'I want your Instagram account': a deadly campaign over coveted handles
businessinsider.com
'I want your Instagram account': a deadly campaign over coveted handles
1–10 of 164 posts
Re: 'I want your Instagram account': a deadly campaign over coveted handles
#2Re: 'I want your Instagram account': a deadly campaign over coveted handles
#3Yes another reason people should leave these corporate run media sites.
Re: 'I want your Instagram account': a deadly campaign over coveted handles
#4Yes another reason people should leave these corporate run media sites.
I would go further and say that all social media should be outright banned, corporate or not
Re: 'I want your Instagram account': a deadly campaign over coveted handles
#5I can't imagine these people are that untraceable. If they are dumb enough to reach out to the victims, finding them should be doable with a bit of luck.
Re: 'I want your Instagram account': a deadly campaign over coveted handles
#6Yes another reason people should leave these corporate run media sites.
There's nothing about this campaign that is caused by or made worse by the fact it is a corporate media site.
Names - whether they be DNS names or Instagram handles or trademarks - are valuable.
Re: 'I want your Instagram account': a deadly campaign over coveted handles
#7Easy solution: Assign all accounts a unique and randomly generated ID, and allow everyone to then use the handle they want. If someone wants to write a @handle in a post or a comment, a list shall appear, asking them to choose the account they wish to link to. IDs shall be public, and the list shall present itself as something like "@Max 36hf28bcd ; @Max 9jv1tcsh ; @Max b63avg960"
Re: 'I want your Instagram account': a deadly campaign over coveted handles
#8Instagram and Twitter afik the only social media sites that have valuable handles
Re: 'I want your Instagram account': a deadly campaign over coveted handles
#9I remember getting a demand I surrender my HoTMaiL address to somebody in a very threatening email to my address way back in 1998. It was kind of surreal back then as the internet was still fresh. Nowadays the closest I've gotten to this is the people who keep using my Gmail address as their own email address. I find this behavior rather bizarre and don't know what it achieves.
Re: 'I want your Instagram account': a deadly campaign over coveted handles
#10Easy solution: Assign all accounts a unique and randomly generated ID, and allow everyone to then use the handle they want. If someone wants to write a @handle in a post or a comment, a list shall appear, asking them to choose the account they wish to link to. IDs shall be public, and the list shall present itself as something like "@Max 36hf28bcd ; @Max 9jv1tcsh ; @Max b63avg960"
It turns out that cryptographic gobblediguuk is difficult for humans to understand. Even if your conscious mind knows it's a meaningless jumble of characters, your visual processing system evolved over millenia and honed with decades of schooling to read text fast is automatically failing to parse it in your visual field. So your users will self-train to ignore them.
A solution is to display the random nonsense as a unique image. More pleasant to look at, much easier to discern differences. There exist competing standards and services to generating images from random numbers, because it turns out the most universal way of doing this is abstract colorful shapes, which fall into that uncanny valley of approximating but not quite successfully imitating abstract art; And most people seem to think that's ugly.
Maybe that dall-e thing could generate good images to represent hashes? What does it output if one inputs nonsense?