A friend of mine has a relatively common first name and last name, and she regularly gets mail that is clearly not meant for her. She started a Facebook group for homonyms to help her route mail, and it now have a hundred members and have helped people get important documents.
At some point, they even organized an impersonation because someone needed to retrieve an official document and couldn’t be there in person. Another member nearby offered to go and get it. “Won’t you need my ID for that? — Oh, I have one with just the right name…”
My name isn’t super known, but it happened to be the same as that of a very big fish in the financial institution I worked for.
Thankfully these people were working mostly through physical meetings and calls, so no sensitive info was leaked, but I did get calendar invites to discuss the future of entire countries as an engineering intern.
I used the name a couple times to set up our internal meetings in the fancier upper floors, so we could have whiteboard discussions over a fancy hardwoods table. No one questioned the name appearing in the entrance display as the current user.
Not identical, but I once shared most of the first name as well as my last name with a VP of research at the company I worked for, and we were in the same technical field. My (much less impressive) publication record got confused with his frequently and I always wondered if it gave me a career boost.
>> My name isn’t super known, but it happened to be the same as that of a very big fish in the financial institution I worked for.
Same thing happened to me. My name in outlook was the right under a high up VP. Outlook auto correct would bring my name up at the top of the list so people would just hit enter and write their email.
Same thing, I was getting some emails I clearly should not have been viewing, with budgetary spreadsheets and names of people who were being considered for layoffs.
One of them I sent back to the VP and diplomatically explained the mixup. I didn't get any emails for a few months and wondered how they fixed the situation. I guess they gave the VP and underscore in his name instead of the normal firstname.lastname@company.com so now when I typed in my name, his came up first.
My deadname was not only owned by some other people in my industry, it was also used by someone else born in the same hospital, same ward on the same day, on the same morning as me. That was endlessly irritating.
Glad to see that after five years post abandoning it my contribution to the name is basically gone from the internet now.
>>it was also used by someone else born in the same hospital, same ward on the same day, on the same morning as me. That was endlessly irritating
How so? Other than a funny coincidence, how would that ever come up anywhere in anything unless you both lived in a tiny community where everyone knows each other. I just don't understand how someone born on the same day as you having the same name was "irritating".
An ex-gf of mine’s dad had the same name and birthday as a convict. Caused him plenty of trouble when crossing the border apparently.
Hopefully that’s not the case for GP
Used to work as a manager at a pizza place and we had a guy apply to deliver who had the same name as... their son.
Allegedly Jr. had a lengthy record including some drug offenses and something like a DUI / DWI. Naturally Sr. And Jr's records got crossed since they have the same First, Last, and Address, which caused Sr. many headaches including that we required a driving record check that would fail on a DUI / DWI.
>I just don't understand how someone born on the same day as you having the same name was "irritating".
Because, lacking a national identity number, the natural way to distinguish to people in a system when the name wouldn’t do is going to be age/birthdate or location.
Try it sometime... My name is somewhat common, but not even close to "John Smith" common... but even at about 1:20,000 or so I've seen a few conflicts just from my name. Another me was born the same day in the state I reside in... I've had a few things on my credit history get tangled up over it.
I've also met two others with the same name, purely coincidentally, not related. I worked on an access/security software team at a major bank (about 350k employees internationally at the time), I found 3 bugs just by being me. Since even SSN/Tax-Id varied, there were several ways to match identity and I had conflicts in a couple of them with other employees. Last Name + last-4 of tax/ssn/national-id (for whatever country the employee was in) was one of them. I don't recall the other two right now, been about 15 years.
Discuss it as in “there’s elections in Argentina, let’s see how we react to the change of administration”. Not as in “I will replace Argentina’s president”.
At least the titles/descriptions didn’t contain anything to consider pulling a Snowden about it.
OK thanks, but well, my comment was a bit tongue in cheek anyway. That nuance didn't survive the passage all the way from intended meaning to text interpretation it seems.
Yes, and the reason I've commonly heard for the bailout was that it is to help US based investors. That's a clear example of the US financial sector influencing foreign politics.
Just because some people accidentally invite journalists into Signal meetings to discuss active bombing campaigns, doesn't mean everyone running a financial institution is vying to be named the next President of Argentina.
> You're being naive. This is exactly what they do.
You are being knee-jerk judgemental.
They didn't say those things don't happen, just that it didn't appear the comms they received by mistake looked like less sinister interactions with the political world.
I have a relatively rare name — I’ve actually never met anyone with my last name, never mind someone with my full name — and this happens to me regularly. Last week I got a job rejection from New Zealand post, for a while I was getting someone’s pay stub notifications from the US, etc.
I suspect it’s because I was the first to register the first.last@gmail.com address for my name. I guess it’s a bit like owning a simple noun .com domain.
I use my lastname [at] gmail (same as my HN username). Over the years, I’ve received all sorts of misdirected messages: medical, financial, support, even real estate documents. When it seems important, I do my best to contact the sender and let them know.
What I’ve learned is that “no-reply” email addresses can cause real harm in situations where it’s critical to reach an actual person.
My dad's first name is my last name so my last name @gmail is taken by him :)
But I have a relatively rare first name and even rarer last name due to my dad having a very rare first name, so I easily snagged first.last. Pretty sure to this day I've never even seen anyone with my dad's first name (or my last name).
Meanwhile, my coworkers name is literally Adam Smith and his usernames tend to be adamsmith2 or 3 or 4.
I once worked at a place that has two Brian Smiths who worked at desks across from each other. That was quite bizarre.
One place I worked, we had one guy with the same personal and family names of the (then) Director General of the BBC… working on a project with another guy who also shared both.
I am not the horror film director I share a name with.
Absolutely... I've had the same issue (nickname is gmail name), and constantly amazed how many people don't "get" that you can't just claim any gmail address you like and start using it on websites anyway.
I've gotten student financial aid docs, various product mailing lists, order receipts etc... it's amazing how many places take an email address and just start spamming without any validation at all.
> Over the years, I’ve received all sorts of misdirected messages […]
Looking at my text messages, surely these are a mix of serious business and the starts of scams. How unsavory to think that helping someone could be a bad thing.
I have lastname.firstname@gmail.com because first.last was already taken.
Just curious, do gmail accounts ever expire? Will I ever get the chance to snag the other one? Or does it forever belong to my nemesis and life-long enemy?
Even if your google account is deleted, the email address is NOT recycled because it can be used to impersonate people - maybe the previous owner still has physical/digital accounts linked to that old email. As far as I know most services do this - an email address once registered is never released again.
Yea I own first.last@gmail.com for my name too and I get emails for who I think is the same person fairly often. Like job stuff, professional education emails, etc. I used to reply to them saying wrong person but have given up...the guy must not care about not getting these emails...
My first name is very uncommon and my last name is very common.
I am on the other side of this problem and was surprised because it is very easy to contact me. When the other person with my name forwarded the emails, it was all careless and unwanted recruiter mail. Someone goes into work, types first.last@gmail, and hits send without doing one Google search. Incredible.
I'm in the same boat, except my first and last name are fairly common.
My gmail account is not my primary email address, and to be honest I don't know if I could manage making it my primary because of the amount of rubbish I get.
I recently wanted to introduce someone to our internal recruiters to a person with a long, uniqueish name. The recruiter was like: they did respond with „I’m not interested“. But the person was like: I’ve never got a mail.
Turned out the whatever tool our recruiter used spit out „first.lastname@gmail.com“ even though the person in question doesn’t own that email.
I've gotten a wide enough variety of stuff (mortgage paperwork, homeowners insurance, game service accounts) that some of it has to be organically entered, but that is a good note. Crazy that any system would be set up that way, but HR tech is a clusterfuck.
I am lastname.firstname@gmail.com, but I wouldn't be surprised if something similar is happening in some instances.
I have met someone with my last name, if its not hyphenated, which mine is. My name is as unique as it gets with hyphenating. I never use my hyphenated name anywhere other than 100% legal stuff.
My address is the same. Someone with my name thinks their email address is firstlast@gmail.com
Its annoying especially since we have the same bank and they are not very good at paying their credit card on time. I therefore get their bank emails. Initially
It will always have me confused as weight wait. I don't have any balance on my credit card. Was this fraud?
I have pretty rare first and last name, but somehow have gotten random person's car service receipts (and reminders) from a service place in the US (I live in NZ).
There car has a lot of problems.
I got on twitter pretty early too, and just have a short first time as my @, and occasionally get DMs about getting my @, but no one wants to hand out cash for it. The most I've been offered is $50.
But most just expect me to give it for free.
I have a sufficiently uncommon last name to be able to figure out which branch of the family the misdirected emails are meant for. Was quite nice getting updates from the chip shop we used to get fish and chips from when we went to visit grandma, intended for someone who afaik I never met.
I had an Australian criminal defense attorney with my name, register the .au version of my personal domain.
I used to get very sensitive documents sent to me. A lot of juvenile cases. I suspect people could have gone to jail for sharing it.
It's really on the sender, to make sure, but it's still a nasty situation.
It eventually stopped. I think they ended up registering a different domain name. I used to diligently respond, when sent erroneous documents, but never got a reply. I destroyed them, but there's no telling where other copies might have gone.
> At some point, they even organized an impersonation because someone needed to retrieve an official document and couldn’t be there in person. Another member nearby offered to go and get it. “Won’t you need my ID for that? — Oh, I have one with just the right name…”
If it hypothetically was a crime, I wonder how often it would actually get prosecuted given someone used their real ID, showing the office failed to check anything other than a name known to have dupes, and/or given they had no intent to steal something and acted with knowledge and permission of the intended recipient, showing no malicious intent. I can imagine reasons those wouldn’t be considered a valid defense, but I guess it probably depends on what office & document & law we’re talking about.
My name is X and another person also named X tells me to gather their documents from the office. Other X also signs a paper for me that says I'm allowed to do this.
I ask the office clerk: "Hi, I'm here to retreive the documents for X". He checks my ID and gives me the documents without asking for written permission from the other X.
It's deception by omission, but there is no fraud. I was legally allowed to do this. It's also a win for everyone because it avoids complications.
So the story says. But what if they didn't? What if it turned out the person receiving the document from the person picking it up also wasn't the intended recipient. How would they know? And if so they'd be holding a document that they shouldn't have in the first place.
You could easily be a paw in an identity theft play like that.
There's no sense in quibbling over a vague and imprecise summary of the concept. Legally, fraud requires an injured party. In our scenario here, nobody was injured, so no fraud. Whether temporarily possessing a document to hand it to its intended recipient counts as "obtaining" is not really the pertinent question.
I suspect it may fall afoul of a law about making false statements to the government, but that's distinct from fraud.
That's debatable. If I let my friends impersonate me to use my zoo membership for free entrance, then were clearly defrauding the zoo (obviously that's not high stakes, but I dare someone to argue it's not). If one of a set of identical twins is better at math and takes all the math tests for their sibling, that's pretty clearly academic fraud, again pretty low stakes but fraud is still fraud
Key note because in case someone decides to go bad faith here, I think the gp comments use case of fraud is a positive thing (if a bit dangerous). Redefining a term just because you don't like the pejorative implications is not a positive thing, though.
There are so many things wrong with this thread. At least you make an effort, but the categorical dismissals are interesting as well and probably explain to some extent why so many hackers end up in trouble with the law.
It's pretty simple: they are deceiving the other party that the document was handed to the right person, the consequences of which range from 'meh' to spending 6 years behind bars.
Let's say this was a summons for a court case. Then the judge would believe the papers were served properly, when in fact they were never served. Permission doesn't enter into it here, it is wilful deception by two parties of a third. The same name should not normally be enough to get away with this but assuming the story is real (there are many reasons to doubt this, such as the ID matching the name, but nothing else) it all depends on who does the checking. In some cases you might not even go home without a small detour in case you are found out (for instance, because the person handing the document over is familiar with the real recipient).
So, jurisdiction matters, what that document was matters, whether the permission was granted in writing (procuration), who the counterparty was, what the value of the document was, whether the parties lived in the same state/province or country and whether or not the permission was communicated to the person passing the document to the wrong recipient (probably not) and lots of other factors besides, such as the person giving permission still evading some legal obligation, which - conveniently - the story doesn't relate (and which hinges on what that document was).
And that's before we get into the wilder options of the second person being social engineered because after all, the only way they could be sure that they were acting on behalf of the real recipient would be to check their identity, in person, and with someone who is able to do that in a way that is legally binding.
I think you are massively overestimating the legal follow-through of an administration with opening hours so tight and irational they would be scadalous at a lingerie show.
I'm Irish and have a common firstname.lastname@gmail.com
At some point the head of a national hospital thought he had that address and wasn't using his official email for everything, I got several emails that should not have been for me and some were quiet sensitive, I always emailed back the sender to let them know and eventually I emailed his secretary as it kept happening. I've also received purchase order confirmations from Australia, building contracts from Canada, HR emails from a university to which I had to confirm I had deleted the mail as letting them know led to GDPR investigation
I’m in the midst of a similar situation. My firstinitial.lastname email keeps getting very sensitive legal documents from law firms handling the case of someone who does not seem to know what their actual email address is. I called the firm and told them they needed to have an in-person meeting with their client and get a correct email address from them. That seemed to help for a few months. But now I’m getting emails again from a different law firm.
And I worked IT for legal firm, if we were not sending documents over email, we would get replaced by the client.
I spent 3 months on secure document transfer portal system, got scrapped after 4 months because clients wanted their forms as Word/PDF and they wanted them without hopping through any hoops.
Yes I know this was about wrong delivery address (person with same name, wrong account); the point is that email is not completely secure - certainly not for very sensitive (legal) content
Gmail can be fetched via IMAP and leave Gmail's infra entirely. And I don't think Google guarantees that their implementation stays fully on their own owned infra. It's a reasonable assumption but I'd never trust that for a security guarantee.
Email is not an end-to-end secure data protocol without the use of client side encryption/decryption like PGP/GPG, but even then, sender/receiver and time are all in the envelop metadata.
Probably because Law Firms arent necessarily computer security firms. Lots of people have terrible op sec. Additionally if you the recipient are on gmail it stops mattering, now Google knows your legal woes.
Exactly, I’d never use Gmail for anything sensitive. Even for just personal emails I use my own mailserver.
(And again, for truly sensitive stuff I don’t use email at all)
Sure even though, as most others, my server supports TLS, having your email not leave gmail at all may be slightly more secure.
Part of the point however was that when either server or receiver is using Gmail, your possibly confidential email content is still in Google’s hands. Using a personal server reduces that part of the attack surface. Still this does not mean I vacate my overall point that email in general is suboptimal from a secop standpoint.
Why’s that even relevant if the recipient is the wrong address? Email isn’t particularly secure anywhere, and gmail has forwarding and IMAP and aliases and other services that send emails outside of gmail. But sending sensitive documents to the wrong recipient, which was the topic that started this sub-thread, is a case where it does not matter how secure your servers are.
Sure it is, and your own comment above about gmail to gmail being fairly secure demonstrated that. Using a photocopier is intentional, and everyone knows what a photocopier is. Most people don’t know what IMAP is, and an email sender does not know if the recipient uses IMAP.
And this is still irrelevant to sending email to the wrong recipient, so I don’t know why you’re stuck on infra security.
Even if the law firm uses a Gmail account - which most of course don’t - Google still has access to your sensitive legal email content.
(And that’s apart from the meta data leaking)
if you attach documents by linking to a Google Drive document, sure.
if you attach documents 'inside' the mail (i.e. MIME encoded multipart) that is most definitely not secure.
1) you do not know how that mail gets delivered, not necessarily via servers that support encryption
2) you do not know how that mail, or the attachment, gets stored on the local machine
3) you do now know if the mail, or attachment, is sent to someone else
4) you cannot revoke the access to the document once the Need To Known stops
In our ISMS, sending Highly Sensitive data (ex: customer data) by attaching directly to a mail, is strictly not allowed by the IT charter. We explain it during an on-boarding meeting to all new staff members. And it's a fireable offense.
