However, Strike 3 argues that this is no ordinary home pirate, using the timing of the downloads as evidence. On March 20, 2025, the porn producer’s general counsel first emailed Meta’s lawyers with forensic evidence of BitTorrent activity on the tech giant’s corporate IP addresses.
“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..
It's Meta so no doubt they're lying and used it to train virtual girlfriends for adolescents or something heinous.
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!
When I worked for office with about 40 employees in 2001 or so, the FBI came to our office to arrest a guy using I think Limewire over our high speed internet access to share music and videos. It may be so common these days they only crack down like that on really egregious abuse.
Around that same time my own brother was working at the second largest record label in the world and their own servers were hacked and serving about 1/3 of global warez downloads.
Law enforcement didn’t get involved and nobody did shit about it.
Not even the last time that company was massively hacked. ;)
I mean basically that. If you hit a corporate IP, unless they have flow level logging or you have very extensive timestamps, then the game ends, company says they've enacted new training or controls, but they can't identify a specific person and it's not their fault.
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
From the ISPs perspective, companies are still just as responsible for whatever takes place over their connection. From the law's perspective, the person responsible is whoever a jury can be convinced did it.
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.
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.
The RIAA still has insane amounts of power both political and actual. They got away with successfully suing an ISP for billions over of what their customers downloaded and only lost on appeal. They've shaken down several other ISPs for settlement money to avoid going to court. Lately they've also been going after stream rippers, AI start ups, and archive.org
The raid being due solely to music copyright infringement is really the most likely situation. There's no need to imply it was anything else.
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!)
This is crazy. Worked at a national ISP/telecom and one of the directors openly had a seedbox and was torrenting massive amount of things. Chalked it up as the poors being held to different standards as this person had a close relationship with one of the executives.
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.
I doubt executives even go through the typical employee interview hazing. It's more vibes and "do you know the right people or go to the right prestigious school?"
man, that's grand, especially the last paragraph. I should be less modest with my resume :)
"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."
Executive (and upper management) hiring is much more about owning and using risk, getting the management unit (your part of the org) all aligned and singing the same tune, and for executives showing that you've done this successfully across distinct business units (eg sales and engineering).
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.
is "executive" a well defined term for american corporate law? like "a person who can allocate funds from the master bank account without approval" or something like that?
Not really, It's just another term for upper management. It's just shorthand for any employee whose title begins with "Chief" or has "Executive" in it (among others like Chairman, President, etc).
Usually, people who can make large decisions for the business without approval from higher-level employees.
Just tell yourself that they rejected you because they thought you had too strong a moral compass and you wouldn't click with the company's overall lack of ethics
Does anyone honestly believe that Zuck doesn't have his own history with filesharing? Any computer nerd from that time would have deep knowledge of filesharing.
From TFA: "Strike 3 suggests the downloads are consistent with work to make the headset compatible with adult films"
> 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.
Why was torrenting needed anyway? Meta could’ve easily reached out to adult media providers to work on VR headset compatibility under an NDA. Or hired a third party contractor to do it.
It’s much more expensive. You as a consumer can buy a movie for $5 with a DVD on sale. But tos generally don’t include commercial activities. If you reach out to the film studio to get their permission, they can charge you anywhere from $10K to $1M+ for same thing.
And I’m sure meta paid for some specific content but they generally wouldn’t want to set a precedent where they paid everyone.
> But tos generally don’t include commercial activities
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?
Meta wants to make their service compatible with meta vr headsets. They don’t require ongoing access to the content. The media vendor would also benefit from this, so an agreement is in the interest of both parties.
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.
The potential output. You train on movies and animation and you get a model that can
- 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.
I'm not a fan of joking about those efforts. The people doing that work to catch predators and prevent their evil from reaching the general public are heroes.
I'm not a lawyer, but in my view copyright violations center around distribution, not necessarily the method by which a work is obtained
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
As in all cases it depends on jurisdiction. For example where I am performers have a right to not be recorded so you may in fact not make such recording, you didn’t not necessarily violate copyright but you violated related rights.
And likewise if you distribute any sort of copy of the recording you made you are violating at least one if not more copyrights.
Which is why torrenting is the dumbest way to do this, since every downloader is also an uploader. That is what gets torrenters locked up. It is possible to leach only, but its not the default mode, and if this guy was broadcasting his IP address, then he was seeding... distributing.
