Who Owns Your Social Identity? 190
wjousts writes "Who actually owns your username on a website? What rights do you have to use it? An IEEE Spectrum podcast reports: 'What happens if Facebook or Twitter or, say, your blog hosting service, makes you take a different user name? Sound impossible? It's happened. Last week, a software researcher named Danah Boyd woke up to find her entire blog had disappeared, and in fact, had been renamed, because her hosting service had given her blog's name to someone else.' And as important as they are, what protects our accounts are the terms of service agreements. If you read them — and who does? — you'd learn, probably to no surprise, that they protect the provider a lot more than they protect you."
money (Score:3)
whoever has more money gets their way.. it really is that simple. in this case the host will give the name to the one who is most likely to sue and who has the financial backing to do so. I miss the days of first-come-first-serve on the internet.
Re:money (Score:4, Informative)
Or whoever has more clout: by the time this article showed up on Slashdot, Danah Boyd had already been on the phone with Tumblr's CEO, and the account had already been reinstated.
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Re:money (Score:4, Funny)
I would like to buy the username Anonymous Coward.
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and get sued by Anonymous Covvard.
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I would like to buy the username Anonymous Coward.
2. ???
3. Profit!
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If you're using a free service, you should expect that if someone comes along and offers to buy your username, they'll get it. I don't know why this would be surprising.
How about paying an ISP for an email account and having spamers use your username freely?
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Seeing as it's trivial to spoof an email from field, there's nothing the ISP can do to stop that. However if the spammers can also access your inbox, you have a problem worth complaining about.
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Re:money (Score:5, Insightful)
Money is a social construct, which exists by consent. So it isn't accurate to say that money will buy anything. The correct statement is that we consent to allow anything to be bought with money. When the problem is restated this way, the logical consequence is inescapable: only as long as we stand by and allow money to buy anything can it in fact buy anything. If we are not happy with a world in which things work this way, all we need to is withdraw our consent in sufficient numbers to effect change. This is the basis for the rule of law.
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Money is a social construct, which exists by consent.
- money exists out of necessity, the consent is secondary (and often it is not even there to begin with, as it is the case with legal tender, which is fiat and is destroyed by government printing, who destroy it and still claim that it is illegal not to accept this fiat).
Money is not just an abstract idea, people are not spirits, we are physical beings, and so we need things - food, clothing, shelter, energy, medical attention, sanitation, etc. That's comes first, then you need things like entertainment, p
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You've completely missed my point, and you're also wrong. Money _is_ an abstract idea, with a concrete implementation. There is no currency that has inherent value. The value of the currency comes from our agreement (typically without reflection) to treat it as having value. This is as true of gold as it is of paper money. But even that is not my point. My point is that the context in which these misdeeds occur is one in which we assent to their occurrence without protest. All that is required
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The actual tokens used in the exchange are irrelevant, the point is that there exists some abstract thing, backed by some kind of token (be they small metal discs, bits of paper, pretty stones or numbers in a database) that can be exchanged for other things - again, be they tangible goods, other numbers in other databases, or a person's (temporary) loyalty.
Money in that sense isn't going to go away any time soon; the world is too complex to go back to a true barter economy. That doesn't mean that we should
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Exactly. And here is the solution:
Do not use social networks or any other free services on the Net for anything you consider essential. If it's important to you, run your own server or pay for a service with a contract that gives you some warranty and customer protection. Don't transfer any valuable data to servers not paid, owned or controlled by you or you'll regret it some day.
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until those whom that person paid/lobbied for enforce the laws he also lobbied for to come after you..
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Very few murders result in federal prison sentences.
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Re:money (Score:5, Interesting)
I get the feeling that you feel proud of a system where money can buy anything.
I get the feeling you feel there's actually any real-life "system" where enough money can't buy anything. It's only a matter of price, blatantness, and which things are cheaper than others.
There isn't any system where money can't corrupt, because the system is people and people have been, are, and will forever continue to be corruptible as long as people are people.
The only defense is to make government as weak/small as possible on the national Federal Government scale to make it necessary for a would-be briber to have to bribe many, many politicians & officials across the entire nation instead of a handful or one to have national effect.
The more power given to the current massive central government the more a target for corruption it becomes and the more damage that can be inflicted on the citizens, and the more power shifts to the rich political elite who have the connections and can afford to play.