There are several people with my name at the company I work for. I frequently get email meant for someone else.
Worst was at another company where a person with the same name has just left, so they gave me that email address. Turned out he was subscribed to several Confluence pages for which I now received updates. But I didn't get his Confluence account, so I couldn't unsubscribe from those updates.
I have a canonical gmail address for what I thought was not such a common name pair. I get so much sensitive stuff. I used to email the sender but I have given up. One of them runs a business and the businesses that interact with his business just keep emailing me. Or stop for a couple of years, change personnel and start right back up.
Same here. My Google Account is something along the lines of jose86@gmail.com (a common hispanic first name + birth year; I'm German).
It's unusable. I have received full blown mortgage applications from couples in Mexico (including paystubs, tax forms, credit ratings, phone bills, passports). Mostly, these days, it's transaction notifications for a guy in Nigeria and phone bills for people in South America.
I have myname.wifename@gmail.com (we use it for bills, children activities, and other family stuff where you can't register more than one email address).
Neither of our names can be confused with a last name and yet I had multiple people writing to it incorrectly, including: as the email attached to a Diners credit card (I called Diners and they asked me what's the right one and "if I don't know the right one how do I know that it's wrong"), as the email for a school 400 km from home (another family must have had the same idea), once for some lawyer stuff (I then learnt that about 100 people in Italy do have my wife's name as a very uncommon last name), and lately as the recovery email for another Google account.
Your use case is why I bought my own domain name. My wife and I create shared aliases we can both send from. It’s made spousal ensuing with schools so much easier, etc.
I used to get email for an org that had a similar domain as me (they had an extra letter in the middle). Thankfully, not a very big org, I would just bounce addresses that got a lot of misdirected email and I think they shut down and that really solved the problem.
Still annoying, but not as bad as gmail. I just got an email, in Italian, about someone adding a passkey to their ebay account. No way to tell ebay it's not their address / it's not my account.
Similar boat (~25 years) and, while I've run into some sites/services that rejected my domain, I'm pretty sure it's happened fewer than 5 times, total.
YES! I have no idea if we're related, but imagine the surprise when you "first get internet at home", and my father and I decided to search our surname on Altavista, and we found foosball tables and tournaments!
> I'm Irish and have a common firstname.lastname@gmail.com
At the risk of nitpicking, @gmail.com email addresses use a dots don't matter policy [0] so really you have a common firstnamelastname@gmail.com and are free to add dots wherever you like.
Recently learned, to my surprise, that other major providers have not followed Google’s lead on this, so there are plenty of places dont.scam..me@ is a valid email (social engineering or typosquatting).
I did a similar thing during lockdown Covid era. Got online and rounded up everyone with the same name as me as we all decided not to tarnish the name, to build respect on the name, and each of us to excel in our fields. It was powerful. One’s a musician/DJ in buenos aries, the other a mechanical engineer for SpaceX, me - a software leader, another is a luthier making traditional folk instruments, and one is a writer across the pond in the EU.
A few years later Tina Fey did those commercials where she pulled in other Tina Feys and we all messaged the group like “Hey! They did it too!”. I’m sure many others did it. The world is so connected now that you should reach out and learn about your “alter-egos”.
Anyways, this reminded me of that and it’s nice to see other people have similar experiences being weird with, I guess themselves.
That is so incredibly smart. I have a very common gmail address (initial + last name) and literally hundreds of people use this mail address and I would love to resolve the countless issues I can witness from getting the mails alone, but I essentially have no chance at all.
It's ridiculous that the US still runs on name matching when you could just have a public Id number (unlike the SSN that everyone needs to pretend it's secret).
We still have to pretend SSNs are private until both law and common practice change. I expect that to be “functionally never”. Maybe within our lifetimes. Maybe.
My SSN is out there several times over at this point, thanks to breaches at phone companies, insurance companies, CRAs, ISPs, and the rest. I stopped tracking breaches that included the kind of info you’d need to impersonate me, about six years ago. The list was long and it seemed to be a pointless exercise by then.
I also have a mixed credit file with all major CRAs because of more than one person with the same name I have, one of whom lived in the same area.
Even if I didn’t have freezes everywhere, over the phone KBAs stopped working years ago even with my SSN.
The most American approach would be for SSNs to become a de facto universal ID number that you have to give everywhere, while still continuing to function as an unchangeable password to all your most important things.
I have a relatively uncommon first name (for my age group) but a very common surname. The first person I met with the same first name as me was when I was about 13 — they also had the same surname.
I used to have a very common name (before getting married and took my wife's last name). Imagine that I have firstname.lastname@gmail and somebody was genius to take firstname.lastnam@gmail.
I felt this was so stupid, that i quickly lost any willingness to try to relay the emails to their original owner, as the other person had zero interest to change their address to be harder to mistype.
I once worked at a company whose lawyer shared the same first and last name. Rarely I would get an email and then a "please don't read that, delete immediately" afterwards.
I have a similar username on a "social media" site as the founder's username. I would get hateful personal messages, requests for favors, begging for money, etc., constantly. At first I would respond to correct people, but after years and years I stopped. I just disable notifications for that site and never read my mailbox, personal messages, etc. This has been going on for about 19 years now.
The other end of the spectrum has its own problems too. My first and last names are both quite rare — deliberately so, thanks to my parents. That means when someone, say a potential employer, googles my name, it’s reasonable for them to assume every result they see is about me.
For a while, I actually liked that. It felt like having a unique identity online. Until one day I discovered someone else had created a YouTube channel under the exact same name. Presumably they happen to share this unusual combination legitimately — but the content on that channel wasn’t exactly what I’d want showing up when someone searches for me.
I tried to “correct the record” by setting up my own channel, just to add some better signals. But since YouTube isn’t my thing, my videos barely register, and Google still insists on showing the other person’s channel first.
My firstname / lastname isn’t common but if you google it you get a disbarred attorney with the same name. I’ve been asked on interviews about being disbarred; I know then that someone at the company is a sloppy “researcher”.
Dennis Ritchie (co-inventor of the C programming language) had a page on his personal web site called “My other lives” with a list of other Dennis Ritchies.
“Outside of my main professional career, I have accumulated other WWW-recorded accomplishments and have other interests. Generally I pursue these interests using separate mail addresses, SS#, and DNA.”
Interesting look into what Zuck and other mega celebrities experience day to day. I'm sure Zuck and others of a certain stature have many protection layers, but surely some things slip through and it's interesting to consider those just a tier lower that can't afford all of the security, etc.
Reminds me of the Bill Murray quote: "I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it."
It's something to remember when considering the reactions and attitudes of extremely high profile people. If you've ever felt bad because of a shitty comment posted by someone you don't know, you have just a fraction of what some people have to endure. Even when you know the comments are unreasonable and 'haters gonna hate' there's still some damage done.
High profile figures may appear distant, callous, or even fully radicalised by that onslaught. While you shouldn't have to blindly accept poor behaviour from people just because of their fame, I think you should still try to have compassion for their situation. If you think in terms of a bad person compared to bad behaviour we risk normalising a response to that behaviour that creates a feedback loop that exacerbates the problem.
Part of me wonders if there is nothing to be done. Perhaps the worst of people will still create enough poor feedback for someone famous enough. Will the majority being more compassionate mitigate the problem, I'd like to think so.
At times I'm mused that man is perhaps calibrated to live in tribes of 100. If you're known to ten million, however, you can get the 100,000x the correct dosage for whatever attention your actions draw.
Hard to fix, -- since even if people were considerate enough to make a tenfold reduction you'd still be overdosed by 10,000x.
I wonder if the emergence of "virtual celebrities" like VTubers has anything to do with that. Seems like the best of both worlds: You get the loyal fanbase and positive energy of a celebrity, but can also simply "log out" of that identity if it would negatively impact your "real" life.
Depends. If you are a really recognisable persona and you just log out one day, then expect a bunch of psycho-fan creeps looking for you in the real world.
Yeah, they'll probably always be a small number of creeps who try to doxx you, unfortunately. But I think it's still the difference between "a small number" and "everyone who has seen you on screen at some point".
An identity that is obviously constructed (like VTubers) at least signals to the audience that the real person behind the character would like to stay anonymous. I think the majority of fans would respect that wish.
Whereas celebrities who make their real-life identity into a brand - even if that brand is an obvious fiction as well - signal the opposite to their audience.
Yes. Outside of the sheer security, people telling rich people they're fake will just warrant a cute condescending laugh and they go on with their life, while the guy here is basically denied his identity.
Related phenomenon: So-called "Lolcows". Over here in Germany, we have the infamous case of "Drachenlord", a Youtuber that had a lot of negative interactions with his "fanbase" to the point that one could argue he was dependent on being harassed.
Also interesting how the definition of "famous" has changed due to that: We now have thousands of "micro-celebrities" who undoubtedly have a fan/celebrity relationship with their specific audience, yet are completely unknown to a wider audience. So even fame is now a relative term.
>Many of the truly rich people are quite anonymous
Are you trying to tell me that there are people out there worth more than Elon Musk who are not throwing money at political campaigns, funding mass projects or cultural pursuits? Because, yes, its possible for someone who is worth say, half a billion or even up to maybe 10 billion dollars or so to stay out of public life, but at a certain degree of wealth that wealth becomes institutional and closely tied to political power, so it becomes functionally impossible to remain fully anonymous. What state, what government would allow a private citizen worth so much money to go untaxed, without that person somehow being tied to the government? Or are you saying that the state, which commands use of force and violence, would not use that force to extract wealth from those who are not apart, directly, of its apparatus?
We would need to define "famous", because just because someone has a steady cam doesn't mean they're famous :P I would think the amount of "famous" "influencers" making that much is a much higher percentage.
Outside of that Twitch leak some years ago, is there any reliable data on how much content creators make?
I used to be a full-time YouTuber, and I was very successful. For my channels, the revenue estimates on Socialblade were accurate. Reality for me tended toward their high estimate.
It definitely is. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drachenlord
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an English version of the article. Maybe auto translate will get the gist across.
Small relative to the number of total influencers maybe, but I'm not sure it's a small number in absolute terms. There are an estimated 12 million full time influencers in the US, and approximately 1% of them have 100k+ followers. That means 120k people likely are making 6 figures at a minimum. Influencers with smaller audiences can still make significant income depending on engagement, sponsorship, demographic, hours worked, and platforms they are operating on.
Considering that you can be a youtuber from anywhere, making a few hundred grand annually would make you actually quite wealthy. It's not the same thing as working for a big tech company but being required to live in a very high cost of living area.
This is why people like my wife exist. They solely are the “human in the loop” on reservations making sure a human on the other side knows it’s legit. It’s a fascinating field.
Like for example how Facebook search results and graph search seem to encompass an ever enlargening circle of Friends Of Friends (and if not just reset the privacy settings to public anyway)
The website security model breaks down when people constantly try to enter your password.
The currently model assumes good behavior by most people most of the time in order for basic web services to function. Seems like an obvious vulnerability to malicious activity.
I rue the day (in 2004/5?) I got my name as my gmail address. My first name is not rare and my surname very common. Since then I've collected an eclectic group of homonyms who I just can't get out my inbox. The list includes: the retired English nurse who races remote control yachts and never pays his telco bill, the South African gold miner whose best new spots I am privy too, the NZ sports shop chain owner with a large property portfolio linked to my identity, the English lad on probation who ignores my suggestions to improve his dire CV presentation, and the Perth member of an illegal motorcycle group who is called occasionally to ride outs for fallen members.
John Jacob Jingleheimer cfeb6ddc-43a5-4ba9-8a28-b71d93407c78, that's my name too. Whenever I go out, the people always shout, cfeb6ddc-43a5-4ba9-8a28-b71d93407c78
Yes, Croatia moved to OIB, which is randomly generated unlike the MBG which was derived and contains personal information, like date of birth, region and gender.
Both points sound really weak I‘m afraid. From the perspective of a ruler of a country, both are much larger attack vectors for adversaries than opportunities for myself.
> Countries don’t really want unique IDs per person
Given the number is countries that already have those and those that attempt it every few years... I'd say it's not correct.
For spies, you just issue multiple identities - the origin country shouldn't have any issues with that part. It already happened for witness protection level stuff.
For voting... yeah, that's a citation needed. Politicians mostly worry about foreigners coming to vote.
As someone moved several times in my life I could support (potentially several) personal uuid with global post routing service. Having declaring new postal address to all essential and random places one by one where I was mandated to give out to receive something I couldn't miss (authorities, banks, essential service providers, all else) is a common nuisance in an otherwise difficult period of life. Having a trustful[*] service (preferably post services itself, trusted parcel services) that translates a postal uuid to a current address each time a postal mail is supposed to be sent, current living address is righfully needed, would be a great advance (some countries have a postal address change service locally, some partially, that does similar).
[*] trustful, yes, that is a hard nut to crack! Who can be trusted with physical address and for what purpose, but in some sense it may be better for its controlled nature rather than the wild west of postal address world that we live in.
In The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, the anarchists have names assigned at birth by a computer, guaranteed to be unique. They are gender-neutral (I think their artificial language doesn't have the possibility for gendered names) and monomial.
(I highly recommend reading the book, it's one of my favourite novels.)
They are not guaranteed to be unique as I recall, at one point the main character gets in a fight with a guy who demanded he change his name since he was tired of getting confused.
Ursula Le Guin didn't sugarcoat anarchism, at least, though I still think the depiction of the main planet system is a lot more depressingly plausible.
Pronounceable by *someone* or by you? Try getting together a native Cantonese speaker, Arabic speaker, and Inuktitut speaker and find a name all three of them can pronounce without noticeable issues.
I tried using Google translate's voiceover, it seems fine? I don't have an iPhone so I can't compare with Siri. It is obviously a nonsensical string of ten characters, but all hangeul characters should be pronouncible.
that is silly. Obviously it should be the hash of someone’s genetic code plus the hash of the mind state vector at last checkpoint (to account for twins and clones)
Even monozygotic twins do not have absolutely identical DNA. And even with clones I bet there are many errors in cell replication, besides the epigenetic differences.
So as the younger iteration, our friend Mark would now own bankrupcy offices now, on top of his shares in Meta, and be protected from impersonation forever.
Your version of the Purge would make an interesting Stephen King movie.
Why, we got something similar in other countries. Here in NL it is called BSN; Burger Service Number (burger means civilian).
I believe the civilian should be able to create identities based on their private key (which only the government knows) and these should have different details. Like for example, a nickname, a realname, a telephone number, and address, or multiple of these. But then, also the civilian should be able to revoke the licenses. Or, rather: they should be valid for a short amount of time.
Nice try, so you tell me that the burger hospital I passed by is not in fact a place where they patch up burgers until they’re back on their feet?
A lot of countries have a unique ID for their citizens which is used for routine identification. On websites, at the bank, etc. nothing special about SSNs in this regard, except that they were leaked more times than you can count.
> Plenty of countries make their numbers de jure public information.
That's the difference. A lot of people and processes in the US make the assumption that the SSN is a well kept secret despite them being publicly leaked so many times. This assumption is a weakness for any process that relies on "secret" SSNs.
Sorry to ruin your fun but in German it's actually just Bürger (capitalized because all nouns are). Though the true etymology might be entirely different.
Bourgeoisie or Burgher in English, Bourgeois in French or in German Bürger, all from old Frankish burg, for town. English has both words, but they now have different meanings, and the term Burgher is mostly obsolete.
The divide (or perception of a divide) between city dwellers and the country is not something the US invented, these divisions predate the colonisation of America.
How is it terrible? SSNs rather reliably identify individual people, actual non-fraudulent collisions are very rare.
The fraud is a separate issue and SSNs are obviously misused, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a reasonable system to uniquely identify multiple people with the same name and DOB.
The fact it is tied to social security and is not called “national ID” shows already it is a legacy system, + the fact there is no authentication in place
Authentication is completely separate from identification, you shouldn’t be using any kind of ID number to authenticate anyone. That does not suggest that ID numbers are not good for identification.