> "In short, this is a lot for one person to torrent on an average day, particularly one who has a demanding job," Strike 3 writes. The company believes the pattern makes more sense as AI training data or research.
I hope they drag Meta hard and get every penny for this.
Strike 3, the studio involved, files more lawsuits in the USA than anyone else. I think that makes them the biggest Copyright Trolls of all time. They run their own BitTorrent monitoring operation.
Good action can also be a way for bad actors to buy good will so they can extend their other bad actions. Plus some of these actions are done on the interest of furthering the interest of the bad actors.
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.
The actor is bad, the deed is good. Though, the open sourcing of llama 2 and beyond was pushed by Yann Lecun and others, some of whom have moved on from the company. Zuckerberg supports the AI initiatives but he's hardly leading them himself.
What argument do you have that releasing llama was actually good? They gave AI access to terrorists and criminals as much as they did to independent researchers. Arguably they are partially responsible for escalating blackhat cyber capabilities that are contributing to the rapid rise in attacks. Open source is neither inherently good or bad. The most you could really say is that it was accelerationist
Adolph Hitler is often credited (with varying accuracy) with the Autobahn, fixing Germany’s unemployment and launching Volkswagen to produce affordable motor vehicles.
None of these make him a good person any more than Meta’s occasional positive acts make it a good company.
> 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.
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.
I'm torn on this. While I can imagine Meta being morally corrupt enough to do all of this, I just can't imagine an exec taking on personal liability for the company.
"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"
Lots of GDP entries there. Uh. Like terabytes of it downloaded.
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.
Very dumb but what if he claims he was only using to train an AI model, what was that ruling on copyright material being ok to training AI models on. Would this hold up in court or not?
Rulings have said that reproduction of AI models which were trained on copyrighted material are not violating the copyright on those materials. The initial copying of those materials without paying is illegal regardless. You still have to buy or otherwise legally view a copy of the book/movie/photo to train your model on it.
I don't know a single company where an executive would be downloading training data themselves.
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.
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.)
1 - How are people torrenting and not using a VPN? 2 - How are judges still allowing this business model of sharing files then trying to shake down people that download them?
What cases are you talking about?
My general understanding is that if the VPN provider does not keep any logs, all that is left is timing / bandwidth correlation. If the endpoint you are connecting to isn't compromised and you connect to a high traffic node wouldn't this be essentially impossible?
Unless you do some user error stuff like logging into accounts tied to your public persona?
When I use the VPN, I am connecting to an endpoint that 40 other people are also connected to. Did I download that file, or did one of the other 39 download it? Even the VPN provider can't tell... they keep no logs. I wouldn't want to use the VPN to phone in some bomb threat, that wouldn't even hide me 5 minutes from the feebs, but it's like an impenetrable shield for copyright troll lawyers. Smooth sailing for the last 13 or 14 years, for $3/month.
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.
yeah everyone knows the losses they argue for are bullshit, I really think people should see how many times lawyers and other legal professionals give each other jobs by creating a world in which they are more and more needed.
Of course legal professionals are always needed but so much of what is done today is just a kind of rent seeking.
Company I work for got sued because someone filled out a form to get contacted, got a phone call as is expected after filling out said form, then sued because they're on the do not call list. Why did you fill out the form then?
Sure, that's plausible... a facebook exec so dumb that they're using their personal ISP connection to run a VPN for others, and even dumber that they don't notice or don't care about a massive amount of torrent traffic through that VPN.
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...
Are you confusing Tor with a VPN? With a VPN the IP is a commercial server run by the VPN provider, and there's usually just one hop (you run an encrypted connection between yourself and the VPN provider that all your traffic is routed over, then the VPN provider makes outgoing connections on your behalf). You're relying on the VPN provider's promise to not log customer connections, but if they are honest, all connections seem like they're coming from the VPN provider and aren't traceable beyond that.
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.
The idea that you'd get notified of infringing activity on corporate network and deliberately shift to residential without changing the activity is crazy. Like, it's hard to believe anyone is that dumb.
> 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.
Even better, they used a corporate network. The plaintiff is alleging that this was actually for work, since they were an executive at Reality Labs (home of Oculus.) They contend that the executive was testing VR porn as part of their job.
This reminds me of a stand up comedy routine about people being bad at hiding their porn collections because their brain doesn't work right when they are horny.
However, Strike 3 argues that this is no ordinary home pirate, using the timing of the downloads as evidence. On March 20, 2025, the porn producer’s general counsel first emailed Meta’s lawyers with forensic evidence of BitTorrent activity on the tech giant’s corporate IP addresses.
