Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 394 posts

Re: How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

#211

Post by olsonea »

sbierwagen wrote: post #139
bushido wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A better analogy would be an owner of a valuable piece of property who wasn't putting it to good use. So if you were not putting your backyard to good use you would not feel too bad if your neighbors decided to encroach on it?

Yes. This is the point of adverse possession: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession Land should not remain unused.

Why shouldn't it remain unused?

"They paved paradise, put up a parking lot." Joni Mitchell

IANAL, but I have a hard time believing that a court of law is going to issue a judgement of adverse possession where the perpetrator used fraud/identity theft, extortion and blackmail to come into possession of it.

Re: How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

#212

Post by westi »

smartician wrote: post #89

That reminds me, a few months ago I had a weird Twitter experience. Someone gained access to my rarely used Twitter account @smartician and started posting spam. Somehow Twitter noticed, reset the password and notified me via email. I have no idea how that was possible.

> Somehow Twitter noticed, reset the password and notified me via email. I have no idea how that was possible.

This sounds like pretty normal automated monitoring for what looks like compromised account behaviour.

Re: How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

#213

Post by Houshalter »

aragot wrote: post #194
markdown wrote: post #24

I feel bad for this guy, and twitter needs to do the right thing and return to him his handle. Then I can come back here and post nasty comments about squatters.

The problem is stealing @N is, someone will have to use it one day. How can they hope not to be traced?

The hacker sells it anonymously to someone who isn't aware of the controversy or who doesn't care. It will probably shrink the value of the username but I bet it's still worth something.

Re: How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

#214

Post by Houshalter »

jrs99 wrote: post #200
yashg wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand it was a sarcasm, but there's one difference between the two. A Twitter handle or a domain name is something unique as opposed to a game console of which there were millions of copies.

Too bad then for the company named "N." They'll have to go with N_company or N_inc or N_co or get really creative if those are taken. There's probably only like 500 names they can choose from relating to "N."

If the username was worthless, no one would have stolen it in the first place or offered $50,000 for it.

Re: How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

#215

Post by malka »

scintill76 wrote: post #136
riffic wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The twitter namespace is property of Twitter alone. It's cute that there are those who think the "owners" of these names would be each user.

Well, OK, but a certain level of assured "ownership" is beneficial to everybody. Twitter handles, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, etc., would not be very useful if Twitter, ISP, postal service, telcos, etc. frequently exercised the right to deny access to previous users at any time. Seeing how easily GoDaddy handed over the domain, it seems one can't even own a domain properly, and that is supposed…

I really don't understand why people still use goDaddy. i wouldn't recommend it to my arch-ennemy

Re: How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

#216

Post by blueskin_ »

Don't use GoDaddy. Simple as that.

If that hadn't happened, he'd still have his twitter account.

>If I were using an @gmail.com email address for my Facebook login, the attacker would not have been able to access my Facebook account.

Just google and the NSA then. Also, Gmail has an exposed password reset and social-engineerable support. A server running Postfix/Exim doesn't.

I'd consider a domain with a good registrar far more secure than google.

Re: How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

#217

Post by WA »

fredsted wrote: post #187
WA wrote: post #171

Reminds me of harvesting ICQ numbers. There was a time when you could search 6-digit ICQ numbers for expired freemail addresses like Hotmail (they deleted your account after a while), register that freemail address and reset your ICQ number password to get a brand "new" 6-digit number. I think this doesn't work anymore, since most freemail hosters don't "free" expired email addresses but keep them locked. It still wo…

Maybe I'm missing something, but who uses ICQ still? And why not focus on 3-digit numbers? There's a million 6-digit ICQ numbers; not that unique.

This was ~10 years ago. 3-digit numbers were all gone. Having a million 6 digit numbers increases chances to actually get one by registering an expired domain/email address.

In times of 9 digit numbers, 6 digit numbers were still sufficiently unique :)

Re: How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

#219

Post by zz9pza »

maxerickson wrote: post #61
harryh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're not interested in creating tweets then you don't really need to be taking up such a valuable piece of the namespace.

Why is it valuable? What amazing things are other single character handles being used for? Or is it just vaguely notable?

harry works around people that pine for vanity usernames. vanity = big deal in those circles. who knows why. not bad in itself.

places like foursquare, people know people at twitter. if your outside the valley twitter won't even help you when the autosuspender mistakenly pops your account but valley/connected people call an investor or executive and get their vanity handle in hours. seen it happen twice.

it's all who you know and never forget it. when i dealt with twitter support as a normal the disparity between insider service and official was pretty amazing. they are the worst of the valley backscratchers.

bet they would have taken @n if the right person called. what would you do, sue?

Re: How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

#220

Post by riffic »

slazaro wrote: post #188
riffic wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or look into alternatives in the microblogging space. What ever happened to Status.net/ostatus?

But the problem with alternatives is the fact that they're alternatives. Not what other people are using. If it's a social app, it's important.

I dug a little deeper, and ostatus is a currently working group committee within the w3c.

If I was the cio at oh, say an org in the public realm (generic government agency for example), I'd rather have control over the publishing and namespace of its tweet-like messages rather than putting every egg into the single-basket solution. Who knows if twitter will be around 20 years from now?

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.

Post reply on HN