Five Questions With the Guy Who Made the MySpace Private Photo Torrent

Submitted by MacRonin on January 24, 2008 - 8:31am

Five Questions With the Guy Who Made the MySpace Private Photo Torrent - Via Threat Level:

A TribalWar.com denizen called "DMaul" harvested half-a-million images from MySpace accounts early this month, before MySpace closed its back door access to private profiles on Friday. Now he's posted the pictures over BitTorrent as a 17-gigabyte download.

Why'd he do it? Here's the full text of my e-mail interview with DMaul, who declined to reveal his real name. (See the story at Wired.com for context).

THREAT LEVEL: Your script seems not to distinguish between public and private profiles, and Myspaceprivateprofile.com was returning photos from public pages, not just private. So is it safe to assume that pictures from both public and private profiles are included in the torrent?

DMaul: The script that I wrote uses the myspaceprivateprofile.com interface to find the images. Therefore, it uses the same criteria. From my own testing, it appeared that myspaceprivateprofile.com did not return public images from public profiles. It only returned public images from private profiles. It did not return private images from either public or private profiles.

TL: What range of Friend IDs did you run?

Maul: I ran a few ranges simultaneously. The ranges included 10000000-100025929, 276972888-277052902, 276100000-276197852. As you can see, the 43,000 profiles with pictures is a tiny percentage of the number of MySpace profiles (numbering 300mil or more).

TL: How long did it take? When did you start/stop?

Maul: I started the script at approximately 11am on the 10th of January. Other than minor disturbances, the script ran until approximately 9am on the 14th. It took approximately 94 hours total to download the images. I only chose to stop the script due to the problems associated with handling that many files. The hack didn't last too much longer after I stopped.

TL: What prompted you to do it? Were you satisfied or disappointed in the results, and did any photos stand out to you?

Maul: I think the greatest motivator was simply to prove that it could be done. It is ridiculous to think that there is privacy on public websites. These types of situations are more education than anything. It is much like the piracy scene, it is not a matter of IF but WHEN these images would be released. I made it public that I was saving these images, however I am certain there are mischievous individuals using these hacks for nefarious purposes.

I was somewhat surprised how easy it was to create the script. I didn't spend much more than 15 minutes coding and testing the script, and it never failed to perform correctly. As I was looking through the images, I was surprised that the images were not as revealing as one might think the private pictures of MySpace might be. If you followed the mass media coverage of MySpace, you would think that all the women would be "sluts" (as TribalWar would say) and all the men would be pedophiles. This is simply not the case. The media, of course, will not run a story titled "Myspace is safe and clean". That isn't sensational at all.

There were some risqué images, but these are vastly outnumbered by the types of images you'd expect at flickr or webshots. I wasn't disappointed in these findings, simply for it to prove that the internet doesn't corrupt as the media would like everyone to believe. I did find that the majority of stereotypes applied to MySpace users are, indeed, true. Almost every single profile had a picture containing a women performing the "stupid lip thing from a odd angle." One final thing about the images I viewed: I did not witness anything that I found to be obviously illegal. Maybe the criminals are keeping it to themselves again.

TL: What's your day job?

I perform computer maintenance, repair, networking, etc. for a small it support company. I work with hardware. The programming that I do is all learned from personal use.


(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)

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