What is more likely to happen is a global namespace of unique names. Famous and powerful people get to pick first, because they are more important. Names can be inherited and become signs of your class and wealth.
You get to be Bob192382, because you got in early and only had to add 6 numeric digits. In the year 2100, we're at 15 digits.
My ex-wife had the same name as a woman in another state who had beaten up a cop and done jail time. So every time my wife's driver's license came up for renewal, the DMV decided she was that criminal, and refused to issue the license. This happened so often, she eventually was on a first-name basis with the DMV director, who had to intervene every time. I'm guessing this problem due to the DMV in our little state using an ancient computer system, perhaps written in COBOL in the 1960s. I can just see the code now, where it compares the name, but not state of residence or any other identifiers.
i had the exact same first/last name / birth year as a kid in my school (town of about 3,000) and were both “juniors” so our dads both have the same name. that makes four of us.
unfortunately that guys got some problems .. duis… domestic batteries.. drug possession ..
i have been walked out of a couple jobs for “not disclosing my record” and having to sort that out.
then the one time i did get into trouble. my expungement was denied because i had “so many priors”…… and then i had to go back and explain that NO, thats not me. it was approved.
then process servers, warrants, derogatory credit entries cause the guy doesnt like paying his bills.
i eventually got a sealed name change and that was the end of that.
Good for you, Mark! I had a nice chuckle.
On a more serious note, I really feel for the people that cannot get any kind of support and try to get some help by messaging "the owner" of the social network they are in. With big companies, you used to be able to get someone to talk to you when you had a problem. Not anymore. The best you can get is a well trained LLM
A couple of years ago when I still was on Facebook, I had a problem with my account being falsely accused of hacking. I believe it happened because I had been chatting with my friend about computer malware.
All my chats were gone, and I couldn't write to any of my friends. "Okay, I will just reach the tech support, and solve the problem" - silly me back then. I was genuinely shocked that there was no "Facebook support". Just a bunch of FAQs, general help, and that's it, no way to talk to anyone. I felt completely helpless and lost, really unpleasant feeling.
My account got back to normal after one day or so, but that was the day I decided to begin the process of leaving that platform.
Facebook will ban you for the most odd of reasons, but report actual gore etc? Well now, that doesn't actually violate our TOS/community guidelines/blah
Gmail/Google has the same problem but I suspect and correct me if I'm wrong that it's less surface area to ban you - unless that did happen to people on Google+? But Google+ also didn't have its founder famously tell people "...they 'trust me', dumb fucks"
Depends on the company. Mail to the CEO is a well known customer support escalation path.
For companies that do generally support their customers, usually it gets you into an 'executive support' queue with people who are empowered to understand and solve problems that are mostly solvable --- you should be able to get money things made right, but don't expect product changes (but it can happen).
For companies that don't support their customers, it gets overwhelmed and may get dumped into the same usual support channels where reps aren't empowered to get anything done.
I mean another theory is that those people are misguided and vexatious, and that this correlates with them not actually checking which Mark Zuckerberg they are sending their urgent complaint email to.
I know the guy who had Twitter/X @Justin (also my name) early on and he would constantly get mentions for “@Justin Bieber” because people didn’t understand the space.
If I wanna check the internet for someone, I find it impossible because for a lot of names there's at least thousands of people with the same exact full name. It must give both a feeling of safety but also frustration if you may want to stand out.
Javanese names used to commonly be mononyms, was only required that people have a surname in 2022.
In Bali, children are essentially numbered. First kid is called Wayan, Putu, Gede, or Ni Luh. Second kid is Made, Kadek, or Nengah. Third kid is Nyoman or Komang. Fourth kid is Ketut. Fifth kid? They go back to Wayan. Most of these names aren't gendered, either.
> We usually don't use our real names for social media accounts
It's interesting how cultural differences can make some life algorithms hardly work in some countries. I sometimes use a method to find people from my past by googling their full name, switching to the image results, and spending a manageable amount of time scrolling through them until I find the person. I've successfully used this method several times. The images are usually related to job activities or social media profiles. However, from your description, this approach probably won't work in China for at least two reasons: too many raw results and few or no social media results.
UPDATE: a follow-up question. If in a big company two or more figures happen to have the same full name and need to be exposed publicly (on a site or promotional materials), are there any tricks for this?
From what I can tell, official documents rely on ID numbers, and for the social side, people can just come up with informal more unique names. But I'm not an expert.
moslem naming is also not very different sometimes. lots of duplicate names like ahmed ahmed and mohammad mohammad. must be very frustrating! (it would be interesting to know how they manage it, since i do not know any of them personally.)
It's good that he has his own website! I can relate (for non famous reasons) about the Facebook issues. I can't even sign up any more, using my real name anyway.
It can be a pain as so many local organisations use Facebook as a free way to share information. Unfortunately if you're not logged in pages can be rate limited, get spammed with modals to sign up, can't scroll very far into any feed and probably in his case a nuisance as a platform for his business.
I once received a number of hateful mentions and DMs on Twitter because I share my name with a 60 Minutes Australia journalist who was the producer on a story about Conrad Murray (Michael Jackson's personal doctor). People really are that stupid.
I worked with a guy that shares the name with the Norwegian mass murderer who targeted children at a youth camp. I think had some pretty though years, but never changed his name.
Depends how you use it. I see numerous possibilities of taking advantage of such "bad name". People know the real Breivik is in prison, so they will be genuinely curious. Besides, it's not like you have your name tattooed on your forehead.
My name is composed of three parts, each one is common, but I thought that their sequence was supposed to be rare for statistical reasons. I sometimes searched for it in the internet to take a look of how my homonyms were going. Before 2010 they were few in terms of search results, but as years passed by, they started to show their faces. Most of the time they weren't bringing good news, like for example writing a best seller. I remember one year, a news site said one got killed by a shot. Then a few months later another one was also shot. I even sent a joke message to a few close coworkers "sorry, I won't be able to show up at work tomorrow. reason: I got killed (again) - <link to news>".
Another name "rareness" related story. Somewhere around 2010's I was backpacking east Europe and border police hold a train from Croatia to Slovenia for something like 15-20 minutes asking me to prove that I really was myself. Then they released me and let the train enter the country, but even so the police randomly appeared to ask my specific documents (in places that there were other people they came and asked only my docs). Then it started happening in other countries, most (but not all) countries started to hold me on the border control for one hour or two to do some clearance. Then in Argentina the border police said that someone with my whole name AND birth date was in some kind of interpol search list. Then two or three years later it stopped happening. I am sure someone stole my id and commited some crimes and then he was caught, because it is impossible to someone with my same three name and birth date happen to be in a interpol list just by coincidence. Interpol lists have how many people? 25k? Divide by days in a year. 69 have born in same day as you. From those, one have the same name as you.
Mark Zuckerberg may soon sue Mark Zuckerberg about name issues.
I most assuredly would not want to be Mark Zuckerberg. That name is not inspiring to most people. (Also, by the way, because Zuckerberg is perfectly fine german: Zucker = Sugar, Berg = Mountain, so a mountain of sugar. That's not good for your health either, in particular your teeth.)
Yeah, but in this case MikeRoweSoft.com redirects to microsoft.com after the settlement. Uzi Nissan was able to keep his domain to this day, even after his death in 2020.
I think that's the usual way the american attorneys advertise. I kinda like that style. In Poland, attorneys aren't allowed to advertise that expressively, which I think is a stupid regulation.
Poland's universal health care also removes the incentive for the type of lawyer who most commonly uses "Saul" style advertising -- personal injury attorneys.
It is a big business because people need to recover their costs or be render homeless is someone hits them with their car or whatever.
As a fun cherry on top, part of the opioid crisis stems from people abusing prescription drugs to return to work sooner than they would in the EU.
After we got acquired I suddenly found myself getting invitations to many many meetings I had no place in. It took me a number of years to figure out it was down to myself and the companies lead architect sharing the same given name. At the time we were the only two Jesse's in a pretty big company. The problem seems to have gone away since we hired more.
Similar situation here. My name is far from unique, but it's not common either. My best known impersonator is a prolific sci-fi author.
Whenever I'm introduced to someone and they perk up at my name, it's almost guaranteed that they're fans of that author. Then I have to disappoint them... Still, it's a good conversation starter.
A couple of decades ago I got sent some potentially sensitive (not sure how sensitive, I read as little as possible) employment related messages intended for someone with a name very like mine (same forename and middle name, surname differed by two typos, they also had the relevant <surname>.net domain).
I replied politely saying that I wasn't who they thought I was, and that I'd deleted the messages, and the buggers threatened to sue me if I continued to receive any more messages that they sent! This was an American firm, so there was no language barrier involved, though apparently an intelligence gap.
I didn't contact the other person until that threat, but at that point I looked him up and passed on that part of the comms trail with a “just to let you know what sort of idiots and litigious fools you are dealing with…” note.
(Note the slightly different spelling; the former mayor is "de Blasio", while the wine importer is "DeBlasio")
quote:
The man at the heart of a high-stakes mix-up that rippled through global political journalism in the final days of the New York mayoral campaign was neither “falsely claiming” to be former Mayor Bill de Blasio — as the Times of London suggested — nor, as The New York Times wrote, a “de Blasio impersonator.”
He is, instead, a 59-year-old Long Island wine importer named Bill DeBlasio, who merely responded to an email from a journalist seeking his views on Democrat Zohran Mamdani’s policies.
“I’m Bill DeBlasio. I’ve always been Bill DeBlasio,” DeBlasio said in an interview conducted Wednesday evening through his Ring doorbell in Huntington Station, Long Island, from his current location in Florida.
“I never once said I was the mayor. He never addressed me as the mayor,” DeBlasio told Semafor. “So I just gave him my opinion.”
In Portugal you can have one or more last names, but the very last one will be from the father's side. Unless both parents have the same double-barreled name? Never seen that here.
Even with people that are not famous it can be difficult. My wife knows three people with the same name. So when I ask with whom are you going out she needs to add the city to make me understand.
Part of why in many times, ‘of x’ was a common ‘surname’. Also, profession - basically ‘Bob the Smith’, ‘John the Baker’, etc.
A lot of places (India, Brazil) still use one of your parents on official documents to disambiguate (Bob Smith, son of John (or Jill) Smith from Smithville).
Some kinds of law specialties can get fun marketing.
In Boston, a personal injury lawyer is recently doing a bus advertising sign that seems to be a play on "Better Call Saul" (of the scrappy fictional TV series character's ads).
Could anyone shed some light on the password reset email “hack”? I don’t really understand the attack sequence if the attacker doesn’t have access to your inbox. Even if you clicked them they don’t get access. My conclusion is trolling / annoyance.
The same thing happens to my Instagram account, which is an old 3-letter username that is desirable. I get hundreds of reset emails per month, all generated by the real service with legit outbound links.
One time in around 2008 when I was in undergrad, I got facebook requested by a guy named David Liu (same name as me) who was going to a school many thousands of miles away, and I noticed that he had facebooked about 20-30 other David Liu's.
About 3-4 years later, I was in grad school, I meet this guy in person (he happened to be going to the same grad school), I recognize his name and face, and let him know that he facebooked me back then, and he got a chuckle out of it.
I share the same name with a local TV star in my country. Even that is a PITA. Can’t imagine being named Mark Zuckerberg or Michael Jackson or anything like that.
At some point there were teenager girls calling me (no idea how they got the phone number). I started acting like they called the right person and there would be happy screams on the other hand. I guess the high point was that. I decided that might not be a good idea though. Would definitely continue if my “fans” were middle aged men.
I seem to recall when he was on TV he leaned into the joke ("not that Michael Jackson"). Of course that was long before the days random people could send abuse on Twitter.
He should at the very least ensure that there was some kind of liaison person at Meta for these not quite as rich (and certainly less obnoxious) Mark Zuckerbergs to reach in case of trouble with his service. This lawyer Mark should just have his account flagged with a huge 'Vetted, this guy is called that; leave it.' notice for any Meta algorithm or employee looking into it.
Answer the question: What would an asshole do? They would buy up their neighbors' houses to make an unapproved mega compound, buy up ancestral Hawaiian land to block communal land access, and do unlicensed shit without permits making their remaining neighbors miserable. So what is right by virtue is unlikely to happen because almost all billionaires are legitimized criminal aristocrats subject to a different set of rules than average or poor people who are killed in the street for selling loose cigarettes like Eric Garner.
I'd never heard of anyone with the same name as me, until '94 or so, when I put up a Web page, and some nice person with the same name contacted me.
Name-wise, apparently there are at least two instances of a Dutch man (surname) unable to resist the marriage-material charms of the Irish.
Decades later, my namesake and I have email addresses differing by one letter, and I still forward email intended for him.
My namesake is accomplished and respected, and at least once I inadvertently rode on his reputation. A remote colleague referred offhand to me being a volunteer firefighter, apparently having Web searched, and confusing me with my better namesake (whose contributions include being a fire chief).
Lol, this reminds me of a funny story. I had a lawyer whose name was Jim Halpert. Turns out he was the very Jim who was inspired his namesake on the office. Asked him about it once. His reply? "Hey, it's been great for getting clients." =)
He was also very much like Jim on the show. Fun times.
I've heard of this guy, but not met him. My CEO told me that I remind them of Jim Halpert and I was like "Really? The guy from the Office? I always pictured myself as more of a Creed"[1], which made them bust out laughing and declare "That's such a Jim thing to say" and wander off after explaining that it's based on a real person.
It made me wonder how many of those characters are based on real people, since they themselves reminded me of another character I'll omit for privacy's sake...
In the south of Italy where families were very close to each others, children abundant, and passing the name of grandparents to first and second borns was expected people ended up with tons of namesakes. I have 6 people in my direct family who all share same name and last name.
>Like I said, I don't wish Mark E. Zuckerberg any ill will at all. I hope the best for him, but let me tell you this: I will rule the search for "Mark Zuckerberg bankruptcy". And if he does fall upon difficult financial times, and happens to be in Indiana, I will gladly handle his case in honor of our eponymy.
According to the Algorithm Lords of my particular filter bubble, he does indeed rule the search results for "Mark Zuckerberg bankruptcy".
I felt guilty reading it, as in many past companies "Mark Zuckerberg" (and Bill Gates, and Tim Apple, Elon Musk etc) was indeed often used as a placeholder for test accounts and test data, and it never crossed my mind that we were basically training ourself to also treat a "Mark Zuckerberg" on our service as an account that escaped the sandbox or some other attack on the service.
It was tricky to use too literal names, as they're basically the placeholders in the input forms for instance, or the translations keys.
To defend a bit the choice for somewhat realistic names, there is a gestalt decomposition where you're looking through "First name" first names for hundreds of lines. Same for Lorum ipsums, designers' reaction are completely different when the page looks somewhat realistic and isn't just a blatant test.
For a long time I would get hardcore stopped and hassled at the airport cause my name matched a terrorist. Although I was born in the USA. Made no sense to me why our system would flag someone just by name
Last I heard, the other Mike Warot was a guard at the British Museum. I'm sure there are more.
My brother in law, William Morris, got me more than one notice when his caller ID showed up at the marketing firm I used to work at. ;-)
A few years ago, I was trying to find fun things to show my friend Ward, and you wouldn't believe how many Ward Christensens there are mentioned in newspapers.com.
I’m have a very common first name and moderately common second name. The people who I have discovered that share my name have been nothing but a pain in the arse.
There was the Guantanamo inmate who managed to get me flagged for extra checks on every flight I took from around 2005-11.
Then there was the guy who leased some mining equipment and failed to pay, which somehow ended up on a background check for me for a job.
I have the same name as a former MLB player. We both use Yahoo Mail. I was there first and use my name without the middle initial as my email address. He uses his middle initial. I've received many emails for him where people have overlooked the use of his middle initial. Sometimes it takes me a second to realize the mistake and I'm wondering WTF is this email on about.
I live in a relatively small country, but my first and last name are very common over here.
