>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".
That would be right thing to do.
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.
In this case that includes the other Zuck's company. He should at least do something about 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.
Me too! Mark S. Zuckerberg seems to be a relaxed guy with a good sense of humor. Very likeable presentation!
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.
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.
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"
Edit: I replied before I read the wikipedia link and learned he literally settled for an xbox.
https://www-heise-de.translate.goog/-55795?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_...
German Original: https://www.heise.de/-55795
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.
Looking back at that period is depressing af.
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.
Just hand out IDs with an actual unique id number with a check digit to _all_ citizens.
If we colonise the galaxy we could increase that to seven letters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I just realised this is probably the German etymological branch of "burgoise".
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.
What? Why?
How is a key private if the government (which belongs to the public) can read/edit/use it?
99ad and e128 in this case.
In unique name world I would totally for a scammer telling me "Hello, my name is Marck Zuckaberg, give me all your data".
(I highly recommend reading the book, it's one of my favourite novels.)
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.
On second thought, I think the Japanese say "piza", so we're back to a unary sequence now. I call dibs on Papa¹
with Session( engine ) as session:
youngest_ids_subq = (
select( func.max( People.id ).label( "max_id" ) )
.group_by( People.name )
.subquery()
)
purge_stmt = (
delete( People )
.where( People.id.not_in( select( youngest_ids_subq.c.max_id ) ) )
)
session.execute( purge_stmt )
session.commit()
unique_idx = Index( "uq_people_name", People.name, unique=True )
unique_idx.create(bind=engine)Your version of the Purge would make an interesting Stephen King movie.
Ordering the world population by birthday becomes so easy. Plus no endless discussion on wether or not we should use UUID as primary key.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identification_number...
which superseded the JMBG
- 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.
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.
Also, a lot of countries do have IDs...
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.
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.
See the username efforts of tech companies like Discord, etc.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
[*] 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.
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
[1] https://ifunny.co/picture/go-gle-most-popular-actor-in-video...
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).
I'm not sure which would be worse.
---
Sorry, an old joke from The Office and I couldn't resits...
Yes, you can. But it’d be stupid.
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.
"You're not related to THE Adolf Hitler .. (I hope?)" -hypothetical conversation
[pope fondling - just getting closer to God]
<a href="https://www.example.com" target="_blank">Link Text</a>
He was also very much like Jim on the show. Fun times.
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...
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."
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.
Many of the truly rich people are quite anonymous. The billionaires you read about are really just the tip of the iceberg.
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.
Outside of that Twitch leak some years ago, is there any reliable data on how much content creators make?
I suspect that the number of folks that need bodyguards, but can't hire them, is nonzero.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Hard to fix, -- since even if people were considerate enough to make a tenfold reduction you'd still be overdosed by 10,000x.
“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...
Which is preserved here [1]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250919063134/https://www.nokia...
https://www.thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/concept/sonder
(meanwhile the sanctioned Ivan is chilling on his yacht with 3 passports and 5 golden visas)
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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
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?
But there are celebrities with exactly the same name, the media add a "big" or "little" prefix to their names according to age
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.
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.
They ended up interviewing Taylor Swift, an MMA instructor from Cheltenham, UK.
- 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.
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…”
I’d switch firms immediately if that’s their level of opsec awareness
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.
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.
No matter what format you hand a recipient a document in, they can always make a photocopy and pass it on.
And this is still irrelevant to sending email to the wrong recipient, so I don’t know why you’re stuck on infra security.
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.
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.
Edit: side note, your username is also the name of my favorite fusball table maker.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 am not the horror film director I share a name with.
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?
It's somewhere in the document.
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.
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'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.
My first name is very uncommon and my last name is very common.
It's bizarre though... who puts down an email address they don't own on a job application?!
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.
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?
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.
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.
Glad to see that after five years post abandoning it my contribution to the name is basically gone from the internet now.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was his iPad's fault, apparently.
It basically defines the organization.
My complete name is rare, but I share it with a journalist who's quite a bit older than me.
If you are famous enough, people might even deliberately name their kids after you.
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's a felony in many places.
You could easily be a paw in an identity theft play like that.
I suspect it may fall afoul of a law about making false statements to the government, but that's distinct from fraud.
Impersonating someone at their behest as a favour is unlikely to be dishonest.
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.
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 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.
Where's the crime?
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.
You wouldn't believe some of the things that have shown up in my inbox.
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.
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.
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
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.
Hundreds of reset mails a month is probably rate limited; otherwise it would be hundreds a day.
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.
Okay, the site needs a little revision =p
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.
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.”
(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.”
We are truly living in the future.
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 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.
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-...
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).
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.
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.
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).
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_...
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.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-09/high-court-to-decide-...
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.
koolala•3mo ago
lukan•3mo ago
"I routinely receive death threats and harassment on the Messenger app directed to the "other" Mark Zuckerberg"
koolala•3mo ago