“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..
> 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.
Yeah but some folks are just data collectors/hoarders. It isn't about consumption.
Maybe if Meta joined a preservation initiative, but that doesn't seem to be the case
like literally too, 20k films at let's say 30m average is 400+ continuous, unbroken days worth of content
and I assume this was just for content from Reality Labs. god knows how much other torrenting was done outside of Reality Labs IP
Even if the dude would consume only the "highlights", that's a load of content, if you catch my drift
It's Meta so no doubt they're lying and used it to train virtual girlfriends for adolescents or something heinous.
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 mean you allegedly did all that
> 20k films at let's say 30m average is 400+ continuous, unbroken days worth of content
You are making the mistake of assuming someone can only have one monitor displaying porn at once. Have you never seen a real gooncave?
And with 365 days in the year and the need to have something on in the background whilst working from home...
> Have you never seen a real gooncave?
So is this what Zuck's bunker in Hawaii is all about?
When I worked for office with about 40 employees in 2001 or so, the FBI came to our office to arrest a guy using I think Limewire over our high speed internet access to share music and videos. It may be so common these days they only crack down like that on really egregious abuse.
I think they are training ai porn so ... this should be a lawsuit
Around that same time my own brother was working at the second largest record label in the world and their own servers were hacked and serving about 1/3 of global warez downloads.
Law enforcement didn’t get involved and nobody did shit about it.
Not even the last time that company was massively hacked. ;)
I mean basically that. If you hit a corporate IP, unless they have flow level logging or you have very extensive timestamps, then the game ends, company says they've enacted new training or controls, but they can't identify a specific person and it's not their fault.
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
From the ISPs perspective, companies are still just as responsible for whatever takes place over their connection. From the law's perspective, the person responsible is whoever a jury can be convinced did it.
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.
> Residential ip's map to a specific person,
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.
> Since when does every household member have their own residential IP?
Isn't that the dream of IPv6? Every member and device in your home trackable all the time?
It had to be more complicated than simple copyright infringement for the cops to get involved.
The music industry had more political power in 2001 than it does now.
The RIAA still has insane amounts of power both political and actual. They got away with successfully suing an ISP for billions over of what their customers downloaded and only lost on appeal. They've shaken down several other ISPs for settlement money to avoid going to court. Lately they've also been going after stream rippers, AI start ups, and archive.org
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...)
Or he was sharing other material that was kept quiet.
The raid being due solely to music copyright infringement is really the most likely situation. There's no need to imply it was anything else.
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!)
This is crazy. Worked at a national ISP/telecom and one of the directors openly had a seedbox and was torrenting massive amount of things. Chalked it up as the poors being held to different standards as this person had a close relationship with one of the executives.
> Or (b) that he was personally downloading porn either at the office or a corp VPN
Man, if Facebook is hiring people this dumb, it's going to make me feel a lot worse about getting rejected after interviewing there.
Mate, I got rejected by Cambridge University.
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.
Cambridge alum here. Agree; admissions is a crapshoot. Job interviews are a crapshoot. C'est la vie.
I worked there for years. I assure you, based on my experience, that there are a lot of dumb people there making > $500k/year.
There's a strong luck component to interviewing.
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 person is supposedly an executive. I doubt most executive could pass an FAANG technical interview.
In a related article linked at the bottom of the article's page, it says Meta confirmed it was a former data engineer:
https://torrentfreak.com/meta-confirms-data-engineer-is-behi...
I doubt executives even go through the typical employee interview hazing. It's more vibes and "do you know the right people or go to the right prestigious school?"
You may remember this story, from a month or two ago: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/07/on-the-run-for-20-yea...
man, that's grand, especially the last paragraph. I should be less modest with my resume :)
"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."
Executive (and upper management) hiring is much more about owning and using risk, getting the management unit (your part of the org) all aligned and singing the same tune, and for executives showing that you've done this successfully across distinct business units (eg sales and engineering).
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.
is "executive" a well defined term for american corporate law? like "a person who can allocate funds from the master bank account without approval" or something like that?
generally unilateral decision making (up to a point) + supervisory functions of an entire group / department / vertical
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.
"Officer" is typically anyone who can bind the company contractually.
Not really, It's just another term for upper management. It's just shorthand for any employee whose title begins with "Chief" or has "Executive" in it (among others like Chairman, President, etc).