This is basically just systems analysis, people! A distributed system is less vulnerable to attack at a single or even multiple points. It can also be looked at as the US Constitution representing FOSS and Liberalism/Progressivism representing closed-source proprietary software.
Hold on, hold on people! This isn't some troll/flame. Take a few moments to read and think about it.
FOSS advocates for a distributed, volunteer method of development (Constitutional democracy, checks and balances, & free-market Capitalism) whereas closed-source proprietary software advocates for a central control with closed development and no source code access, restrictive EULA's, TOS's, etc (Liberal/Progressive top-down government command-&-control, centrally-planned/controlled economy, legislation/regulation control of people's behavior).
I know I shouldn't be shocked, but it never ceases to amaze me how many times I hear and read comments from strong FOSS advocates against proprietary software using much of the same logic and many of the same arguments that invalidate Liberalism/Progressivism as viable, fair systems, yet are vocal supporters of the Left when it comes to politics and sneer at the very same logic and arguments they themselves used regarding FOSS vs closed-source proprietary software.
Strat
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And as Jefferson pointed out, can also take it all away.
There's also the point that distributing government acros
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I'm over 40 years old and haven't met one person ever that wants a super-powerful central government that can give them anything they want and neither have you.
Maybe he met me.
I really don't care what government can "give" me, however if a government can not crush like a bug the most powerful company in the country that it supposedly governs, then it really governs nothing.
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Very good post.
While touting the good that comes from spreading power away from individuals in government, we must be careful not to assume that big business is any better than big government. Not that I got that implication from the parent post... but like it stated, the less power any individual has, the better off we all are. So in that sense, we don't want huge monopolies any more than we want huge government. Billionnaire CEOs have so much power and influence, they might as well be kings. And we ce
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we must be careful not to assume that big business is any better than big government.
True, but not all big business is problematic. It's relatively easy to spot the evil ones. Here is a checklist:
[ ] The company is on the stock market.
[ ] The company is well-known for a non-open-source product that is not the real source of income for the company.
[ ] The company does not offer any innovative product at all but is nevertheless well-known or known to possess some important intellectual property.
[ ] The company is known for large patent lawsuits or has a huge number of software patents.
[ ] The
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Hold on, hold on people! This isn't some troll/flame. Take a few moments to read and think about it.
Okay, I've read it, thought about it, taken a few moments, read it and thought about it again ... yep, you're trolling.
Either that or you're just ignorant, since if you really believe that capitalism as it's actually practiced in the real world has anything at all in common with F/OSS, you honestly don't know enough to have a meaningful opinion on either economics or software development. You profess to be amazed at the number of F/OSS advocates who are politically leftish; maybe you should consider that t
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Either that or you're just ignorant, since if you really believe that capitalism as it's actually practiced in the real world has anything at all in common with F/OSS...
I never said that. Strawman.
In point of fact, I don't believe "Capitalism" IS being currently practiced. At best, it's a type of "Crony Capitalism".
Hello. That's the problem I'm talking about.
Reading comprehension. It's a wonderful thing.
Why not try it?
Strat
Re:money (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, I see, you're talking about Libertopia Capitalism, which is this wonderful magical system which will take hold and sweep away all this corruption and power-mongering as soon as we get the eeevil gub'mint out of the way. Also, everyone gets a pony.
All right, back to reality. There is no such thing as capitalism except as it's practiced in the real world, just as there's no such thing as communism except the real-world variety (although, ironically in this context, F/OSS probably comes closer to a utopian Marxist's idea of how things ought to work than anything else ever has.) It's what happens in the real world, to real people, that counts. True believers in any economic ideology are as bad as religious fundamentalists: just as ignorant of the way the world works, just as likely to ride roughshod over people in their pursuit of the way they believe things ought to be, and just as likely to see their prophecies come to fruition.
Now go away, kid, the grown-ups are talking.
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We should all be politicians; then, a potential briber would have to bribe all of us.
With what, money if we don't want to work, if we're old enough, or if our jobs don't give us enough? Sounds like we're already politicians...
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Of course, if you read that you'll notice it's not the first time Tumblr have done this [gawker.com]. Probably not the last time either.