There have been at least seven others with the same name in my city (population 1M) who had bought computer equipment in the same shop.
In the country, there are at least three other software engineers, of which one had published his undergrad thesis on the same topic as I had at about the same time.
The most recent episode of the BBC Satire Radio show "The Naked Week" reached out to hundreds of name-alikes to get them to comment on a recent UK news story.
They ended up interviewing Taylor Swift, an MMA instructor from Cheltenham, UK.
Firefox does not trust this site because it uses a certificate that is not valid for markzuckerberg.com.
The certificate is only valid for the following names: *.facebook.com, *.facebook.net, *.fbcdn.net, *.fbsbx.com, *.m.facebook.com, *.messenger.com, *.xx.fbcdn.net, *.xy.fbcdn.net, *.xz.fbcdn.net, facebook.com, messenger.com
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This article gives a window into both how oppressive social media can be for high-profile folks and how confused a LOT of people are basically all the time.
It also helps me remember that there’s a lot of people out there who are pretty angry and feel unheard.
I have a fairly common name, along with an uncle of the same name. I found a few others as well, and was thinking of visiting the business of one of us. Sadly, that Nacho passed away, so the plan is not going to happen, but at least we got a chuckle out of sending out the NYT obituary to various friends.
My namesake was(died a few years back) the wealthiest person in the city I live in. He was worth peanuts compared to my brother's namesake who made billions through some sort of Lisp derivative shenanigans(or something along those lines, it's unclear).
When I was in university a decade ago, a classmate of mine shared the same name as some high-ranking university staff. The classmate's university email account received some unsolicited confidential messages that were intended for the staff, not him.
A friend of mine worked for a company with “cloud” in its name, but company had nothing to do with computer clouds.
He said they got at least two calls a day from angry people complaining that their “cloud” wasn’t working (he’s pretty sure most of them meant iCloud).
I literally just hired Ben Horowitz last month, but I must assume that mine is the better systems and integrations engineer so I consider myself having getting the better deal.
I got halfway through an exec level interview process with an international food service conglomerate due to them trying to internally promote my namesake.
Reminds me of CV lcamtuf published on his website shortly after leaving Google. A single page that mainly said: "my name is Zalewski, yes, that Zalewski".
any sanctioned individual. Some of their names are super common. Sorry Ivan Ivanov, you are on the list, no bank account for you. based by a true story.
(meanwhile the sanctioned Ivan is chilling on his yacht with 3 passports and 5 golden visas)
The most recent hilarious example of this was a British newspaper that contacted “Bill DeBlasio” by email for comment on the NYC mayor election (Bill de Blasio is a former mayor of NYC), without ever verifying (or apparently, even asking) that they had found the person they intended.
The man at the heart of a high-stakes mix-up that rippled through global political journalism in the final days of the New York mayoral campaign was neither “falsely claiming” to be former Mayor Bill de Blasio — as the Times of London suggested — nor, as The New York Times wrote, a “de Blasio impersonator.”
He is, instead, a 59-year-old Long Island wine importer named Bill DeBlasio, who merely responded to an email from a journalist seeking his views on Democrat Zohran Mamdani’s policies.
“I’m Bill DeBlasio. I’ve always been Bill DeBlasio,” DeBlasio said in an interview conducted Wednesday evening through his Ring doorbell in Huntington Station, Long Island, from his current location in Florida.
“I never once said I was the mayor. He never addressed me as the mayor,” DeBlasio told Semafor. “So I just gave him my opinion.”
my name's Muhammad Usman, let me tell you, there are 1000s of us out there if not more. It's very hard to get a username without numbers on any site except somehow I got it on HN :D
Honestly the more I read the more I felt bad for the guy. Like yeah, having your personal facebook disabled a bunch is funny but I couldn't imagine getting a bunch of threats directed towards you is very good for the psyche, especially while getting hundreds of calls a day
Sure, but if tomorrow some dude with the same name as me decides to go on a killing spree, or sexually assault a toddler, I'd change my name. Just or unjust.
I'd have to change my email domain too though, so that would suck, but at least I could put up a website there explaining my new name and that I am not the now world famous terrorist who shot up a kindergarden/fondled the pope/ate a baby.
I would change my name. Family tradition isn't worth the hassle. The older people in my family would eventually get over it. This harassment will not stop.
My name is so common that people laugh and say, "come on, what's your real name?" There are two of us in our little town. When the other one robbed a convenience store I started getting calls from friends who thought it was me. I also look like many people, to the point that I once told someone, "no, I'm really not your cousin."
Just a reminder that there are ongoing issues where Facebook prevents Native Americans from signing up or being allowed to use their legitimate names because their legal names are judged “inauthentic.”
This has been documented for well over a decade. Facebook has publicly promised changes, but the problem persists and support responses appear weak. Almost like they don’t care at all…
Having the same name as a famous person seems like a decent marketing benefit. And funnily enough, that’s achievable with some paperwork in many areas of the world! I wonder how/if this interacts with trademark (or other?) law. Can I change my name to Sundar Pichai? If so, then why haven’t a bunch of techbro founders done that already?
A friend of mine has a relatively common first name and last name, and she regularly gets mail that is clearly not meant for her. She started a Facebook group for homonyms to help her route mail, and it now have a hundred members and have helped people get important documents.
At some point, they even organized an impersonation because someone needed to retrieve an official document and couldn’t be there in person. Another member nearby offered to go and get it. “Won’t you need my ID for that? — Oh, I have one with just the right name…”
My name isn’t super known, but it happened to be the same as that of a very big fish in the financial institution I worked for.
Thankfully these people were working mostly through physical meetings and calls, so no sensitive info was leaked, but I did get calendar invites to discuss the future of entire countries as an engineering intern.
I used the name a couple times to set up our internal meetings in the fancier upper floors, so we could have whiteboard discussions over a fancy hardwoods table. No one questioned the name appearing in the entrance display as the current user.
Not identical, but I once shared most of the first name as well as my last name with a VP of research at the company I worked for, and we were in the same technical field. My (much less impressive) publication record got confused with his frequently and I always wondered if it gave me a career boost.
We had a board member who frequently emailed confidential documents to a security guard with the same name as another director.
It was his iPad's fault, apparently.
How did that play out?
It basically defines the organization.
>> My name isn’t super known, but it happened to be the same as that of a very big fish in the financial institution I worked for.
Same thing happened to me. My name in outlook was the right under a high up VP. Outlook auto correct would bring my name up at the top of the list so people would just hit enter and write their email.
Same thing, I was getting some emails I clearly should not have been viewing, with budgetary spreadsheets and names of people who were being considered for layoffs.
One of them I sent back to the VP and diplomatically explained the mixup. I didn't get any emails for a few months and wondered how they fixed the situation. I guess they gave the VP and underscore in his name instead of the normal firstname.lastname@company.com so now when I typed in my name, his came up first.
Plot twist: you were the real VP all along.
My deadname was not only owned by some other people in my industry, it was also used by someone else born in the same hospital, same ward on the same day, on the same morning as me. That was endlessly irritating.
Glad to see that after five years post abandoning it my contribution to the name is basically gone from the internet now.
>>it was also used by someone else born in the same hospital, same ward on the same day, on the same morning as me. That was endlessly irritating
How so? Other than a funny coincidence, how would that ever come up anywhere in anything unless you both lived in a tiny community where everyone knows each other. I just don't understand how someone born on the same day as you having the same name was "irritating".
An ex-gf of mine’s dad had the same name and birthday as a convict. Caused him plenty of trouble when crossing the border apparently. Hopefully that’s not the case for GP
Used to work as a manager at a pizza place and we had a guy apply to deliver who had the same name as... their son.
Allegedly Jr. had a lengthy record including some drug offenses and something like a DUI / DWI. Naturally Sr. And Jr's records got crossed since they have the same First, Last, and Address, which caused Sr. many headaches including that we required a driving record check that would fail on a DUI / DWI.
>I just don't understand how someone born on the same day as you having the same name was "irritating".
Because, lacking a national identity number, the natural way to distinguish to people in a system when the name wouldn’t do is going to be age/birthdate or location.
Try it sometime... My name is somewhat common, but not even close to "John Smith" common... but even at about 1:20,000 or so I've seen a few conflicts just from my name. Another me was born the same day in the state I reside in... I've had a few things on my credit history get tangled up over it.
I've also met two others with the same name, purely coincidentally, not related. I worked on an access/security software team at a major bank (about 350k employees internationally at the time), I found 3 bugs just by being me. Since even SSN/Tax-Id varied, there were several ways to match identity and I had conflicts in a couple of them with other employees. Last Name + last-4 of tax/ssn/national-id (for whatever country the employee was in) was one of them. I don't recall the other two right now, been about 15 years.
Birthdate and place of birth are used as identifiers (I have been asked what hospital/city I was born in before on paperwork).
Nice to meet you, Jeff Lebowski.
Now stay out of Malibu
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Discuss it as in “there’s elections in Argentina, let’s see how we react to the change of administration”. Not as in “I will replace Argentina’s president”.
At least the titles/descriptions didn’t contain anything to consider pulling a Snowden about it.
OK thanks, but well, my comment was a bit tongue in cheek anyway. That nuance didn't survive the passage all the way from intended meaning to text interpretation it seems.
Not a great example when a $40B bailout is preventing an Argentine puppet from being sacked.
Yes, and the reason I've commonly heard for the bailout was that it is to help US based investors. That's a clear example of the US financial sector influencing foreign politics.
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Nah, it is probably just about rebalancing the portfolio in prevision of the bond market acting up... this is not MKUltra yet. ;D
That's what they said, isn't it?
Just because some people accidentally invite journalists into Signal meetings to discuss active bombing campaigns, doesn't mean everyone running a financial institution is vying to be named the next President of Argentina.
> You're being naive. This is exactly what they do.
You are being knee-jerk judgemental.
They didn't say those things don't happen, just that it didn't appear the comms they received by mistake looked like less sinister interactions with the political world.
Oops, didnt realize it was the same poster. Thought it was someone else saying these things dont happen.
I have a relatively rare name — I’ve actually never met anyone with my last name, never mind someone with my full name — and this happens to me regularly. Last week I got a job rejection from New Zealand post, for a while I was getting someone’s pay stub notifications from the US, etc.
I suspect it’s because I was the first to register the first.last@gmail.com address for my name. I guess it’s a bit like owning a simple noun .com domain.
I use my lastname [at] gmail (same as my HN username). Over the years, I’ve received all sorts of misdirected messages: medical, financial, support, even real estate documents. When it seems important, I do my best to contact the sender and let them know.
What I’ve learned is that “no-reply” email addresses can cause real harm in situations where it’s critical to reach an actual person.
One of my gmail doppelgängers has started trading crypto and I am deeply concerned for them.
I think mine is worse off. He keeps being signed up for Facebook notifications on whatever activity he's doing.
My dad's first name is my last name so my last name @gmail is taken by him :)
But I have a relatively rare first name and even rarer last name due to my dad having a very rare first name, so I easily snagged first.last. Pretty sure to this day I've never even seen anyone with my dad's first name (or my last name).
Meanwhile, my coworkers name is literally Adam Smith and his usernames tend to be adamsmith2 or 3 or 4.
I once worked at a place that has two Brian Smiths who worked at desks across from each other. That was quite bizarre.
I've worked in a few groups over the years with several other "Michael"... It's not fun when you get 4 in a group (dev/mgt teams) of like 15.
One place I worked, we had one guy with the same personal and family names of the (then) Director General of the BBC… working on a project with another guy who also shared both.
I am not the horror film director I share a name with.
Absolutely... I've had the same issue (nickname is gmail name), and constantly amazed how many people don't "get" that you can't just claim any gmail address you like and start using it on websites anyway.
I've gotten student financial aid docs, various product mailing lists, order receipts etc... it's amazing how many places take an email address and just start spamming without any validation at all.
> Over the years, I’ve received all sorts of misdirected messages […]
Looking at my text messages, surely these are a mix of serious business and the starts of scams. How unsavory to think that helping someone could be a bad thing.
Same boat. Obscure last name humans unite!
I get a ton of email to my gmail address for other people with similar names.
One of them was a director at Google, but I think she retired. Always assumed that meant I'd get a lame work email if I applied there.
I have lastname.firstname@gmail.com because first.last was already taken.
Just curious, do gmail accounts ever expire? Will I ever get the chance to snag the other one? Or does it forever belong to my nemesis and life-long enemy?
Even if your google account is deleted, the email address is NOT recycled because it can be used to impersonate people - maybe the previous owner still has physical/digital accounts linked to that old email. As far as I know most services do this - an email address once registered is never released again.
Unused they have a half-life. Google Voice numbers much more aggressively so.
It's somewhere in the document.
After two years of inactivity:
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290?hl=en
This answer is not actually correct. I have an account I deleted 18 years ago, still can’t make it again.
Could in theory be because someone else grabbed the account 16 years ago tho, unless I'm missing something?
No Google does not allow creating a new account with a previously-used Gmail address. Each Gmail address can be used at most once.
I emailed the address to make sure: It bounce due to not existing.
You can never make another account with that address because Google does not delete things.
Yea I own first.last@gmail.com for my name too and I get emails for who I think is the same person fairly often. Like job stuff, professional education emails, etc. I used to reply to them saying wrong person but have given up...the guy must not care about not getting these emails...
My first name is very uncommon and my last name is very common.
I am on the other side of this problem and was surprised because it is very easy to contact me. When the other person with my name forwarded the emails, it was all careless and unwanted recruiter mail. Someone goes into work, types first.last@gmail, and hits send without doing one Google search. Incredible.
I'm in the same boat, except my first and last name are fairly common. My gmail account is not my primary email address, and to be honest I don't know if I could manage making it my primary because of the amount of rubbish I get.
Same, albeit it seems like multiple people. Or at least someone who moves states.
It's bizarre though... who puts down an email address they don't own on a job application?!
I recently wanted to introduce someone to our internal recruiters to a person with a long, uniqueish name. The recruiter was like: they did respond with „I’m not interested“. But the person was like: I’ve never got a mail.
Turned out the whatever tool our recruiter used spit out „first.lastname@gmail.com“ even though the person in question doesn’t own that email.
Interesting!
I've gotten a wide enough variety of stuff (mortgage paperwork, homeowners insurance, game service accounts) that some of it has to be organically entered, but that is a good note. Crazy that any system would be set up that way, but HR tech is a clusterfuck.
I am lastname.firstname@gmail.com, but I wouldn't be surprised if something similar is happening in some instances.
I own tsrif.last@gmail.com and luckily I don't get any misdirected mail there.
I have met someone with my last name, if its not hyphenated, which mine is. My name is as unique as it gets with hyphenating. I never use my hyphenated name anywhere other than 100% legal stuff.
My address is the same. Someone with my name thinks their email address is firstlast@gmail.com
Its annoying especially since we have the same bank and they are not very good at paying their credit card on time. I therefore get their bank emails. Initially It will always have me confused as weight wait. I don't have any balance on my credit card. Was this fraud?
I'm in exactly the same situation - very rare last name, first.last@gmail.com address, wrong mail from all over including NZ.
I have pretty rare first and last name, but somehow have gotten random person's car service receipts (and reminders) from a service place in the US (I live in NZ).
There car has a lot of problems.
I got on twitter pretty early too, and just have a short first time as my @, and occasionally get DMs about getting my @, but no one wants to hand out cash for it. The most I've been offered is $50. But most just expect me to give it for free.
I have a sufficiently uncommon last name to be able to figure out which branch of the family the misdirected emails are meant for. Was quite nice getting updates from the chip shop we used to get fish and chips from when we went to visit grandma, intended for someone who afaik I never met.
I had an Australian criminal defense attorney with my name, register the .au version of my personal domain.
I used to get very sensitive documents sent to me. A lot of juvenile cases. I suspect people could have gone to jail for sharing it.
It's really on the sender, to make sure, but it's still a nasty situation.
