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Someone has stolen my Instagram account

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Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#331

Post by Asooka »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #256
ethbr0 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely what I was going to link this to: the early (and now, TLD-expansion) domain name ownership mess. The US (and seemingly other countries) trademark system is woefully underspecified for the modern world. Among other issues: - Enforcement, given an exponential explosion of user-created public content with increasingly sophisticated tools - 1:1 design & physical matter copying - Likeness-intended / indistinguis…

There's also the international issue. Different countries can have conflicting trademarks. So if you've got a valid trademark for "ACME, inc" from the US, and someone else has a valid trademark for "ACME, inc" from the UK, who gets the ACME domain/TLD/subdomain/twitter handle/etc? Both can get legal judgements in their respective countries!

I'd say if you only own "ACME, Inc" in the US (UK), you only get to register acme.co.us (.co.uk). In this case, when no company owns an international ACME trademark, there should be a body that maintains acme.com as a simple text-only disambiguation page showing you links to each ACME, Inc with a description in the respective country's official language(s). I am nearly certain there is already a discussion buried at the end of some RFC about exactly this problem and proposed solutions, which weren't implemented because the good-enough solution was way cheaper than adding trademark disambiguation to the assigned names system.

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#332

Post by notdang »

toyg wrote: post #328
notdang wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

apparently he did not lost his images. the original account was swapped with this one: https://www.instagram.com/danny.miracle.done3/

How? Where did you read about it? The fact that IG accounts can be just "swapped" like that seems like a big security problem.

I saw it in his twitter thread.

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#333

Post by SpelingBeeChamp »

jstanley wrote: post #279
zamadatix wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's remarkably hard to actually "own" anything on the internet. The act of paying for something or not does not dictate what's your property - ASNs are leased, IPs are leased, domains are leased, connections are leased and you'll need to either pay or use someone else's to host something on the internet. The closest you could come is legacy IPv4 space and not rely on traditional infrastructure such as DNS. Most regi…

Interestingly you can "own" an Onion address for a Tor hidden service quite easily. You know the private key and nobody else does, so nobody can take your address away from you.

If it's known that you are the owner a court can theoretically take it away from you. (Or at least jail you if you don't hand it over.)

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#334

Post by jstanley »

SpelingBeeChamp wrote: post #333
jstanley wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly you can "own" an Onion address for a Tor hidden service quite easily. You know the private key and nobody else does, so nobody can take your address away from you.

If it's known that you are the owner a court can theoretically take it away from you. (Or at least jail you if you don't hand it over.)

Perfect.

That's the same level of ownership that you have over anything physical, which is the level of ownership that the comment I was replying to was saying is hard to achieve on the Internet.

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#335

Post by cnst »

Kapura wrote: post #16

I think this is indicative of the biggest problem we have had with social media: there is no legalism here, just "codes of conduct" that companies and users both willfully ignore. If your handle gets sold by some facebook employee to a rich kid in LA, what recourse do you have? I don't know what laws this would break (maybe some broad definition of fraud? I Am Not A Lawyer) so it's not like this person has a slam dun…

The biggest problem is that a lot of these companies no longer have support for the average users, so, you simply have no way to escalate the issue, other than Hacker News or the like.

It's this support-through-Hacker-News phenomenon that must be addressed. One CDN is especially notable for doing this -- they may delete your site w/o an explanation, and then if it blows up, their CEO or CTO comes here to say not to worry, that you can always contact him directly here through HN or the special email. What if you don't have or don't know HN? We never get any follow-ups or postmortems for these incidents, either; with the companies brushing the whole incident as a private matter, never respecting the wishes of the user to share the details publicly, never sharing the details with the user itself, either.

P.S. Looks like Danny Hall got the account restored a few hours ago with all the pics; but he didn't seem to have received any explanation, either; probably never will.

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#336

Post by cnst »

zamadatix wrote: post #191
nabla9 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the new owner is imposter trying to be the old owner, it would be identity theft and fraud. If it's just giving the handle to someone else there is nothing. If you don't pay for a account, you don't usually own it unless there is something I'm missing. If you want to own your identity in the internet, get a website you own and don't rely on shady social-media networks that give you something free.

It's remarkably hard to actually "own" anything on the internet. The act of paying for something or not does not dictate what's your property - ASNs are leased, IPs are leased, domains are leased, connections are leased and you'll need to either pay or use someone else's to host something on the internet. The closest you could come is legacy IPv4 space and not rely on traditional infrastructure such as DNS. Most regi…

Just because a fee is due annually doesn't mean you don't "own" whatever it is that you "lease".

In the real world, you still have to pay taxes and HOA fees on real estate property that you own; plus, have to put up (or finance) a huge deposit in order to "own" it. Same goes for any other large property like cars.

You're talking about trademarks, but trademarks themselves often require renewal every 10 years, where you have to continue paying a renewal fee in order to continue to "own" it.

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#337

Post by noxer »

nitrogen wrote: post #146
noxer wrote: post #41

HN is becoming a tool to report such crap. can we stop that pls. I know it may help some but get back their account but it ultimately does not solve the problem and it unfair as most people will not know how to make the necessary drama. + its annoying non-content post we get here every other week.

it unfair as most people will not know how to make the necessary drama The solution to a deep problem is not to kick down the ladder a few people have found to climb out of it.

I never said its a solution to the problem. Its a solution to the symptom - the crappy non-content posts on HN like this one. I'm pretty sure these post are against the guidelines anyway.

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#339

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

asciident wrote: post #273
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m with you to a degree, but if most anyone’s email account vanished, or worse was stolen, I’d be pretty confident guessing that they’re screwed. For more typical social media, losing a decade of pictures is pretty harmful. It’s not about the value of the @danny handle, it’s also about the account being gone. And the privacy issues if the new person got all the DMs and private info.

You're right that these things are devastating when they happen, but pre- social media, they happened all the time. Every year, half the people born in [year-21] lose their university email accounts (including their google drive, etc.) and eventually transfer to another email just fine. Before online identity, people lost their phone numbers and had to inform friends that they switched to a new one. You'd get the pre…

Of course email isn’t new and neither are phones. Things like 2FA are new, as are other things assuming you still have the phone and email you signed up with. The problem isn’t the thing, it’s the services that rely on the assumption that you still have the thing.
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