Adult Film Producer Unmasks Prolific 'John DOE' Torrent Pirate as Meta Executive
torrentfreak.com324 points by speckx 8 hours ago
324 points by speckx 8 hours ago
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.
I download clips but I mostly don't really watch most of what I download; I do when the internet is down.
I've seen anti terrorist police appear at offices because certain executives were trading so much porn they assumed there must be messages hidden in it.
The noise has always been about the UN private network which is apparently absolutely full of anything you might ever want.
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
> like literally too, 20k films at let's say 30m average is 400+ continuous, unbroken days worth of content
You could run them in parallel, like a Zoom or Teams mtg, but with each square a different movie.
Would be more entertaining than the next status mtg.
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!
> 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?
No, for example, people torrent vastly more mp3's than they could ever listen to
Being a tech, I had access to people's mp3 collection so my collection got huge but I never listened to them.
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
> 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?
Most devices should be using temporary dynamic IPv6 addresses, for this exact reason. I believe this is the default on most Linux distributions, not sure about others.
I felt quite let down when I realised Fedora which bills itself as "Free & private" didn't use temporary addresses by default and I had to go hunting for the magic configuration files to enable it as it's not exposed in the UI either.
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/ipv6-privacy-option-a...
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.
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...)
Cox v. Sony Music went all the way to the Supreme Court. The lawsuit started in a Virginia US District Court in 2018 and the Supreme Court opinion was in 2026. [1][2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox_Communications,_Inc._v._So...
[2] https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/cox-communications-inc-v-so...
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 went to a similar school. It depended on major. If it was a major that the school was known for, say the top ranked CS school...then it was 100% that a grad was someone who was noticeably much, much smarter than most people. If they were at the same school but in a much less well recognized major (at my school...let's say history), then they were much closer to the average. If you are seeing students at Cambridge who are in prestige majors but without obvious skills...something else is happening and it isn't good. Otherwise, you are probably just seeing the differences between different majors.
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.
20 years ago, this wasn't the case (at least in tech in SV). If you are seeing this today, its because of something (or somethings) specific. Could be the general increase in size of the companies or industry, a problem with recruiting or a problem with the universities that feed into that industry. Maybe a combination of those things. But 20 years ago, you could tell who worked in tech and who didn't.
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...
Multiple articles, multiple cases, multiple people.
Today's Torrentfreak article is about "an executive" and references the article you have linked thus:
This is not the first time a Reality Labs employee has surfaced in the case. Earlier this summer, Meta confirmed that a former data engineer at the division was behind a Comcast connection linked to 97 films.
Or not - still much is under the fog of reporting ongoing partial disclosures.
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 definitely 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.
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
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.
> ...you need average folks who are going to STFU and get the unfun, unsexy tasks done.
This task might have been the sexiest work available at Meta, and there's nothing average about a guy that can single-handedly "process" 2,973 porn vids.
If Mark ever needs a right hand, this man is it.
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.
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 (:
It's even worse that they overpay people who do this type of thing while at work.
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.
Zuck & co released Wirehog in late 2004… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehog
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
The second read, (b), is irrelevant with respect to Meta's liability for the downloads before the switch to a residential IP, i.e., the downloads that prompted the email to Meta's lawyers
> 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.
where I live, anything in public view is allowed to be filmed/recorded, which is how the news can record things on the street without getting a release from those that they filmed, and they certainly distribute those recordings
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...
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 someone is bad and worth condemnation, all their actions must also be bad.
> I don't have to take a brain-dead shortcut of claiming every deed is bad.
What? Reconcile these seemingly opposing statements?
The second sentence of the first post was explication of the sentiment described and criticized by the preceding sentence. It is the sentiment I am calling out.
The first post could or should have been more clearly written with an em-dash, but then people would start calling me a clanker. /s
> Actor and action conflation is incredibly common these days — If someone is bad and worth condemnation, all their actions must also be bad.
Bad person can do good thing for bad motives. example: The evil wife beating doctor who saves a baby just because they get paid for it.
My "autistic" brain can recognize that saving babies is still a good thing. I don't have to like the doctor, or their reasons. For whatever reason, a large portion of people see a comparable solution and instantly start arguing that saving babies is bad.