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Gail.com FAQ

gail.com

201–210 of 224 posts

Re: Gail.com FAQ

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever met rms? http://www.jwz.org/hacks/why-cooperation-with-rms-is-impossi...

for the uninitiated, you're looking for an audio file at the above link. you need to delete your HN referrer in order to do that because jwz is a "special" kind of adult.

For those who don't know how to do the above, simply open the link in a private window.

Re: Gail.com FAQ

#202

It must have been nice to have been alive in the early internet where barely any domains were taken. On the bright side domains have been less relevant since the rise of accessing sites via search engines and the move to mobile apps whose stores don't suffer from the squatting issues.

> since the rise of accessing sites via search engines

This is worse as now you have to compete with ads (potentially from scammers) and SEO. At least with domains, once you register all the major misspellings for a nominal fee, the problem is resolved. With ads, it's an auction so you're constantly paying a protection racket to the search engine to outbid the malicious actors.

Re: Gail.com FAQ

#203
post #134

Yeah, I can sympathize... I've been using "jest" as my nickname since college years, like 25 years now. Now I'm bothered when someone upgrades @jest in their JavaScript project on GitHub or BitBucket

@TODO is a real person on github as well

Re: Gail.com FAQ

#204
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the page layout is likely designed to be readable on anything that speaks HTTP. Including text-based browsers, mobile devices with low bandwidth and performance, screen readers, etc. All you have to do to get the text width you want is resize your browser window.

None of those things are harmed by putting a maxwidth that limits the line length to something reasonable for the viewport size.

The trouble is that everyone else's idea of "reasonable" is about 1/3 of what I want. You can all make your browsers narrower, but I've got no way to make your sites wider :(.

Re: Gail.com FAQ

#206
post #205

> My husband registered it as a birthday gift back in 1996. This is the strangest gift I ever saw.

Surely not that unusual to buy somebody a domain of their name? Admittedly quite a techie gift but I’m not sure I’d agree it’s quite as “out there” as you suggest!

Re: Gail.com FAQ

#209
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The requesting computer has a bit flip and requests the wrong domain. It even is not stopped by HTTPS depending on where the bit flip happens and how the software is written.

Is there any data to support the hypothesis that this happens often? I've never experienced it without being a human typo. I find it hard to believe in this day and age we have a single service that has high error rates no one notices.

The trick was that over a large number of machines it becomes likely to happen.

Re: Gail.com FAQ

#210
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The requesting computer has a bit flip and requests the wrong domain. It even is not stopped by HTTPS depending on where the bit flip happens and how the software is written.

Is there any data to support the hypothesis that this happens often? I've never experienced it without being a human typo. I find it hard to believe in this day and age we have a single service that has high error rates no one notices.

My own anecdotal experience. The talk. We essentially registered some popular domain bitflips, set up some honeypot style collectors and listened. Saw way more traffic than we expected and decided it was worth offering to customers ad a proof of concept, some stuck with it for some time. Now there is a cottage industry around “domain protection” and really all you have to do register your bitflip and typo domains if you are a big company or service provider where this matters. But it was fin demonstrating the why to them :)
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