Be careful... (Score:4, Funny)
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I still clearly remember watching that skit, it's still my favorite skit, and I still, on occasion, reference it inappropriately. I don't know that anyone's ever understood it, but the possibility that there's scores of people in this world who think I'm some sort of sexual deviant who goes for red noses and brown noises, well.. that, too, makes me laugh.
Ad Impressions from Customer Content-generation (Score:4, Insightful)
Not just money to sue. But a service whose entire revenue model is dependent on customer generated content creating ad impressions is more likely to hand an identity from someone who produces little revenue to one they think will generate more ad impressions. (So you're safer if your social identity is a big traffic generator, say like a Scoble.)
What protects your social identity? (Score:3, Funny)
Why, the same thing that protects you if someone steals your identity in the real world.
Unicorns, vigilante superheroes and the goodwill of corporations like Mastercard - all in equal measure.
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Why, the same thing that protects you if someone steals your identity in the real world.
Unicorns, vigilante superheroes and the goodwill of corporations like Mastercard - all in equal measure.
That's ridiculous. Because every knows that even if the other two are imaginary, there are, in fact, a few vigilante superheroes.
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That's ridiculous. Because every knows that even if the other two are imaginary, there are, in fact, a few vigilante superheroes.
You find me one with 'super' powers that would defend Axman13 and I'll agree.
The higest bidder (Score:2)
for a bulk transaction
As much as I don't like the implications (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm torn on this. As much as I would like the server operators to have control as to what they do with their machines and the data, there is a trust relationship between the users and the service provider, and some rights that users should have are being violated in the name of profits--which is a sign that the model is breaking down in the face of a changing reality and needs to be changed--whenever you see humanity acting as a tool to serve the economy and not the other way around you should reexamine you priorities and goals.
I'd like some sort of first come first serve system, but then you get cyber-squatters who buy up domains with no intention of using them just to extort money from people who would like to put them to good use; the same could be possible with usernames on popular sites but I'm not sure if that's happened before. The question is, how do you stop the squatters while protecting the rights of the little guy who got their first and is legitimately using a username or domain that a big powerful corporation or well connected individual has their eye on?
I was able to register the vanity URL for my real name on Facebook, but if some more famous or powerful person came around with my same name (possible, it's that uncommon of a name) and wanted to take that URL from me I'd want there to be some protection against that. I registered the name first, it's my name so my claim to it is just as valid, money or power shouldn't have a say in who gets it and that seems to be a gap where we need legislation to protect people from the service operators.
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>I'm torn on this.
I'm not. It's a dick move to take someone's content and steal it like this.
And just because you click on an agreement doesn't mean that all parts of the agreement are valid. There are things called unconscionable terms, which are /never/ valid.
I would also say that all bullshit clauses that say "this agreement can and will change at any time" are demonstrably unconscionable and any changes made without explicit agreement by both parties are contracts of adhesion, at best.
--
BMO
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I agree with that, but what if the service operator simply shuts down their business? What happens to your account and username? If tumblr just shuts down, what's stopping someone from making a site on blogger with your old username and stealing your traffic that way? How do you enforce ownership of an account across multiple businesses?
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what if the service operator simply shuts down their business?
Which, as it turns out, has happened numerous times so far. AOL home pages, Geocities, and countless smaller systems have just vanished.
If having your online name be under your control is that important to you, then your online name needs to actually be under your control: buy your own domain, and manage your own services.
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how does one link one's own services to the services that people actually use?
With RSS? Or perhaps by sending people a link (that is, the kind that the web itself was built on)? Really, this is a problem that was solved a long time ago (perhaps everyone has forgotten the solution).
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Twitter does support outgoing RSS, so you go download a RSS reader. This isn't rocket surgery here...
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Shutting down the business is not the same thing.
A few weeks warning should be given so people can pull their content off like the shutdown of Geocities.
There's a difference between stealing and going broke/shutting down.
If you can't see it, then I don't know what to tell you.
--
BMO
Do you have the right to not have an account? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Wasn't there an Australian dating site that did just this?
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I think there was a dating site that did just that in the last few months.
My Username.. (Score:3)
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I read it as "head cheese" because kase resembles the German word for cheese, Käse.
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Oddly enough, we're in the same boat.
I'm not the musician who goes by Kompressor, although I have listened to and been confused by his work.