It eventually stopped. I think they ended up registering a different domain name. I used to diligently respond, when sent erroneous documents, but never got a reply. I destroyed them, but there's no telling where other copies might have gone.
> At some point, they even organized an impersonation because someone needed to retrieve an official document and couldn’t be there in person. Another member nearby offered to go and get it. “Won’t you need my ID for that? — Oh, I have one with just the right name…”
That's a felony in many places.
If it hypothetically was a crime, I wonder how often it would actually get prosecuted given someone used their real ID, showing the office failed to check anything other than a name known to have dupes, and/or given they had no intent to steal something and acted with knowledge and permission of the intended recipient, showing no malicious intent. I can imagine reasons those wouldn’t be considered a valid defense, but I guess it probably depends on what office & document & law we’re talking about.
Obtaining something of value through deception is fraud.
My name is X and another person also named X tells me to gather their documents from the office. Other X also signs a paper for me that says I'm allowed to do this.
I ask the office clerk: "Hi, I'm here to retreive the documents for X". He checks my ID and gives me the documents without asking for written permission from the other X.
It's deception by omission, but there is no fraud. I was legally allowed to do this. It's also a win for everyone because it avoids complications.
"with the approval of the intended recipient" makes it like breaking into someone's home with their consent
They didn't obtain anything, though.
I understood that they obtained legal documents
They retrieved those documents and gave them to the intended recipient. “Obtain” suggests something longer term.
So the story says. But what if they didn't? What if it turned out the person receiving the document from the person picking it up also wasn't the intended recipient. How would they know? And if so they'd be holding a document that they shouldn't have in the first place.
You could easily be a paw in an identity theft play like that.
No, "obtain" suggests "obtain".
There's no sense in quibbling over a vague and imprecise summary of the concept. Legally, fraud requires an injured party. In our scenario here, nobody was injured, so no fraud. Whether temporarily possessing a document to hand it to its intended recipient counts as "obtaining" is not really the pertinent question.
I suspect it may fall afoul of a law about making false statements to the government, but that's distinct from fraud.
The key term in most statutes is dishonesty.
Impersonating someone at their behest as a favour is unlikely to be dishonest.
That's debatable. If I let my friends impersonate me to use my zoo membership for free entrance, then were clearly defrauding the zoo (obviously that's not high stakes, but I dare someone to argue it's not). If one of a set of identical twins is better at math and takes all the math tests for their sibling, that's pretty clearly academic fraud, again pretty low stakes but fraud is still fraud
Key note because in case someone decides to go bad faith here, I think the gp comments use case of fraud is a positive thing (if a bit dangerous). Redefining a term just because you don't like the pejorative implications is not a positive thing, though.
There are so many things wrong with this thread. At least you make an effort, but the categorical dismissals are interesting as well and probably explain to some extent why so many hackers end up in trouble with the law.
It's pretty simple: they are deceiving the other party that the document was handed to the right person, the consequences of which range from 'meh' to spending 6 years behind bars.
Let's say this was a summons for a court case. Then the judge would believe the papers were served properly, when in fact they were never served. Permission doesn't enter into it here, it is wilful deception by two parties of a third. The same name should not normally be enough to get away with this but assuming the story is real (there are many reasons to doubt this, such as the ID matching the name, but nothing else) it all depends on who does the checking. In some cases you might not even go home without a small detour in case you are found out (for instance, because the person handing the document over is familiar with the real recipient).
So, jurisdiction matters, what that document was matters, whether the permission was granted in writing (procuration), who the counterparty was, what the value of the document was, whether the parties lived in the same state/province or country and whether or not the permission was communicated to the person passing the document to the wrong recipient (probably not) and lots of other factors besides, such as the person giving permission still evading some legal obligation, which - conveniently - the story doesn't relate (and which hinges on what that document was).
And that's before we get into the wilder options of the second person being social engineered because after all, the only way they could be sure that they were acting on behalf of the real recipient would be to check their identity, in person, and with someone who is able to do that in a way that is legally binding.
Impersonation is inherently dishonest
https://youtu.be/uLlv_aZjHXc
No it isn’t.
Is it? An authorized agent picked up the document. Someone with matching ID picked up the document.
Where's the crime?
I think you are massively overestimating the legal follow-through of an administration with opening hours so tight and irational they would be scadalous at a lingerie show.
Shhh, snitch
I'm Irish and have a common firstname.lastname@gmail.com At some point the head of a national hospital thought he had that address and wasn't using his official email for everything, I got several emails that should not have been for me and some were quiet sensitive, I always emailed back the sender to let them know and eventually I emailed his secretary as it kept happening. I've also received purchase order confirmations from Australia, building contracts from Canada, HR emails from a university to which I had to confirm I had deleted the mail as letting them know led to GDPR investigation
I’m in the midst of a similar situation. My firstinitial.lastname email keeps getting very sensitive legal documents from law firms handling the case of someone who does not seem to know what their actual email address is. I called the firm and told them they needed to have an in-person meeting with their client and get a correct email address from them. That seemed to help for a few months. But now I’m getting emails again from a different law firm.
Law firms that send very sensitive legal documents over email… #sigh
I’d switch firms immediately if that’s their level of opsec awareness
And I worked IT for legal firm, if we were not sending documents over email, we would get replaced by the client.
I spent 3 months on secure document transfer portal system, got scrapped after 4 months because clients wanted their forms as Word/PDF and they wanted them without hopping through any hoops.
I believe you - convenience gets picked over security all the time
If you reread again it sounds as if the secretary was hanging out the wrong email.
Yes I know this was about wrong delivery address (person with same name, wrong account); the point is that email is not completely secure - certainly not for very sensitive (legal) content
What are you talking about? If you send emails from eg GMail to Gmail, it's fairly secure.
Gmail can be fetched via IMAP and leave Gmail's infra entirely. And I don't think Google guarantees that their implementation stays fully on their own owned infra. It's a reasonable assumption but I'd never trust that for a security guarantee.
Email is not an end-to-end secure data protocol without the use of client side encryption/decryption like PGP/GPG, but even then, sender/receiver and time are all in the envelop metadata.
Yeah, that exactly my point - no idea why I’m being downvoted on this
Probably because Law Firms arent necessarily computer security firms. Lots of people have terrible op sec. Additionally if you the recipient are on gmail it stops mattering, now Google knows your legal woes.
Exactly, I’d never use Gmail for anything sensitive. Even for just personal emails I use my own mailserver. (And again, for truly sensitive stuff I don’t use email at all)
If the sender is using GMail, then using your own mail server is less secure than using GMail as the receiver.
Sure even though, as most others, my server supports TLS, having your email not leave gmail at all may be slightly more secure. Part of the point however was that when either server or receiver is using Gmail, your possibly confidential email content is still in Google’s hands. Using a personal server reduces that part of the attack surface. Still this does not mean I vacate my overall point that email in general is suboptimal from a secop standpoint.
Why’s that even relevant if the recipient is the wrong address? Email isn’t particularly secure anywhere, and gmail has forwarding and IMAP and aliases and other services that send emails outside of gmail. But sending sensitive documents to the wrong recipient, which was the topic that started this sub-thread, is a case where it does not matter how secure your servers are.
> [...] and gmail has forwarding and IMAP and aliases and other services that send emails outside of gmail.
No matter what format you hand a recipient a document in, they can always make a photocopy and pass it on.
Sure. How’s that relevant?
That someone might use IMAP is no worse than someone using a photocopier.
Sure it is, and your own comment above about gmail to gmail being fairly secure demonstrated that. Using a photocopier is intentional, and everyone knows what a photocopier is. Most people don’t know what IMAP is, and an email sender does not know if the recipient uses IMAP.
And this is still irrelevant to sending email to the wrong recipient, so I don’t know why you’re stuck on infra security.
Even if the law firm uses a Gmail account - which most of course don’t - Google still has access to your sensitive legal email content. (And that’s apart from the meta data leaking)
if you attach documents by linking to a Google Drive document, sure.
if you attach documents 'inside' the mail (i.e. MIME encoded multipart) that is most definitely not secure.
1) you do not know how that mail gets delivered, not necessarily via servers that support encryption 2) you do not know how that mail, or the attachment, gets stored on the local machine 3) you do now know if the mail, or attachment, is sent to someone else 4) you cannot revoke the access to the document once the Need To Known stops
In our ISMS, sending Highly Sensitive data (ex: customer data) by attaching directly to a mail, is strictly not allowed by the IT charter. We explain it during an on-boarding meeting to all new staff members. And it's a fireable offense.
There are several people with my name at the company I work for. I frequently get email meant for someone else.
Worst was at another company where a person with the same name has just left, so they gave me that email address. Turned out he was subscribed to several Confluence pages for which I now received updates. But I didn't get his Confluence account, so I couldn't unsubscribe from those updates.
Couldn't you reset the password since you have access to the email address?
Might have been using company SSO.
SSO indeed. I forgot if it was ever solved before I left.
I have a canonical gmail address for what I thought was not such a common name pair. I get so much sensitive stuff. I used to email the sender but I have given up. One of them runs a business and the businesses that interact with his business just keep emailing me. Or stop for a couple of years, change personnel and start right back up.
Same here. My Google Account is something along the lines of jose86@gmail.com (a common hispanic first name + birth year; I'm German).
It's unusable. I have received full blown mortgage applications from couples in Mexico (including paystubs, tax forms, credit ratings, phone bills, passports). Mostly, these days, it's transaction notifications for a guy in Nigeria and phone bills for people in South America.
My spouse suffers from this as well. It's bananas to me how many people use that email address clearly thinking it's theirs.
I have myname.wifename@gmail.com (we use it for bills, children activities, and other family stuff where you can't register more than one email address).
Neither of our names can be confused with a last name and yet I had multiple people writing to it incorrectly, including: as the email attached to a Diners credit card (I called Diners and they asked me what's the right one and "if I don't know the right one how do I know that it's wrong"), as the email for a school 400 km from home (another family must have had the same idea), once for some lawyer stuff (I then learnt that about 100 people in Italy do have my wife's name as a very uncommon last name), and lately as the recovery email for another Google account.
Your use case is why I bought my own domain name. My wife and I create shared aliases we can both send from. It’s made spousal ensuing with schools so much easier, etc.
I used to get email for an org that had a similar domain as me (they had an extra letter in the middle). Thankfully, not a very big org, I would just bounce addresses that got a lot of misdirected email and I think they shut down and that really solved the problem.
Still annoying, but not as bad as gmail. I just got an email, in Italian, about someone adding a passkey to their ebay account. No way to tell ebay it's not their address / it's not my account.
I've noticed a lot of sites and orgs wont accept email domains that aren't gmail, hotmail, outlook, icloud, or yahoo.
Interesting. I've used my personal domain name for email for almost 30 years and I've never had that problem.
Similar boat (~25 years) and, while I've run into some sites/services that rejected my domain, I'm pretty sure it's happened fewer than 5 times, total.
It's a tactic to prevent burner/spam accounts created using temporary emails
That is that we do as well, but she still has her own email account that I presume she'll keep as long as Gmail exists.
What a weird world. :)
Edit: side note, your username is also the name of my favorite fusball table maker.
YES! I have no idea if we're related, but imagine the surprise when you "first get internet at home", and my father and I decided to search our surname on Altavista, and we found foosball tables and tournaments!
Damn it I was hoping you were going to reply "that's my family!" :D
> I'm Irish and have a common firstname.lastname@gmail.com
At the risk of nitpicking, @gmail.com email addresses use a dots don't matter policy [0] so really you have a common firstnamelastname@gmail.com and are free to add dots wherever you like.
[0] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150
Recently learned, to my surprise, that other major providers have not followed Google’s lead on this, so there are plenty of places dont.scam..me@ is a valid email (social engineering or typosquatting).
I did a similar thing during lockdown Covid era. Got online and rounded up everyone with the same name as me as we all decided not to tarnish the name, to build respect on the name, and each of us to excel in our fields. It was powerful. One’s a musician/DJ in buenos aries, the other a mechanical engineer for SpaceX, me - a software leader, another is a luthier making traditional folk instruments, and one is a writer across the pond in the EU.
A few years later Tina Fey did those commercials where she pulled in other Tina Feys and we all messaged the group like “Hey! They did it too!”. I’m sure many others did it. The world is so connected now that you should reach out and learn about your “alter-egos”.
Anyways, this reminded me of that and it’s nice to see other people have similar experiences being weird with, I guess themselves.
That is so incredibly smart. I have a very common gmail address (initial + last name) and literally hundreds of people use this mail address and I would love to resolve the countless issues I can witness from getting the mails alone, but I essentially have no chance at all.
It's ridiculous that the US still runs on name matching when you could just have a public Id number (unlike the SSN that everyone needs to pretend it's secret).
We still have to pretend SSNs are private until both law and common practice change. I expect that to be “functionally never”. Maybe within our lifetimes. Maybe.
My SSN is out there several times over at this point, thanks to breaches at phone companies, insurance companies, CRAs, ISPs, and the rest. I stopped tracking breaches that included the kind of info you’d need to impersonate me, about six years ago. The list was long and it seemed to be a pointless exercise by then.
I also have a mixed credit file with all major CRAs because of more than one person with the same name I have, one of whom lived in the same area.
Even if I didn’t have freezes everywhere, over the phone KBAs stopped working years ago even with my SSN.
The most American approach would be for SSNs to become a de facto universal ID number that you have to give everywhere, while still continuing to function as an unchangeable password to all your most important things.
We’re almost there!
I have a relatively uncommon first name (for my age group) but a very common surname. The first person I met with the same first name as me was when I was about 13 — they also had the same surname.
I have this problem badly enough I was interviewed for this article: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/workplace/work-colleague-same-...
You wouldn't believe some of the things that have shown up in my inbox.
I used to have a very common name (before getting married and took my wife's last name). Imagine that I have firstname.lastname@gmail and somebody was genius to take firstname.lastnam@gmail.
I felt this was so stupid, that i quickly lost any willingness to try to relay the emails to their original owner, as the other person had zero interest to change their address to be harder to mistype.
I once worked at a company whose lawyer shared the same first and last name. Rarely I would get an email and then a "please don't read that, delete immediately" afterwards.
I have a similar username on a "social media" site as the founder's username. I would get hateful personal messages, requests for favors, begging for money, etc., constantly. At first I would respond to correct people, but after years and years I stopped. I just disable notifications for that site and never read my mailbox, personal messages, etc. This has been going on for about 19 years now.
I have nickname@berkeley.edu as my alumni email address and I get a lot of interesting emails directed towards more important people…
The other end of the spectrum has its own problems too. My first and last names are both quite rare — deliberately so, thanks to my parents. That means when someone, say a potential employer, googles my name, it’s reasonable for them to assume every result they see is about me. For a while, I actually liked that. It felt like having a unique identity online. Until one day I discovered someone else had created a YouTube channel under the exact same name. Presumably they happen to share this unusual combination legitimately — but the content on that channel wasn’t exactly what I’d want showing up when someone searches for me. I tried to “correct the record” by setting up my own channel, just to add some better signals. But since YouTube isn’t my thing, my videos barely register, and Google still insists on showing the other person’s channel first.
My firstname / lastname isn’t common but if you google it you get a disbarred attorney with the same name. I’ve been asked on interviews about being disbarred; I know then that someone at the company is a sloppy “researcher”.
I wonder if I'm accidentally doing that to someone.
My complete name is rare, but I share it with a journalist who's quite a bit older than me.
This is why actors and musicians use stage names.
Using a stage name doesn't protect you from someone else coming along later and sharing the same name (as your stage name).
If you are famous enough, people might even deliberately name their kids after you.
Here you can trademark the name and sue anyone who uses it…
I have a common first initial and last name and that's my gmail and I get more email for other people than myself
Dennis Ritchie (co-inventor of the C programming language) had a page on his personal web site called “My other lives” with a list of other Dennis Ritchies.
“Outside of my main professional career, I have accumulated other WWW-recorded accomplishments and have other interests. Generally I pursue these interests using separate mail addresses, SS#, and DNA.”
