Live data from Hacker News

Gail.com FAQ

gail.com

211–220 of 224 posts

Re: Gail.com FAQ

#211
post #151

Am I wrong to guess that this domain is worth more than a million dollars? Rejecting that kind of money for making a point is… I don’t know, but it’s definitely something. Edit: not just rejecting money, but defending it in court!

What they successfully defended in court was a company called GAIL trying to get the domain without paying them for it.

Re: Gail.com FAQ

#212
Fun fact: In the 90's IBM produced a commercial where a young girl is creating her own website, www.duck.com, about ducks. Unfathomably, no one thought to check whether www.duck.com was an actual website, and what if any content might be there if people watching the commercial typed the domain name into their browser address bar.

Turns out www.duck.com was our domain name at "The Duck Corporation", an early version of On2.com, later bought by Google. Google then gifted the domain to DuckDuckGo (try it!)

Sort of a tech company version of Ancestry.com?

Re: Gail.com FAQ

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or just copy it to the clipboard and paste.

Re: Gail.com FAQ

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a weird take. I am French, I have never heard (except for Téléphone's song) that expression. The closest thing that comes to mind is "plouf plouf". Wouldn't it simply be because you have been using (and publicly disclosing) that mail address for quite some time and it probably became part of each and every email list script kiddies are able to get their hands on?

French canadian here and same comment, ploum does not mean anything. Even plouf (for us).

Belgian here. I don’t use "ploum ploum" either (else I would never have this pseudo) but realized over the years that a number of people use this expression. (look on twitter for "ploum ploum" for example).

And, yes, lot of spam is because this email was in multiple exposed account but I’ve received lot and lot of "fresh subscription/confirm your emails" where it was obvious people were simply writing whatever in a field.

Re: Gail.com FAQ

#216
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps they are confusing it with the San Francisco Armory, a historic building the NIMBY neighbors blocked from being converted into housing so a porn company bought it instead and turned it into a production company instead.

Not anymore I’m afraid. Sold in 2018 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Armory

Yes. I guess a few years of this was more than even the NIMBYs could take. It's now owned by some capital group seeking to build housing there, but new NIMBYs will come to the fore to block it, and the combo of declining SF real estate prices and rising interest rates may well make the project unviable, since a developer has to pay interest for a decade or more while stalling tactics delay approval.

Re: Gail.com FAQ

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I friend of mine has "common short personal name" at icloud.com, me.com, mac.com, gmail.com, hotmail.com, proton, ... Importantly, one of those is bound to his iCloud account. During the holidays, he has an alternate "burner account", since his account can receive multiple reset requests per- minute for a couple of weeks. He estimates he gets 20000+ reset requests per year. According to him, it's just part of living…

My HN username is what I use for lots of other things, including for older email providers. You'd be surprised how many reset emails I get to that username at various webmails. It's not exactly John Smith.

I am a "J Smith" and my employer has many of us.

Every quarter "we" (the group of specifically-first-named J-Smith's) are sent an email kindly reminding us to change our middle name in the corporate directory to "(Job Title)", to help people disambiguate us. The last time, there were three of us, so I tried to get the other "J Smith"s to change their names to "(Larry)", "(Moe)", and "(Curly)". No luck. There's a new crop of auxiliary "J Smith"s (I'm "J Smith Prime", in my mind), now, so I'm trying to work on them.

One day ... one day.

Re: Gail.com FAQ

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, for SBI, I saw recently that they have become pretty Internet savvy -- they own the `.sbi` TLD. Non-classic TLDs get the worst search and email filter ratings, don't they?

That gets repeated a lot, but I've never seen a confirmation. There may be a perception like that because non-classic TLD are usually cheaper, which leads to easier spam. But that's still a problem with the specific domain, not the TLD. The only confirmed thing I heard is manual email filtering where some people don't understand the bias above and ban all non-com/net/gov emails and think they're clever.

Not just manual filtering, there are many automatic/default filters like "KAM_INFOUSMEBIZ = Prevalent use of .info|.us|.me|.me.uk|.biz domains in spam/malware"

It's not a guaranteed strike but I just had a look at the last email I had from a .biz and it got 0.8 added to it's spam score because it had a biz domain. Still got through as it was otherwise legit though.

Re: Gail.com FAQ

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My HN username is what I use for lots of other things, including for older email providers. You'd be surprised how many reset emails I get to that username at various webmails. It's not exactly John Smith.

I am a "J Smith" and my employer has many of us. Every quarter "we" (the group of specifically-first-named J-Smith's) are sent an email kindly reminding us to change our middle name in the corporate directory to "(Job Title)", to help people disambiguate us. The last time, there were three of us, so I tried to get the other "J Smith"s to change their names to "(Larry)", "(Moe)", and "(Curly)". No luck. There's a new…

Oh, I can only imagine how annoyed I'd be with that. That's how I'd end up as "K (Viceroy) Strauser" or such.

Re: Gail.com FAQ

#220

Fun fact: In the 90's IBM produced a commercial where a young girl is creating her own website, www.duck.com, about ducks. Unfathomably, no one thought to check whether www.duck.com was an actual website, and what if any content might be there if people watching the commercial typed the domain name into their browser address bar. Turns out www.duck.com was our domain name at "The Duck Corporation", an early version o…

I assume Google avoided a significant legal risk by gifting it to DDG

edit: surprisingly, it used to point to Google Search https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/12/duck-com-now-points-to-duc...

Post reply on HN