their network. Most enterprise firewalls nowadays don’t even require any fancy set up, it’s a toggle switch away. I don’t buy the “oopsie we didn’t know” excuse. They were permitted to torrent by design.
Seriously, ain’t nobody torrenting terabytes of porn at work without approval.
How 'bout a NSFW tag there buddy.
EDIT: The thumbnail for this post is of a woman wearing only a bra laying seductively on a bed. I realize some users may not see this or have thumbnails active. But some do.
Interestingly, I usually have thumbnails for links but not for this one, maybe they edited the presentation?
Meta claims this is all normal on the workplace, so it’s your opinion against theirs.