It's preserved here:
https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/other...
> It's preserved here: > https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/other...
Which is preserved here [1]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250919063134/https://www.nokia...
This made me feel the world is huge and I know nothing about the lived lives of others.
You’re experiencing sonder.
https://www.thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/concept/sonder
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sonder
No, you're an experienced tumbler.
Interesting look into what Zuck and other mega celebrities experience day to day. I'm sure Zuck and others of a certain stature have many protection layers, but surely some things slip through and it's interesting to consider those just a tier lower that can't afford all of the security, etc.
Reminds me of the Bill Murray quote: "I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it."
It's something to remember when considering the reactions and attitudes of extremely high profile people. If you've ever felt bad because of a shitty comment posted by someone you don't know, you have just a fraction of what some people have to endure. Even when you know the comments are unreasonable and 'haters gonna hate' there's still some damage done.
High profile figures may appear distant, callous, or even fully radicalised by that onslaught. While you shouldn't have to blindly accept poor behaviour from people just because of their fame, I think you should still try to have compassion for their situation. If you think in terms of a bad person compared to bad behaviour we risk normalising a response to that behaviour that creates a feedback loop that exacerbates the problem.
Part of me wonders if there is nothing to be done. Perhaps the worst of people will still create enough poor feedback for someone famous enough. Will the majority being more compassionate mitigate the problem, I'd like to think so.
At times I'm mused that man is perhaps calibrated to live in tribes of 100. If you're known to ten million, however, you can get the 100,000x the correct dosage for whatever attention your actions draw.
Hard to fix, -- since even if people were considerate enough to make a tenfold reduction you'd still be overdosed by 10,000x.
I wonder if the emergence of "virtual celebrities" like VTubers has anything to do with that. Seems like the best of both worlds: You get the loyal fanbase and positive energy of a celebrity, but can also simply "log out" of that identity if it would negatively impact your "real" life.
Depends. If you are a really recognisable persona and you just log out one day, then expect a bunch of psycho-fan creeps looking for you in the real world.
Yeah, they'll probably always be a small number of creeps who try to doxx you, unfortunately. But I think it's still the difference between "a small number" and "everyone who has seen you on screen at some point".
An identity that is obviously constructed (like VTubers) at least signals to the audience that the real person behind the character would like to stay anonymous. I think the majority of fans would respect that wish.
Whereas celebrities who make their real-life identity into a brand - even if that brand is an obvious fiction as well - signal the opposite to their audience.
Yes. Outside of the sheer security, people telling rich people they're fake will just warrant a cute condescending laugh and they go on with their life, while the guy here is basically denied his identity.
With the Internet, you can now be famous, without being rich.
Many of the truly rich people are quite anonymous. The billionaires you read about are really just the tip of the iceberg.
Plus fame minus rich is probably not great. You can get a lot of unwanted attention that you can't avoid by moving or hiring guards.
Related phenomenon: So-called "Lolcows". Over here in Germany, we have the infamous case of "Drachenlord", a Youtuber that had a lot of negative interactions with his "fanbase" to the point that one could argue he was dependent on being harassed.
Also interesting how the definition of "famous" has changed due to that: We now have thousands of "micro-celebrities" who undoubtedly have a fan/celebrity relationship with their specific audience, yet are completely unknown to a wider audience. So even fame is now a relative term.
The Warhol Corollary: In the future, everybody will be famous to fifteen people.
>Many of the truly rich people are quite anonymous
Are you trying to tell me that there are people out there worth more than Elon Musk who are not throwing money at political campaigns, funding mass projects or cultural pursuits? Because, yes, its possible for someone who is worth say, half a billion or even up to maybe 10 billion dollars or so to stay out of public life, but at a certain degree of wealth that wealth becomes institutional and closely tied to political power, so it becomes functionally impossible to remain fully anonymous. What state, what government would allow a private citizen worth so much money to go untaxed, without that person somehow being tied to the government? Or are you saying that the state, which commands use of force and violence, would not use that force to extract wealth from those who are not apart, directly, of its apparatus?
Rich is relative. Famous YouTubers/streamers/etc making even a few hundred thousand a year would be considered rich by much of the world.
Yup, but the number of "influencers," even making six digits, is small.
A couple months ago, I was at a stoplight, and this kid in an old beater was in the left-turn lane, to my left.
He had a steadycam rig in the passenger seat, and was nattering on about something.
We would need to define "famous", because just because someone has a steady cam doesn't mean they're famous :P I would think the amount of "famous" "influencers" making that much is a much higher percentage.
Outside of that Twitch leak some years ago, is there any reliable data on how much content creators make?
I used to be a full-time YouTuber, and I was very successful. For my channels, the revenue estimates on Socialblade were accurate. Reality for me tended toward their high estimate.
Fair 'nuff. Certainly not something I feel like dedicating any time to researching.
I suspect that the number of folks that need bodyguards, but can't hire them, is nonzero.
It definitely is. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drachenlord Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an English version of the article. Maybe auto translate will get the gist across.
Small relative to the number of total influencers maybe, but I'm not sure it's a small number in absolute terms. There are an estimated 12 million full time influencers in the US, and approximately 1% of them have 100k+ followers. That means 120k people likely are making 6 figures at a minimum. Influencers with smaller audiences can still make significant income depending on engagement, sponsorship, demographic, hours worked, and platforms they are operating on.
Six figures ain't what it used to be.
I suspect a majority of folks on this forum make over six figures.
Not sure how many of us can afford bodyguards, though. Bodyguards make a lot. I know a couple.
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Considering that you can be a youtuber from anywhere, making a few hundred grand annually would make you actually quite wealthy. It's not the same thing as working for a big tech company but being required to live in a very high cost of living area.
I’ve heard stories of celebrities having things like hotel room and rental car reservations canceled because people thought they were playing a prank.
This is why people like my wife exist. They solely are the “human in the loop” on reservations making sure a human on the other side knows it’s legit. It’s a fascinating field.
Like for example how Facebook search results and graph search seem to encompass an ever enlargening circle of Friends Of Friends (and if not just reset the privacy settings to public anyway)
The website security model breaks down when people constantly try to enter your password.
The currently model assumes good behavior by most people most of the time in order for basic web services to function. Seems like an obvious vulnerability to malicious activity.
I rue the day (in 2004/5?) I got my name as my gmail address. My first name is not rare and my surname very common. Since then I've collected an eclectic group of homonyms who I just can't get out my inbox. The list includes: the retired English nurse who races remote control yachts and never pays his telco bill, the South African gold miner whose best new spots I am privy too, the NZ sports shop chain owner with a large property portfolio linked to my identity, the English lad on probation who ignores my suggestions to improve his dire CV presentation, and the Perth member of an illegal motorcycle group who is called occasionally to ride outs for fallen members.
You must have the most English name imaginable!
This is why we should replace names with uuids.
That would make parties a bit awkward, but it would avoid collisions.
Hi,my name is 1bd0a30d-b415-4747-9650-f1f6e530cd2a, can I get you something to drink?
What a coincidence! That's my name too!!
John Jacob Jingleheimer cfeb6ddc-43a5-4ba9-8a28-b71d93407c78, that's my name too. Whenever I go out, the people always shout, cfeb6ddc-43a5-4ba9-8a28-b71d93407c78
As The Clash booms through the speakers
Lock the taskbar, lock the taskbar!
Hmm, yes, I don’t know what I want, but I’m sure we’ll hash it out together
We do have personal numbers used for identification purposees, in my country we have the OIB
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identification_number...
which superseded the JMBG
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_Master_Citizen_Number
JMBG? One of the ex-YU countries?
Yes, Croatia moved to OIB, which is randomly generated unlike the MBG which was derived and contains personal information, like date of birth, region and gender.
Countries don’t really want unique IDs per person, even though it would extremely simplify all administrative work, because:
- How can spies have false identities, if you can account for every individual?
- The only scalable way to get voters is not to make people switch to the opposite party, but to flood a country with people who will vote for you.
Both points sound really weak I‘m afraid. From the perspective of a ruler of a country, both are much larger attack vectors for adversaries than opportunities for myself.
> Countries don’t really want unique IDs per person
Given the number is countries that already have those and those that attempt it every few years... I'd say it's not correct.
For spies, you just issue multiple identities - the origin country shouldn't have any issues with that part. It already happened for witness protection level stuff.
For voting... yeah, that's a citation needed. Politicians mostly worry about foreigners coming to vote.
That's BS, you can have spies with or without unique IDs, and there's better ways to get votes than creating fake people.
Also, a lot of countries do have IDs...
Biometrics have made it very hard for spies to have many different identities.
I propose we use UUIDv4 to interfere with any attempts to build demographic databases.
I strongly suggest UUIDv7, with our birthdate encoded as time.
Ordering the world population by birthday becomes so easy. Plus no endless discussion on wether or not we should use UUID as primary key.
People wouldn’t be fond of their name divulging exactly how old they are.
It's not a matter of being fond of, we're trying to be efficient here
I mean, it’s not hard to guess how old people are…
It’s hard for that guess to be accurate, though. Some people look ten years older or younger than they really are.
Yeah but think of the automated age discrimination during resume/CV screenings.
As someone moved several times in my life I could support (potentially several) personal uuid with global post routing service. Having declaring new postal address to all essential and random places one by one where I was mandated to give out to receive something I couldn't miss (authorities, banks, essential service providers, all else) is a common nuisance in an otherwise difficult period of life. Having a trustful[*] service (preferably post services itself, trusted parcel services) that translates a postal uuid to a current address each time a postal mail is supposed to be sent, current living address is righfully needed, would be a great advance (some countries have a postal address change service locally, some partially, that does similar).
[*] trustful, yes, that is a hard nut to crack! Who can be trusted with physical address and for what purpose, but in some sense it may be better for its controlled nature rather than the wild west of postal address world that we live in.
At the very least names should be unique strings, preferably pronouncable
In The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, the anarchists have names assigned at birth by a computer, guaranteed to be unique. They are gender-neutral (I think their artificial language doesn't have the possibility for gendered names) and monomial.
(I highly recommend reading the book, it's one of my favourite novels.)
They are not guaranteed to be unique as I recall, at one point the main character gets in a fight with a guy who demanded he change his name since he was tired of getting confused.
Ursula Le Guin didn't sugarcoat anarchism, at least, though I still think the depiction of the main planet system is a lot more depressingly plausible.
Those two names, IIRC, are unique but similar. (Shevek and Shevet, or something like that.)
Correct horse battery staple
“That’s amazing! I’ve got the same combination on my luggage!”
Pronounceable by *someone* or by you? Try getting together a native Cantonese speaker, Arabic speaker, and Inuktitut speaker and find a name all three of them can pronounce without noticeable issues.
Great! Everyone can get named a combination of Papa and Pizza, which are the only 2 words I've heard consistently pronounced everywhere I've traveled.
On second thought, I think the Japanese say "piza", so we're back to a unary sequence now. I call dibs on Papa¹
Well, Papa, if you've only ever heard pizza being pronounced correctly you haven't played Mystery of the Druids.
Great point. Touché
You need to have a restricted set of allowed syllables to prevent attackers from having names with similar pronounciation to common ones.
In unique name world I would totally for a scammer telling me "Hello, my name is Marck Zuckaberg, give me all your data".
Urbit IDs https://urbit.org/overview/urbit-explained/urbit-id
I dare you to name your kids UUIDs and see what happens.
I suspect when they are old enough to change their names, they will. For example, Wavy Gravy's son changed his name back to a normal family name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavy_Gravy#Personal_life
"Ohhh, if it isn't 99adbad3-f3c8-4c52-99d8-be692c62b9db again! Man, what a blast last Friday at e128001f-9737-4245-b08b-73bc50db0204's party, right?"
That's impractical. Someone made a base8192 Hangul UUID conversion, only ten characters long.
This? https://alicecengal.github.io/uuid-hangul/
Telling Siri to pronounce the output there is absolutely wild, I may not speak Korean but can tell it’s outputting unpronounceable nonsense.
I tried using Google translate's voiceover, it seems fine? I don't have an iPhone so I can't compare with Siri. It is obviously a nonsensical string of ten characters, but all hangeul characters should be pronouncible.
Well obviously in your personal circles you'd still use nicknames.
99ad and e128 in this case.
First guy is "bad", second guy is "bo8b" (Bob).
I just go by Ad Bad. Yeah I know about the other guy. E7 123 and the other college friends call me Ad Bad 3 and him Ad 88
But you'd call em 99ad for short in casual conversation
I feel like the names we have now already work well for casual conversations
Absolutely... but they will be mere nicknames.
I vote for [nanoid](https://github.com/ai/nanoid).
Everyone should get their own emoji that looks just like them.
My parents had me done one for my first ID card! They called it "a photo".
Don't give the Unicode consortium ideas!
Right after we upload minds into machines.
Which version? Probably UUID v7, right? So names can be easily indexed in a btree database
As someone who already has trouble with names, I endorse this. Now everyone will feel my pain
An IPv6 would also. Then this chap could have his website hosted on it.
that is silly. Obviously it should be the hash of someone’s genetic code plus the hash of the mind state vector at last checkpoint (to account for twins and clones)
Even monozygotic twins do not have absolutely identical DNA. And even with clones I bet there are many errors in cell replication, besides the epigenetic differences.
A quick tattoo on the arm and your set for life.
And forehead. Maybe four letters, on a scarlet base.
I suspect the GP was referring to this: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/tattoos-an...
I'm _Not Sure_ this is a good idea
Sorry but I am voting for the opposite solution, meaning:
So as the younger iteration, our friend Mark would now own bankrupcy offices now, on top of his shares in Meta, and be protected from impersonation forever.
Your version of the Purge would make an interesting Stephen King movie.
Oh I wasn't talking about that part of the equation, in the money regards I think in the people_money table we would be better off running "truncate"
Even better: social security numbers
lol, if it's downvoted that's how you know americans did it, because people from other countries have no idea why SS number is important or what it is
Why, we got something similar in other countries. Here in NL it is called BSN; Burger Service Number (burger means civilian).
I believe the civilian should be able to create identities based on their private key (which only the government knows) and these should have different details. Like for example, a nickname, a realname, a telephone number, and address, or multiple of these. But then, also the civilian should be able to revoke the licenses. Or, rather: they should be valid for a short amount of time.
> burger means civilian
Nice try, so you tell me that the burger hospital I passed by is not in fact a place where they patch up burgers until they’re back on their feet?
A lot of countries have a unique ID for their citizens which is used for routine identification. On websites, at the bank, etc. nothing special about SSNs in this regard, except that they were leaked more times than you can count.
> On websites, at the bank, etc. nothing special about SSNs in this regard, except that they were leaked more times than you can count.
That's not that special either. Plenty of countries make their numbers de jure public information.
The most special thing about the SSN is that the cards say (or said) not for identification, and then they're used for exactly that.
> Plenty of countries make their numbers de jure public information.
That's the difference. A lot of people and processes in the US make the assumption that the SSN is a well kept secret despite them being publicly leaked so many times. This assumption is a weakness for any process that relies on "secret" SSNs.
> burger means civilian
I just realised this is probably the German etymological branch of "burgoise".
Sorry to ruin your fun but in German it's actually just Bürger (capitalized because all nouns are). Though the true etymology might be entirely different.
Bourgeoisie or Burgher in English, Bourgeois in French or in German Bürger, all from old Frankish burg, for town. English has both words, but they now have different meanings, and the term Burgher is mostly obsolete.
The divide (or perception of a divide) between city dwellers and the country is not something the US invented, these divisions predate the colonisation of America.
> on their private key (which only the government knows)
What? Why?
How is a key private if the government (which belongs to the public) can read/edit/use it?
Because the responsibility of the proof that you are you lies, ultimately, at the proper authorities.
You could prove that through the government signing your public key...
Oh, we know what it is and we also know that it is terrible for identification.
Just hand out IDs with an actual unique id number with a check digit to _all_ citizens.
A mix of six upper and lower case gets you nearly 20 billion unique IDs, which should be enough for a while.