How many others on here have the same situation?
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If you google my name, the first N pages of results are mostly about a jazz drummer named Bill Stewart. While I am an amateur musician, if you've heard me drum you'd know that I'm not the same Bill Stewart....
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I sometimes get mistaken for a real doctor.
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Can you compress air in a German fashion too?
her account has been restored (Score:4, Informative)
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And to think, the case was this close, this close, to making it all the way to the SCOTUS.
How much longer can society go on without knowing who owns our names on Facebook?
You own your domain (Score:5, Interesting)
What, did you think that Facebook or Twitter were obligated to keep your username intact? If you were on my system, would I be obligated to keep your username and account intact (politeness aside)?
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why not just buy your own domain?
She did. Please see my other comment [slashdot.org].
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To put it another way: my username on my high school's servers was recently deactivated, probably since it has been several years since I was a student there. Would it be reasonable to complain about having lost that username?
Re:You own your domain (Score:4, Funny)
To put it another way: my username on my high school's servers was recently deactivated, probably since it has been several years since I was a student there. Would it be reasonable to complain about having lost that username?
Perhaps you should e-mail the Slashdot admins and see if they'd be willing to take away BadAnalogyGuy's username and give it to you, because you'd clearly do a great job with it.
There oughtta be a law. (Score:3)
There should be a law against this. Something to enforce your right to control copies of your creative work, and maybe something to make sure nobody uses your unique names, logos, and marks to steal your business trade. We could call it a "copyright and trademark law".
I realize that supporting copyright and trademark law is heresy on Slashdot, but this is *exactly* the sort of situation it was designed to help with. The service provider has the right to shut you down if they want, but if you have trademarked "zephoria" -- a unique identifying phrase which is eminently trademarkable -- they can't re-purpose it without your express permission.
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Or at least that's how I understand it.
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However. if you have established a distinctive online identity, probably on multiple systems, and gained a (presumably positive) reputation with that identity, and one of those systems takes the identity from you and allocates it to someone else, could the recipient of the identity not be guilty of "passing off'"?
Ok so Blizzard Stole my name..... (Score:2)
Ok so Blizzard stole my name, what recourse do I have?
http://www.wowhead.com/quest=4122/grark-lorkrub [wowhead.com]
I clearly have had the name since 1988, even have published short story about the character.
Funny how they never returned my emails....
Yo Grark
RMS was right all along (Score:4, Interesting)
With all the shit talking people do here on RMS, he's right on a lot of fundamental things. This includes his campaign against cloud services.
The only reason you would have your host rename your blog or account with no regard to you is because you are not your own host. People enter into these disgusting one sided contracts multiple times per day and then they're surprised when the party holding all the cards actually plays them. It's the definition of stupidity.
Willingly signing your rights away and then run around crying when you get shafted. Then you run crying to the politicians because now you need them to fix it, you don't care what they do but something must be done about it. And of course they seize the moment to push through whatever power grabbing measures that only go one way, ratcheting away everyone else's freedoms too with all sorts of unintended consequences.
Same reason I'll never get a damn kindle.
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Yeah, but for most people there are pretty practical reasons why they don't host their own services, and that's why they go running off to the Government to try to get some redress for their grievances.
You're not signing your rights away, you never had rights to begin with. You have no right to post on slashdot, you have no right to post on Gawker, tumblr, facebook, twitter, xanga, livejournal or bash.org. You're allowed the use of those services, but right? No.
I'm all for legislation stating that if EUL
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And when they run their own blog it will get hacked every few weeks, spammed to hell and generally be useless. If you think the average person won't have those problems you're downright delusional.
So, between having nothing and having something with risk, guess which wins?
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Depends on your legal juristiction. Here in the UK, one-sided contracts can actually be invalidated - even if you agreed, signed and got photographed holding the contract doing a thumbs up sign. It doesn't matter how much you consented, if it's a legally unenforceable contract, then it's unenforceable.
That said, I doubt someone's going to the High Court because their username got changed. By the time you're motivated enough for that, you'll have got your own domain (although if the registrar takes it from y
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The title of this article should really be "Who owns the website, the person that paid for it or the person using it as a free service?".