Usually, people who can make large decisions for the business without approval from higher-level employees.
They are, they probably just did slightly better at regurgitating leetcode problems than you
Did you apply for the VR porn training team?
It’s a massive company, with more than 75k employees. At that scale you have to have a lot of dumb people
and, like, literally you need some dumb or mediocre people.
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.
The employees at any particular company are a random sample of the population, and will therefore have traits that occur in the larger population.
No? It’s not a random selection. The interview process doesn’t just randomly pick people
To be fair, you'd have to be pretty dumb to apply to work at Meta anyway.
Or ideologically aligned
I wouldn’t, lack of moral fiber is a key factor they look for
Just tell yourself that they rejected you because they thought you had too strong a moral compass and you wouldn't click with the company's overall lack of ethics
It's even worse that they overpay people who do this type of thing while at work.
How is their network security that lax? I feel like if I tried run a torrent at work, netops would be hunting my ass down immediately.
In my experience, executives get special treatment.
like, literally send a request to the board for unlimited, no restrictions stuff.
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.
as someone once forced to put Windows XP back on a hospital CEO's laptop in 201X... yeah.
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 (:
Does anyone honestly believe that Zuck doesn't have his own history with filesharing? Any computer nerd from that time would have deep knowledge of filesharing.
Zuck & co released Wirehog in late 2004… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehog
we was all running napster
but i ain't dumb enough to do it off work IPs
Who'd have thought a Meta exec would be arrogant enough to assume they can get away with this (!!). /s
From TFA: "Strike 3 suggests the downloads are consistent with work to make the headset compatible with adult films"
> 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.
Why was torrenting needed anyway? Meta could’ve easily reached out to adult media providers to work on VR headset compatibility under an NDA. Or hired a third party contractor to do it.
It’s much more expensive. You as a consumer can buy a movie for $5 with a DVD on sale. But tos generally don’t include commercial activities. If you reach out to the film studio to get their permission, they can charge you anywhere from $10K to $1M+ for same thing.
And I’m sure meta paid for some specific content but they generally wouldn’t want to set a precedent where they paid everyone.
> But tos generally don’t include commercial activities
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?
Meta wants to make their service compatible with meta vr headsets. They don’t require ongoing access to the content. The media vendor would also benefit from this, so an agreement is in the interest of both parties.
> And I’m sure meta paid for some specific content
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.
Leaks would be a very, very big problem given how aggressively they want to promote child safety and restrictions.
Fair. Hence it makes sense to engage a third party vendor to handle this project. Both the media provider and Mets stands to gain here
> Meta was using porn for AI training or …
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.
What is the moral difference between training on porn vs other genres of media?
The potential output. You train on movies and animation and you get a model that can
- 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.
I suspect their goal is to train a model for detecting adult material, so that they can block it, which isn't necessarily an amoral goal
Just never ever ask how they train the models for CSAM.
I'm not a fan of joking about those efforts. The people doing that work to catch predators and prevent their evil from reaching the general public are heroes.
"Guys we can't sell a VR headset that doesn't do porn good, nobody will buy it" seems just as likely to me.
I don't follow your logic, VR headsets are fully capable of displaying 3D scenes. That's a solved problem.
But would still be a copyright violation
I'm not a lawyer, but in my view copyright violations center around distribution, not necessarily the method by which a work is obtained
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
As in all cases it depends on jurisdiction. For example where I am performers have a right to not be recorded so you may in fact not make such recording, you didn’t not necessarily violate copyright but you violated related rights.
And likewise if you distribute any sort of copy of the recording you made you are violating at least one if not more copyrights.
Which is why torrenting is the dumbest way to do this, since every downloader is also an uploader. That is what gets torrenters locked up. It is possible to leach only, but its not the default mode, and if this guy was broadcasting his IP address, then he was seeding... distributing.
You expose your IP address even when not seeding, and I don't know if this person was seeding these torrents
> "In short, this is a lot for one person to torrent on an average day, particularly one who has a demanding job," Strike 3 writes. The company believes the pattern makes more sense as AI training data or research.
I hope they drag Meta hard and get every penny for this.
IT is usually not the one doing the enforcement. They typically only do the monitoring and may report some activity above thresholds.
Legal is usually the one initiating then engaging with HR to do enforcement.
Strike 3, the studio involved, files more lawsuits in the USA than anyone else. I think that makes them the biggest Copyright Trolls of all time. They run their own BitTorrent monitoring operation.