If we colonise the galaxy we could increase that to seven letters.
A social security number is unique. I do agree it's better to use a different unique number.
At least in my country, the SSN is unique and everyone has one.
How is it terrible? SSNs rather reliably identify individual people, actual non-fraudulent collisions are very rare.
The fraud is a separate issue and SSNs are obviously misused, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a reasonable system to uniquely identify multiple people with the same name and DOB.
The fact it is tied to social security and is not called “national ID” shows already it is a legacy system, + the fact there is no authentication in place
Authentication is completely separate from identification, you shouldn’t be using any kind of ID number to authenticate anyone. That does not suggest that ID numbers are not good for identification.
okay, mr... nullptr
See, someone told me few days ago that sarcasm doesn't work via text. Lol
Every time that kind of thing is suggested, people go on about “The Mark of the Beast.”
This is why we can’t have nice things.
What is more likely to happen is a global namespace of unique names. Famous and powerful people get to pick first, because they are more important. Names can be inherited and become signs of your class and wealth.
You get to be Bob192382, because you got in early and only had to add 6 numeric digits. In the year 2100, we're at 15 digits.
I guess people missed my sarcasm here.
See the username efforts of tech companies like Discord, etc.
> 15 digits
A billion (-1) is only 9 digits, even with only one "name" that would likely be sufficient, or 10 maybe digits at the absolute extreme.
How would this be enforced? Do you get punished on social media if you claim you are Bob?
My ex-wife had the same name as a woman in another state who had beaten up a cop and done jail time. So every time my wife's driver's license came up for renewal, the DMV decided she was that criminal, and refused to issue the license. This happened so often, she eventually was on a first-name basis with the DMV director, who had to intervene every time. I'm guessing this problem due to the DMV in our little state using an ancient computer system, perhaps written in COBOL in the 1960s. I can just see the code now, where it compares the name, but not state of residence or any other identifiers.
Are criminals not allowed to drive?
We might be missing information, such as that the person who beat up a cop also had their license suspended.
No, those are the people who refuse to upgrade the old COBOL systems. They are allowed to drive.
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i had the exact same first/last name / birth year as a kid in my school (town of about 3,000) and were both “juniors” so our dads both have the same name. that makes four of us.
unfortunately that guys got some problems .. duis… domestic batteries.. drug possession ..
i have been walked out of a couple jobs for “not disclosing my record” and having to sort that out.
then the one time i did get into trouble. my expungement was denied because i had “so many priors”…… and then i had to go back and explain that NO, thats not me. it was approved.
then process servers, warrants, derogatory credit entries cause the guy doesnt like paying his bills.
i eventually got a sealed name change and that was the end of that.
Did she share the same DOB?
Good for you, Mark! I had a nice chuckle. On a more serious note, I really feel for the people that cannot get any kind of support and try to get some help by messaging "the owner" of the social network they are in. With big companies, you used to be able to get someone to talk to you when you had a problem. Not anymore. The best you can get is a well trained LLM
A couple of years ago when I still was on Facebook, I had a problem with my account being falsely accused of hacking. I believe it happened because I had been chatting with my friend about computer malware.
All my chats were gone, and I couldn't write to any of my friends. "Okay, I will just reach the tech support, and solve the problem" - silly me back then. I was genuinely shocked that there was no "Facebook support". Just a bunch of FAQs, general help, and that's it, no way to talk to anyone. I felt completely helpless and lost, really unpleasant feeling.
My account got back to normal after one day or so, but that was the day I decided to begin the process of leaving that platform.
Facebook will ban you for the most odd of reasons, but report actual gore etc? Well now, that doesn't actually violate our TOS/community guidelines/blah
Gmail/Google has the same problem but I suspect and correct me if I'm wrong that it's less surface area to ban you - unless that did happen to people on Google+? But Google+ also didn't have its founder famously tell people "...they 'trust me', dumb fucks"
> Good for you, Mark! I had a nice chuckle.
Me too! Mark S. Zuckerberg seems to be a relaxed guy with a good sense of humor. Very likeable presentation!
What do you think happens today if you mail a letter addressed to the CEO of a big company (or their office)?
Please try... for science... and write about it and post here referencing this discussion. Thanks! :)
Depends on the company. Mail to the CEO is a well known customer support escalation path.
For companies that do generally support their customers, usually it gets you into an 'executive support' queue with people who are empowered to understand and solve problems that are mostly solvable --- you should be able to get money things made right, but don't expect product changes (but it can happen).
For companies that don't support their customers, it gets overwhelmed and may get dumped into the same usual support channels where reps aren't empowered to get anything done.
I mean another theory is that those people are misguided and vexatious, and that this correlates with them not actually checking which Mark Zuckerberg they are sending their urgent complaint email to.
There's a lawyer in Philadelphia named Justin Bieber.
I'm not sure which would be worse.
The data is pretty clear, Justin Bieber, specially in February 2011 (but improving since) https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...
haha, you are in trouble, i am calling justin bieber!
I know the guy who had Twitter/X @Justin (also my name) early on and he would constantly get mentions for “@Justin Bieber” because people didn’t understand the space.
If I were him, I would start singing and sending my music as a side project.
Who is Justice Beaver?
---
Sorry, an old joke from The Office and I couldn't resits...
there's several dudes named Jeffrey Epsteins out there who i assure you have far more negative associations
How do Chinese people deal with name conflicts?
If I wanna check the internet for someone, I find it impossible because for a lot of names there's at least thousands of people with the same exact full name. It must give both a feeling of safety but also frustration if you may want to stand out.
Indonesia is next fucking level.
Javanese names used to commonly be mononyms, was only required that people have a surname in 2022.
In Bali, children are essentially numbered. First kid is called Wayan, Putu, Gede, or Ni Luh. Second kid is Made, Kadek, or Nengah. Third kid is Nyoman or Komang. Fourth kid is Ketut. Fifth kid? They go back to Wayan. Most of these names aren't gendered, either.
> How do Chinese people deal with name conflicts?
In a big company, there are often many people with the same name. some companies may add a numeric suffix to their name like abc1, abc2, abc3.
We usually don't use our real names for social media accounts
> We usually don't use our real names for social media accounts
It's interesting how cultural differences can make some life algorithms hardly work in some countries. I sometimes use a method to find people from my past by googling their full name, switching to the image results, and spending a manageable amount of time scrolling through them until I find the person. I've successfully used this method several times. The images are usually related to job activities or social media profiles. However, from your description, this approach probably won't work in China for at least two reasons: too many raw results and few or no social media results.
UPDATE: a follow-up question. If in a big company two or more figures happen to have the same full name and need to be exposed publicly (on a site or promotional materials), are there any tricks for this?
Wow this is so rare, I can't recall any case like this.
But there are celebrities with exactly the same name, the media add a "big" or "little" prefix to their names according to age
From what I can tell, official documents rely on ID numbers, and for the social side, people can just come up with informal more unique names. But I'm not an expert.
A lot of names which are spelt differently in Chinese are translated to the same Latin spelling. So there’s a lot less conflict than it seems.
India is an interesting subject with so many Kumars and Prasads. They probably don't try to stand out with their name brand.
In Korea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_(Korean_surname)#Clans
In Vietnam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguyen
moslem naming is also not very different sometimes. lots of duplicate names like ahmed ahmed and mohammad mohammad. must be very frustrating! (it would be interesting to know how they manage it, since i do not know any of them personally.)
It's good that he has his own website! I can relate (for non famous reasons) about the Facebook issues. I can't even sign up any more, using my real name anyway.
It can be a pain as so many local organisations use Facebook as a free way to share information. Unfortunately if you're not logged in pages can be rate limited, get spammed with modals to sign up, can't scroll very far into any feed and probably in his case a nuisance as a platform for his business.
I once received a number of hateful mentions and DMs on Twitter because I share my name with a 60 Minutes Australia journalist who was the producer on a story about Conrad Murray (Michael Jackson's personal doctor). People really are that stupid.
I worked with a guy that shares the name with the Norwegian mass murderer who targeted children at a youth camp. I think had some pretty though years, but never changed his name.
I can't even imagine how you would go on with this name if you're living in europe as it guarantees instant recognition almost anywhere.
Depends how you use it. I see numerous possibilities of taking advantage of such "bad name". People know the real Breivik is in prison, so they will be genuinely curious. Besides, it's not like you have your name tattooed on your forehead.
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In Soviet Russia... Or not so Soviet but rather "modern" Russia, people are facing treason charges due to mistaken identity. Such a story unfolds right now: https://bereg.io/feature/2025/11/09/my-zhivem-v-raznyh-mirah
My name is composed of three parts, each one is common, but I thought that their sequence was supposed to be rare for statistical reasons. I sometimes searched for it in the internet to take a look of how my homonyms were going. Before 2010 they were few in terms of search results, but as years passed by, they started to show their faces. Most of the time they weren't bringing good news, like for example writing a best seller. I remember one year, a news site said one got killed by a shot. Then a few months later another one was also shot. I even sent a joke message to a few close coworkers "sorry, I won't be able to show up at work tomorrow. reason: I got killed (again) - <link to news>".
Another name "rareness" related story. Somewhere around 2010's I was backpacking east Europe and border police hold a train from Croatia to Slovenia for something like 15-20 minutes asking me to prove that I really was myself. Then they released me and let the train enter the country, but even so the police randomly appeared to ask my specific documents (in places that there were other people they came and asked only my docs). Then it started happening in other countries, most (but not all) countries started to hold me on the border control for one hour or two to do some clearance. Then in Argentina the border police said that someone with my whole name AND birth date was in some kind of interpol search list. Then two or three years later it stopped happening. I am sure someone stole my id and commited some crimes and then he was caught, because it is impossible to someone with my same three name and birth date happen to be in a interpol list just by coincidence. Interpol lists have how many people? 25k? Divide by days in a year. 69 have born in same day as you. From those, one have the same name as you.
Mark Zuckerberg may soon sue Mark Zuckerberg about name issues.
I most assuredly would not want to be Mark Zuckerberg. That name is not inspiring to most people. (Also, by the way, because Zuckerberg is perfectly fine german: Zucker = Sugar, Berg = Mountain, so a mountain of sugar. That's not good for your health either, in particular your teeth.)
The Facebook founder's father was a dentist, which is pretty funny given the name.
already did https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yk810pgkko
Similar case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Comput...
Also somewhat similar, the first large domain name dispute in Germany, in which a person called Andreas Shell held the domain shell.de:
https://www-heise-de.translate.goog/-55795?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_...
German Original: https://www.heise.de/-55795
Close approximation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_v._MikeRoweSoft (this was not Mike from "Dirty Jobs" but a different person)
Yeah, but in this case MikeRoweSoft.com redirects to microsoft.com after the settlement. Uzi Nissan was able to keep his domain to this day, even after his death in 2020.
Man, litigating versus a 12 year old boy has got to be the easiest job in the business - "Will you settle for an Xbox and a bundle of games?"
Huh, having checked the wikipedia link (the kid was 17 not 12), that's exactly what happened!
12th grade, not 12 years old.
The Xbox offer still stands
Edit: I replied before I read the wikipedia link and learned he literally settled for an xbox.
A more hilarious example: https://korrespondent.net/strange/522473-belorus-soobshchivs... ( translated: https://korrespondent-net.translate.goog/strange/522473-belo... ).
First thing I did was check https://nissan.com which apparently I haven’t done in years. RIP Uzi!
This website looks a lot like the one of Saul Goodman from Breaking Bad.
I think that's the usual way the american attorneys advertise. I kinda like that style. In Poland, attorneys aren't allowed to advertise that expressively, which I think is a stupid regulation.
Poland's universal health care also removes the incentive for the type of lawyer who most commonly uses "Saul" style advertising -- personal injury attorneys.
It is a big business because people need to recover their costs or be render homeless is someone hits them with their car or whatever.
As a fun cherry on top, part of the opioid crisis stems from people abusing prescription drugs to return to work sooner than they would in the EU.
This is his personal site not his law business site, which he links to in the page.
After we got acquired I suddenly found myself getting invitations to many many meetings I had no place in. It took me a number of years to figure out it was down to myself and the companies lead architect sharing the same given name. At the time we were the only two Jesse's in a pretty big company. The problem seems to have gone away since we hired more.
Similar situation here. My name is far from unique, but it's not common either. My best known impersonator is a prolific sci-fi author.
Whenever I'm introduced to someone and they perk up at my name, it's almost guaranteed that they're fans of that author. Then I have to disappoint them... Still, it's a good conversation starter.
I'm more interested in what your opinion on their works is? Are you a fan of yourselfsake?
A couple of decades ago I got sent some potentially sensitive (not sure how sensitive, I read as little as possible) employment related messages intended for someone with a name very like mine (same forename and middle name, surname differed by two typos, they also had the relevant <surname>.net domain).
I replied politely saying that I wasn't who they thought I was, and that I'd deleted the messages, and the buggers threatened to sue me if I continued to receive any more messages that they sent! This was an American firm, so there was no language barrier involved, though apparently an intelligence gap.
I didn't contact the other person until that threat, but at that point I looked him up and passed on that part of the comms trail with a “just to let you know what sort of idiots and litigious fools you are dealing with…” note.
Another recent name collision story: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/british-newspaper-spoke-...
(Note the slightly different spelling; the former mayor is "de Blasio", while the wine importer is "DeBlasio")
quote:
The man at the heart of a high-stakes mix-up that rippled through global political journalism in the final days of the New York mayoral campaign was neither “falsely claiming” to be former Mayor Bill de Blasio — as the Times of London suggested — nor, as The New York Times wrote, a “de Blasio impersonator.”
He is, instead, a 59-year-old Long Island wine importer named Bill DeBlasio, who merely responded to an email from a journalist seeking his views on Democrat Zohran Mamdani’s policies.
“I’m Bill DeBlasio. I’ve always been Bill DeBlasio,” DeBlasio said in an interview conducted Wednesday evening through his Ring doorbell in Huntington Station, Long Island, from his current location in Florida.
“I never once said I was the mayor. He never addressed me as the mayor,” DeBlasio told Semafor. “So I just gave him my opinion.”
“said in an interview conducted Wednesday evening through his Ring doorbell in Huntington Station, Long Island, from his current location in Florida.”
We are truly living in the future.
Video doorbells have been around for a long time.
In Spain we have 2 last names:
- first last name from last name first of the father.
- second last name from the last name first of the mother.
And with this method we have collisions.
In Portugal the last name come from the mothers.
In Portugal you can have one or more last names, but the very last one will be from the father's side. Unless both parents have the same double-barreled name? Never seen that here.
Some names are problematic, like this one. Some others are lucky [1] (I know it's a joke)
[1] https://ifunny.co/picture/go-gle-most-popular-actor-in-video...
Even with people that are not famous it can be difficult. My wife knows three people with the same name. So when I ask with whom are you going out she needs to add the city to make me understand.
Part of why in many times, ‘of x’ was a common ‘surname’. Also, profession - basically ‘Bob the Smith’, ‘John the Baker’, etc.
A lot of places (India, Brazil) still use one of your parents on official documents to disambiguate (Bob Smith, son of John (or Jill) Smith from Smithville).
Michael Bolton: https://youtu.be/WjZKVKxZcAo
I celebrate the guy's entire catalog.
This post is somewhat related and always makes me chuckle:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43929724
Some kinds of law specialties can get fun marketing.
In Boston, a personal injury lawyer is recently doing a bus advertising sign that seems to be a play on "Better Call Saul" (of the scrappy fictional TV series character's ads).
https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1nboypw/someone_at_...
He should be glad to be a lawyer, otherwise he might have spent so much money dealing with the name lol
Could anyone shed some light on the password reset email “hack”? I don’t really understand the attack sequence if the attacker doesn’t have access to your inbox. Even if you clicked them they don’t get access. My conclusion is trolling / annoyance.
