Multiple accounts for the same person.
I doubt it’s that tiny. After all, in a lot of cases both parties are married, and whether or not it is true that half of all married women cheat, I doubt it’s a tiny fraction of that.
Am I the only one who feels actual, non-snarky sympathy for the people who got their identities exposed here? I’m with Bill Maher: I think Americans are stupid about this, and much prefer the French attitude that infidelity is not a big deal.
Allegedly there were two suicides over the weekend related to the hack.
It seems quite unconfirmed at this point.
The data was posted on the “dark web”. On a “onion” site, available through Tor.
I didn’t go to look at it, because the idea of looking for stuff on the dark web reminds me of what happens to the characters in Neil Gaiman books.
I wouldn’t say “not a big deal,” but on the whole, infidelity that doesn’t touch my relationship isn’t my problem.
As for my own relationship, I haven’t noticed anything that would make me worry about it, so I’m not going to worry about it. I’m selfish, but not possessive.
Gives me an idea for a SF story:
‘Designed to provide explicit sexchat messages for lonely men for the Ashley Madison website’s fake profiles, a computer program inadvertantly achieves sentience when a group of hackers mess with it for a lark … and goes on to wreak a terrible, yet somehow both rauchy and hilarious, vengence on the human race’
Yeah, despite my seemingly libertine attitude, I can’t comprehend the openly polyamourous lifestyle. My wife and I have a “don’t ask, don’t tell, be discreet” policy.
Here’s a listing of the dollar amounts spent by state:
It’s not a direct measure of the number of people cheating, but unless they’re charging folks in DC more than elsewhere, it’s probably close.
It’s a little surprising. Alabama, of all places, is the leader, and by a pretty good margin over #2, Colorado. DC is next, which doesn’t surprise me, even though DC is smaller than any of the others – it’s got a large, wealthy, and motivated population.
Utah’s about 2/3 of the way up. a little surprising to e, after living there for four years.
West Virginia’s way down at the bottom. Even lower than Alaska, which has two of only 3 zip codes in the country with no entries in Ashley Madison:
In other news, the Ashley Madison releases are apparently precipitating some divorce cases already:
Pretty lazy reporting on BI’s part not to spend a few minutes adjusting the ranking based on states’ population. In fact, I’m surprised journalists don’t have a tool to read numbers like that into and have it done automatically within seconds.
They did exactly that. The chart is labeled with the words ‘per Capita’.
OIC. I confess I didn’t click the link–I was going by CalMeacham’s statement that “DC is next, which doesn’t surprise me, even though DC is smaller than any of the others – it’s got a large, wealthy, and motivated population.” If it is per capita, the “even though” there makes no sense. 
ETA: After looking at it, I agree that Alabama is likely up there due to alphabetical order, and the same is probably true of Arkansas as well.
It was apparently a total sausage party
*Only 1,492 of the women in the database had ever opened their inbox to check their messages on the site. That’s compared with more than 20 million men.
Only 2,409 of the women had ever used the site’s chat function, versus more than 11 million men.
Only 9,700 of the women had ever responded to a message from another person on the site, versus almost 6 million men. (This number was greater than the number of women who checked messages because it’s possible to answer messages in bulk when you first visit the site, without ever opening your inbox.)
It’s possible that most of the women signed up but never did anything.
Either way, Newitz writes, Ashley Madison is a site where tens of millions of men write mail, chat, and spend money for women who aren’t there."*
Wowww. And who knows what percentage of that relatively meagr number are prostitutes? I thought this site might be finished because people would be afraid of another hack. But what might be the most damaging of all is the revelation that there are essentially no women there. I guess married women just find there affairs at work or something?