Meta, the other company involved, engaged in industrial scale piracy in pursuit of training data[1].
Let me break out the world's tiniest violin for them.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...
Fantastic, so we win either way
They downloaded pdfs (shock and horror) to create and publish the first open weights LLM
Your ethics shouldn't be dictated by US copyright law
> Your ethics shouldn't be dictated by US copyright law
If your ethics deem Meta ethical, they probably need recalibrating.
Actor and action conflation is incredibly common these days. If someone is bad and worth condemnation, all their actions must also be bad.
Good action can also be a way for bad actors to buy good will so they can extend their other bad actions. Plus some of these actions are done on the interest of furthering the interest of the bad actors.
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.
No need to be rude. Luckily, I also have room in my brain to hold two entire thoughts, and can acknowledge a deed and it's context are differnt too.
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
If a bad actor’s actions appear good, skepticism is warranted.
The actor is bad, the deed is good. Though, the open sourcing of llama 2 and beyond was pushed by Yann Lecun and others, some of whom have moved on from the company. Zuckerberg supports the AI initiatives but he's hardly leading them himself.
What argument do you have that releasing llama was actually good? They gave AI access to terrorists and criminals as much as they did to independent researchers. Arguably they are partially responsible for escalating blackhat cyber capabilities that are contributing to the rapid rise in attacks. Open source is neither inherently good or bad. The most you could really say is that it was accelerationist
> They gave AI access to terrorists and criminals as much as they did to independent researchers.
That's an odd hill to die own. Lots of despicable people use iPhones. Does that Apple is somehow complicit?
No, it means iPhones are neither good nor bad.
https://twitter.com/dril/status/831805955402776576
Adolph Hitler is often credited (with varying accuracy) with the Autobahn, fixing Germany’s unemployment and launching Volkswagen to produce affordable motor vehicles.
None of these make him a good person any more than Meta’s occasional positive acts make it a good company.
Im glad we agree then, provided you assume neither building the autobahn or affordable vehicles are evil.
My whole point was bad actor /= bad deed.
It's more likely that their motivation was bad.
Like they wanted Llama to kill babies, or what?
> Your ethics shouldn't be dictated by US copyright law
Corporate lawlessness has no good outcomes for humans.
i don't necessarily disagree but others have been jailed for this activity (or like aaron swarz, driven to suicide)
Are you saying laws shouldn’t restrict any company that give out an open source next-token iterator?
I think that’s more hopium ethics.
The company that owns the copyright should be allowed to enforce it. I don't see how that can be called trolling.
> 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.
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.
I'm torn on this. While I can imagine Meta being morally corrupt enough to do all of this, I just can't imagine an exec taking on personal liability for the company.
I don't believe, but this feels a bit like:
"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...
When they start torrenting on residential IP addresses and bring the content to work to train their AI, they should be.
That's a lot of ifs. Equally likely that the guy was just running a seedbox.
https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/?ip=162.192.7.34
Lots of GDP entries there. Uh. Like terabytes of it downloaded.
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.
how long are these videos? 2,973 of them (and not even the 20,000 count)? even at 15 minute clips that is like... five years?! watching non-stop.
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.
I doubt many consumers of these videos are watching them straight through like a normal movie.
Don't know how they're keeping up with the plot like that.
Hoarders gonna hoard
I've heard the same about pirated software, people who have downloaded thousands of programs. People are strange.
umm it’s called archiving, thank you very much.
3000 fifteen minute clips is 750 hours, or 31 days. A lot, but not five years.
Checkout r/DataHoarder for what kind of person does this.
It's about having the library, not about reading the books.
A few decades back, someone I know had entire CD towers worth of burned CDs & DVDs of porn. Easily onto the thousand discs.
This was mostly a hoarding thing. Hoarders gonna hoard.
It said it was AT&T, which probably implies AT&T Fiber. Gigabit fiber.
humans aren't watching it mate, they're training something related to VR
I wonder if they were using the porn to train moderation filters.
Let the man run a porn seedbox in peace
Very dumb but what if he claims he was only using to train an AI model, what was that ruling on copyright material being ok to training AI models on. Would this hold up in court or not?
Rulings have said that reproduction of AI models which were trained on copyrighted material are not violating the copyright on those materials. The initial copying of those materials without paying is illegal regardless. You still have to buy or otherwise legally view a copy of the book/movie/photo to train your model on it.
Downloading it and making a copy on your disk are separate potentially infringing events from copying into memory and a model.
