this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
293 points (99.3% liked)

Technology

81933 readers
2919 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

top 44 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] brsrklf@jlai.lu 147 points 2 days ago (4 children)

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.

[–] pulsewidth@lemmy.world 94 points 2 days ago (5 children)
[–] one_old_coder@piefed.social 30 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

To be fair, if I had the money, I would make my own porn NAS too. I would call it "the NASS" or something.

[–] Deceptichum@quokk.au 22 points 2 days ago

I’d go with ”Freak NASty”

[–] tordenflesk@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I don't have "the money" and I have 22...

[–] Fuck_u_spez_@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

22TB or 22 porn NASSes?

[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago

That's some dedication

[–] M137@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago
[–] village604@adultswim.fan 14 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] pulsewidth@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

Damn, the title got me. Thanks for the correction.

[–] GreenShimada@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

9 TB of work porn.

Considering it was Meta, it's probably 90% CSAM anyway.

[–] mPony@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

You wouldn't download a 9

[–] Railcar8095@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Gotta be at the office.

[–] brsrklf@jlai.lu 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Absolutely. Or, as they say, "sporadic" amounts.

[–] FishFace@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] brsrklf@jlai.lu 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] FishFace@piefed.social 0 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 days ago

Too early for the Metaverse, just in time for Metawankers.

[–] Spacehooks@reddthat.com 2 points 2 days ago

Meta has such nice work benefits. They offer a special room for viewing too or just have a wank at desk?

[–] SirSamuel@lemmy.world 35 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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!?

[–] FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 17 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] SirSamuel@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

12 years ago I was the proud owner of a half a terabyte USB drive.

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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?

[–] FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] remon@ani.social 4 points 2 days ago

Those are rookie numbers, you need to up your game!

[–] jaybone@lemmy.zip 18 points 2 days ago (3 children)

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.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] village604@adultswim.fan 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] CriticalMiss@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] eestileib@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 2 days ago

Seriously, ain't nobody torrenting terabytes of porn at work without approval.

[–] HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

But what if the people in question are the IT guys?

[–] billwashere@lemmy.world 17 points 2 days ago

Those are rookie numbers

[–] Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago

Gee, that's a lot of homework.