The same thing happens to my Instagram account, which is an old 3-letter username that is desirable. I get hundreds of reset emails per month, all generated by the real service with legit outbound links.
how much are these services wasting sending out these emails? surely some rate limiting would be sensible
What are they wasting, other than recipient time?
Hundreds of reset mails a month is probably rate limited; otherwise it would be hundreds a day.
Compared to the torrent of actual spam this is just a drop in the bucket.
One time in around 2008 when I was in undergrad, I got facebook requested by a guy named David Liu (same name as me) who was going to a school many thousands of miles away, and I noticed that he had facebooked about 20-30 other David Liu's.
About 3-4 years later, I was in grad school, I meet this guy in person (he happened to be going to the same grad school), I recognize his name and face, and let him know that he facebooked me back then, and he got a chuckle out of it.
Reminds me of this prank where you call two people with the same name and you conference them together and have them figure it out.
I wonder if he’s ever had anything positive happen because of it. That list looks like a PITA :)
I share the same name with a local TV star in my country. Even that is a PITA. Can’t imagine being named Mark Zuckerberg or Michael Jackson or anything like that.
At some point there were teenager girls calling me (no idea how they got the phone number). I started acting like they called the right person and there would be happy screams on the other hand. I guess the high point was that. I decided that might not be a good idea though. Would definitely continue if my “fans” were middle aged men.
Michael Jackson is a fairly common name though, I went to school with one. Also with a George Washington, he had a harder time...
Michael (A.) Jackson is the inventor of representing programs in this diagram format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_structured_programming
There's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson_(writer) , who was one of the most famous experts on beer and whisky.
I seem to recall when he was on TV he leaned into the joke ("not that Michael Jackson"). Of course that was long before the days random people could send abuse on Twitter.
It used to be that whenever I told people about his work, they'd ask if that was the beer guy.
The "rich" Mark Zuckerburg should give him some compensation for the hassle.
That would be right thing to do.
He should at the very least ensure that there was some kind of liaison person at Meta for these not quite as rich (and certainly less obnoxious) Mark Zuckerbergs to reach in case of trouble with his service. This lawyer Mark should just have his account flagged with a huge 'Vetted, this guy is called that; leave it.' notice for any Meta algorithm or employee looking into it.
No. The individuals genuinely at fault here are
1) those who inflict harm on others, considering that being wealthy or disliked does not justify actions such as death threats
2) those who target the wrong person simply due to a shared name.
Any discussion of compensation should be directed at them.
> 2) those who target the wrong person simply due to a shared name.
In this case that includes the other Zuck's company. He should at least do something about that.
Answer the question: What would an asshole do? They would buy up their neighbors' houses to make an unapproved mega compound, buy up ancestral Hawaiian land to block communal land access, and do unlicensed shit without permits making their remaining neighbors miserable. So what is right by virtue is unlikely to happen because almost all billionaires are legitimized criminal aristocrats subject to a different set of rules than average or poor people who are killed in the street for selling loose cigarettes like Eric Garner.
Cigarettes kill. Selling loosies to kids kills.
Okay
As a Will Smith with no acting abilities I can relate. I have heard it got my resume to the top of the stack out of curiosity though
I would send business that guys way if I could, he seems like good people, unlike the more famous Zuckerberg.
Hey, this is one of those rare folks Facebook doesn't even know about! https://medium.com/the-haven/5-people-facebook-doesnt-know-a...
I'd never heard of anyone with the same name as me, until '94 or so, when I put up a Web page, and some nice person with the same name contacted me.
Name-wise, apparently there are at least two instances of a Dutch man (surname) unable to resist the marriage-material charms of the Irish.
Decades later, my namesake and I have email addresses differing by one letter, and I still forward email intended for him.
My namesake is accomplished and respected, and at least once I inadvertently rode on his reputation. A remote colleague referred offhand to me being a volunteer firefighter, apparently having Web searched, and confusing me with my better namesake (whose contributions include being a fire chief).
Lol, this reminds me of a funny story. I had a lawyer whose name was Jim Halpert. Turns out he was the very Jim who was inspired his namesake on the office. Asked him about it once. His reply? "Hey, it's been great for getting clients." =)
He was also very much like Jim on the show. Fun times.
I've heard of this guy, but not met him. My CEO told me that I remind them of Jim Halpert and I was like "Really? The guy from the Office? I always pictured myself as more of a Creed"[1], which made them bust out laughing and declare "That's such a Jim thing to say" and wander off after explaining that it's based on a real person.
It made me wonder how many of those characters are based on real people, since they themselves reminded me of another character I'll omit for privacy's sake...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeZ6a1A0-ow
Did he look at the camera after replying?
In the south of Italy where families were very close to each others, children abundant, and passing the name of grandparents to first and second borns was expected people ended up with tons of namesakes. I have 6 people in my direct family who all share same name and last name.
The best bit:
>Like I said, I don't wish Mark E. Zuckerberg any ill will at all. I hope the best for him, but let me tell you this: I will rule the search for "Mark Zuckerberg bankruptcy". And if he does fall upon difficult financial times, and happens to be in Indiana, I will gladly handle his case in honor of our eponymy.
According to the Algorithm Lords of my particular filter bubble, he does indeed rule the search results for "Mark Zuckerberg bankruptcy".
On the "fake name" thing:
I felt guilty reading it, as in many past companies "Mark Zuckerberg" (and Bill Gates, and Tim Apple, Elon Musk etc) was indeed often used as a placeholder for test accounts and test data, and it never crossed my mind that we were basically training ourself to also treat a "Mark Zuckerberg" on our service as an account that escaped the sandbox or some other attack on the service.
Hopefully there aren't too many people with the name "First Last" running around.
It was tricky to use too literal names, as they're basically the placeholders in the input forms for instance, or the translations keys.
To defend a bit the choice for somewhat realistic names, there is a gestalt decomposition where you're looking through "First name" first names for hundreds of lines. Same for Lorum ipsums, designers' reaction are completely different when the page looks somewhat realistic and isn't just a blatant test.
Lol, it's Tim Cook, Mr. President.
Tim Apple is an awesome mnemonic
It was kinda funny from across the pond, the first time around. Putin horse riding topless was also a funny meme.
Looking back at that period is depressing af.
For a long time I would get hardcore stopped and hassled at the airport cause my name matched a terrorist. Although I was born in the USA. Made no sense to me why our system would flag someone just by name
"Welcome to iammarkzuckerg.com"
Okay, the site needs a little revision =p
Yes I also spotted that and wondered if it was intentional or not
Last I heard, the other Mike Warot was a guard at the British Museum. I'm sure there are more.
My brother in law, William Morris, got me more than one notice when his caller ID showed up at the marketing firm I used to work at. ;-)
A few years ago, I was trying to find fun things to show my friend Ward, and you wouldn't believe how many Ward Christensens there are mentioned in newspapers.com.
This must be some analog of the birthday paradox.
Singer Katy Perry vs Sydney designer Katie Perry
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-09/high-court-to-decide-...
I’m have a very common first name and moderately common second name. The people who I have discovered that share my name have been nothing but a pain in the arse.
There was the Guantanamo inmate who managed to get me flagged for extra checks on every flight I took from around 2005-11.
Then there was the guy who leased some mining equipment and failed to pay, which somehow ended up on a background check for me for a job.
I have the same name as a former MLB player. We both use Yahoo Mail. I was there first and use my name without the middle initial as my email address. He uses his middle initial. I've received many emails for him where people have overlooked the use of his middle initial. Sometimes it takes me a second to realize the mistake and I'm wondering WTF is this email on about.
I live in a relatively small country, but my first and last name are very common over here.
There have been at least seven others with the same name in my city (population 1M) who had bought computer equipment in the same shop. In the country, there are at least three other software engineers, of which one had published his undergrad thesis on the same topic as I had at about the same time.
The most recent episode of the BBC Satire Radio show "The Naked Week" reached out to hundreds of name-alikes to get them to comment on a recent UK news story.
They ended up interviewing Taylor Swift, an MMA instructor from Cheltenham, UK.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002lppb
Time for other Zuck to sort out his SSL.
Firefox does not trust this site because it uses a certificate that is not valid for markzuckerberg.com.
The certificate is only valid for the following names: *.facebook.com, *.facebook.net, *.fbcdn.net, *.fbsbx.com, *.m.facebook.com, *.messenger.com, *.xx.fbcdn.net, *.xy.fbcdn.net, *.xz.fbcdn.net, facebook.com, messenger.com
Thanks for the list. Blocked.
My name is Jonathan Apple, a variety of a fruit.
If I want to find myself in a search engine I usually have to add -fruit -trees.
I work in tech so the jokes are endless.
I recommend everyone contact GENIUSWEBHACKERS@GMAIL.COM or via WhatsApp at +447414699515. In addition to exposing cheating partners, they offer the following services: * Removal of criminal charges * Monitoring of phones and social media * Hacking of websites * Bank transfers * Modification of account balances * Location tracking * Hacking of bank statements and much more. Feel free to share your concerns with us. Your satisfaction is our priority. You can also try their services at an affordable price through this professional email address.
This article gives a window into both how oppressive social media can be for high-profile folks and how confused a LOT of people are basically all the time.
It also helps me remember that there’s a lot of people out there who are pretty angry and feel unheard.
The world’s a tough place for a lot of people.
I have a fairly common name, along with an uncle of the same name. I found a few others as well, and was thinking of visiting the business of one of us. Sadly, that Nacho passed away, so the plan is not going to happen, but at least we got a chuckle out of sending out the NYT obituary to various friends.
My namesake was(died a few years back) the wealthiest person in the city I live in. He was worth peanuts compared to my brother's namesake who made billions through some sort of Lisp derivative shenanigans(or something along those lines, it's unclear).
When I was in university a decade ago, a classmate of mine shared the same name as some high-ranking university staff. The classmate's university email account received some unsolicited confidential messages that were intended for the staff, not him.
A friend of mine worked for a company with “cloud” in its name, but company had nothing to do with computer clouds.
He said they got at least two calls a day from angry people complaining that their “cloud” wasn’t working (he’s pretty sure most of them meant iCloud).
I literally just hired Ben Horowitz last month, but I must assume that mine is the better systems and integrations engineer so I consider myself having getting the better deal.
OK. I avoided this post for a while, and then had to find out what was up. It was worth it. Ha ha, it brought a bit of levity to my afternoon.
ctrl+u this ... there's some nice parts commented out
That lost bit of sample HTML below the body is cute too:
It gives the site an artisanal feel.I got halfway through an exec level interview process with an international food service conglomerate due to them trying to internally promote my namesake.
Reminds me of CV lcamtuf published on his website shortly after leaving Google. A single page that mainly said: "my name is Zalewski, yes, that Zalewski".
I am fascinated by the people who just send a request to mark zuckerburg for money in Venmo. I guess shoot your shot, it costs you nothing. But still
I share my name with a corporate lawyer living a few hours away. Maybe one day I'll cash-in on that domain name.
I’m Jet Li, not the real master. People laughed and couldn’t believe it, but both of us live in Singapore.
I wonder if Facebook Mark ever receives emails from people needing bankruptcy help. It goes both ways.
If our Mark here ever thinks his live is too easy, he should consider moving to England, specifically Scunthorpe.
Easy living. Go try to register company, open a bank and then send few payments if your name is "Vladimir Putin".
any sanctioned individual. Some of their names are super common. Sorry Ivan Ivanov, you are on the list, no bank account for you. based by a true story.
(meanwhile the sanctioned Ivan is chilling on his yacht with 3 passports and 5 golden visas)
Wouldn't they at the very least compare the birth dates?
Computer says no.
Btw enjoy your instant ban due to AML policy, register another account to contact support again so we can ban you for breaking single account policy.
https://nissan.com
Something tells me Mark E. Zuckerberg might need the services of Mark S. Zuckerberg soon.
The most recent hilarious example of this was a British newspaper that contacted “Bill DeBlasio” by email for comment on the NYC mayor election (Bill de Blasio is a former mayor of NYC), without ever verifying (or apparently, even asking) that they had found the person they intended.
https://www.semafor.com/article/10/29/2025/british-newspaper...
The man at the heart of a high-stakes mix-up that rippled through global political journalism in the final days of the New York mayoral campaign was neither “falsely claiming” to be former Mayor Bill de Blasio — as the Times of London suggested — nor, as The New York Times wrote, a “de Blasio impersonator.”
He is, instead, a 59-year-old Long Island wine importer named Bill DeBlasio, who merely responded to an email from a journalist seeking his views on Democrat Zohran Mamdani’s policies.
“I’m Bill DeBlasio. I’ve always been Bill DeBlasio,” DeBlasio said in an interview conducted Wednesday evening through his Ring doorbell in Huntington Station, Long Island, from his current location in Florida.
“I never once said I was the mayor. He never addressed me as the mayor,” DeBlasio told Semafor. “So I just gave him my opinion.”
my name's Muhammad Usman, let me tell you, there are 1000s of us out there if not more. It's very hard to get a username without numbers on any site except somehow I got it on HN :D
Honestly the more I read the more I felt bad for the guy. Like yeah, having your personal facebook disabled a bunch is funny but I couldn't imagine getting a bunch of threats directed towards you is very good for the psyche, especially while getting hundreds of calls a day
Sucks to have all the downsides of being famous, but none of the benefits.
I think I would rather change my name than deal with all that, tbh.
i went to his professional website https://zucklaw.com/ and ironically the accessibility features there are largely inaccessible
Sometimes your life would be easier if you just changed your name.
"Why should I? He's the one who sucks"
It's unjust.
Sure, but if tomorrow some dude with the same name as me decides to go on a killing spree, or sexually assault a toddler, I'd change my name. Just or unjust.
I'd have to change my email domain too though, so that would suck, but at least I could put up a website there explaining my new name and that I am not the now world famous terrorist who shot up a kindergarden/fondled the pope/ate a baby.
I see - that would suck.
"You're not related to THE Adolf Hitler .. (I hope?)" -hypothetical conversation
[pope fondling - just getting closer to God]
I would change my name. Family tradition isn't worth the hassle. The older people in my family would eventually get over it. This harassment will not stop.
The Facebook founder can change his name, he already changed his company's name. Mark Metaberg would surely be a more unique name.
But he won't
"Why should I change? He's the one who sucks."
That was funny in the movie. In real life, he won't change. You're the one who has to deal with constant avoidable frustration.
This is pure awesomeness. It made my day.
My name is so common that people laugh and say, "come on, what's your real name?" There are two of us in our little town. When the other one robbed a convenience store I started getting calls from friends who thought it was me. I also look like many people, to the point that I once told someone, "no, I'm really not your cousin."
this reminds me of Adolf Hitler Unnona [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_Uunona
poor bastard he cops all the flack
Just a reminder that there are ongoing issues where Facebook prevents Native Americans from signing up or being allowed to use their legitimate names because their legal names are judged “inauthentic.”
This has been documented for well over a decade. Facebook has publicly promised changes, but the problem persists and support responses appear weak. Almost like they don’t care at all…
https://www.vice.com/en/article/facebook-is-still-making-it-...
I mean, I guess since he is on the front page of Hacker News, he is in fact the real Mark Zuckerberg
He could easily use his middle name or go by Marcus. Just saying...sounds terrible having to deal with all the insanity.
Why should I change my name? He's the one that sucks.
I wouldn't want to humiliate myself by letting The Zuck prevent me from using my own name
it is pretty funny
Mostly
"I routinely receive death threats and harassment on the Messenger app directed to the "other" Mark Zuckerberg"
you'd hope they would notice their mistake before its too late
"I don't know who they are, but their attorney is Mark Zuckerberg".
Having the same name as a famous person seems like a decent marketing benefit. And funnily enough, that’s achievable with some paperwork in many areas of the world! I wonder how/if this interacts with trademark (or other?) law. Can I change my name to Sundar Pichai? If so, then why haven’t a bunch of techbro founders done that already?
> Can I change my name to Sundar Pichai? If so, then why haven’t a bunch of techbro founders done that already?
Yes, you can. But it’d be stupid.
Another successful Zuck? What a blessed name.
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