I don't know a single company where an executive would be downloading training data themselves.
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.
> I don't know a single company where an executive would be downloading training data themselves.
Maybe an ethically bankrupt company with a "move fast and break things" ethos looking for exactly the plausible deniability your comment hints at?
> the plausible deniability
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.)
They might be in the clear if they were solely downloading (might) but if he's also seeding then it's just copyright violations.
Pretty sure you could unredact this based on the length of the name in this font. People who redact things don't really think very hard.
Between that and the tenure, yeah.
i'm waiting for a name, then...
Can’t you guess?
1 - How are people torrenting and not using a VPN? 2 - How are judges still allowing this business model of sharing files then trying to shake down people that download them?
> not using a VPN
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.
What cases are you talking about? My general understanding is that if the VPN provider does not keep any logs, all that is left is timing / bandwidth correlation. If the endpoint you are connecting to isn't compromised and you connect to a high traffic node wouldn't this be essentially impossible? Unless you do some user error stuff like logging into accounts tied to your public persona?
What’s the argument if it’s on your Home internet?
When I use the VPN, I am connecting to an endpoint that 40 other people are also connected to. Did I download that file, or did one of the other 39 download it? Even the VPN provider can't tell... they keep no logs. I wouldn't want to use the VPN to phone in some bomb threat, that wouldn't even hide me 5 minutes from the feebs, but it's like an impenetrable shield for copyright troll lawyers. Smooth sailing for the last 13 or 14 years, for $3/month.
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.
Depends on the VPN. Mullvad account don’t have a username tied to you.
In countries with lax enforcement VPN use is not really needed.
In the UK you get a stern letter from your ISP and that's it.
yeah everyone knows the losses they argue for are bullshit, I really think people should see how many times lawyers and other legal professionals give each other jobs by creating a world in which they are more and more needed.
Of course legal professionals are always needed but so much of what is done today is just a kind of rent seeking.
Company I work for got sued because someone filled out a form to get contacted, got a phone call as is expected after filling out said form, then sued because they're on the do not call list. Why did you fill out the form then?
How do you know the IP in question was not the final hop of someone's VPN connection?
Sure, that's plausible... a facebook exec so dumb that they're using their personal ISP connection to run a VPN for others, and even dumber that they don't notice or don't care about a massive amount of torrent traffic through that VPN.
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...
Are you confusing Tor with a VPN? With a VPN the IP is a commercial server run by the VPN provider, and there's usually just one hop (you run an encrypted connection between yourself and the VPN provider that all your traffic is routed over, then the VPN provider makes outgoing connections on your behalf). You're relying on the VPN provider's promise to not log customer connections, but if they are honest, all connections seem like they're coming from the VPN provider and aren't traceable beyond that.
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.
Or his kid, spouse, or other household member...
Hours after they alerted Meta that similar activity was happening from their corporate network?
Read to the end. It isn't really clear how much causality can be inferred from the hours after thing.
That's a very dedicated kid.
Backdoored dad's work computer, how diabolical. ;)
Hey if the dad is into tech, decent chance the angry teenage kid is into tech too.
And probably back doors, too. Gotta verify in the downloads though.
Well the porn titles leans it a little.
There was huge traffic from Meta's corporate networks.
The idea that you'd get notified of infringing activity on corporate network and deliberately shift to residential without changing the activity is crazy. Like, it's hard to believe anyone is that dumb.
> 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.
> 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
I would think a Meta Executive who was into torrenting would know they likely had enough to lose to use something other than their home IP address.
One might think to call them “Careless People”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
Read the book, you will never trust facebook again. (if you did before)
You need to be a dumb fuck to trust them. Hey, Zuck's words, not mine.
Even better, they used a corporate network. The plaintiff is alleging that this was actually for work, since they were an executive at Reality Labs (home of Oculus.) They contend that the executive was testing VR porn as part of their job.
It is so easy to get lulled into a false sense of security.
I'd put good money on him thinking the odds of him getting caught were negligible.
This reminds me of a stand up comedy routine about people being bad at hiding their porn collections because their brain doesn't work right when they are horny.
My hero.
> arguing that a Reality Labs executive downloaded nearly 20,000 files at his home for work purposes, not for personal use
So is it a Reality Labs executive or a Meta executive? Is the headline lying?
Reality Labs is a division of Meta...
“I only broke the law to train AI your honor”
Said Muse in metallic voice.