Simple (Score:2)
Don't trust anything online. Have we not learned this lesson many times now? Several people have mentioned that "he who has the most money wins." Yeppers. This story is absolute crap (as in the way the company trounced on this lady), but if you really want to be free you have to have to go really independent of anyone above you that can cut you off. Which, really, is nigh impossible unless your super rich so you can have your own ISP, servers, line, and a team of lawyers. No one will ever try to claim
Social networks are fragile (Score:2)
I wrote about a similar problem a few days ago. Facebook and Twitter are the only contact I have with some people, yet they are private businesses with no obligation to provide a service, and they can and do close accounts on a whim.
Here's my blog post about it. The fragility of social networks [latentexistence.me.uk]
Duh (Score:2)
To 'trust' your information to someone else is simply foolishness.
Sure, you might have legal recourse because, well, there's a lawyer under every rock and you can sue anyone for anything. Ultimately, trusting anyone without making your own arrangements/backup for data that's important to you is just silly.
Can't delete your own account either (Score:2)
I've run into an increasing amount of sites that won't let you "delete" or "turn off" your account. At best you can hide it. The worst I've come across is one where you have to pay them for deletion. But 10 years later, I really don't care to be associated with that car forum/demographic anymore.
Of course, we all agree to this as it is buried in the "Terms Of Use"
ME actually... (Score:2)
Lumpy(tm) is a registered trademark of LumpyCo a subsidary of the Lumpy Foundation.
Honestly, if you pull the same shenanigans that corporations do you can control them.
Trademark your persona along with copyrighting it. then you have a legal standing to FORCE companies like facebook, blogger.com, etc.. to do what you tell them to.
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Hell, do both, then tumblr have no control over the blog domain.
It's easy to set up and you're not relying on goodwill to keep "ilikebigbugs.blogspot.com" or whatever it turns out to be
She did register zephoria.org (Score:2)
Should have bought your own domain name instead.
Should have read the article instead. I quote: "Last week, a software researcher named Danah Boyd woke up to find her entire blog had disappeared [zephoria.org]." The link goes to a page on zephoria.org about how the username zephoria on Tumblr got reassigned and then reinstated.
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Follow across multiple microblog providers? (Score:2)
She has her own domain, and she could run her own microblogging system on her own domain if she wanted to.
But I haven't seen evidence of a follow operation across multiple microblog providers. Can a user of Twitter follow users of Tumblr and Identi?
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Either it is time to write a program that does that
And run the risk of having the popular microblog providers block that program's access to the microblog providers' data feeds, just as all major U.S. TV networks have blocked access from Google TV-powered devices.
or to move to a system that is more open and more easily interoperates with other systems.
Say I have used T*r for months or years, and I want to abandon T*r in favor of "a system that is more open and more easily interoperates with other systems." So how do I convince all the T*r users who are following me on T*r to drop T*r in favor of something else?
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I've often pondered that question, and I keep coming to the conclusion that a perfectly good system exists for that: RSS feeds. A lot of proper blogging services (LiveJournal et al) provide RSS by default with any blog. Twitter doesn't, afaik, and neither does Facebook - they prefer to keep all the users in their own walled-off ecosystem, just like AOL did once upon a time.
Straight RSS feeds don't allow for comments and/or replies, of course, so it's effectively limited to following; but then you can always
Followers are an incentive (Score:2)
Re:Usernames should never change (Score:4, Insightful)
Best to buy a domain name for yourself.
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Best to buy a domain name for yourself.
Exactly: if you need an online identity that you control, buy your own domain. It is not terribly hard to do, and it is not terribly expensive.
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Exactly. Domains are $9 a year, or cheaper with coupon codes.
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Re:Usernames should never change (Score:4, Insightful)
buy your own domain.
RTFA. She has-- TFA is on her own domain.. However, there are plenty of online communities one may wish to join (eg, even Slashdot) and prefer to use the same identity (e.g., login name). You have to be a member, with a name, to participate. And thus come under the control of the owners of that service.
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Not always easy. Back when .tv was opened up I immediately registered joe.tv because, hey, it's a three letter domain name that is also my name. It cost me $50 to do (still 'expensive' for a domain name, even then), and I owned it for about 35 hours or so - the DNS changes had just finished settling for me and it was resolving to my online journal.
Then the name company took it off me, because they "accidentally sold it for less than was intended" and all my attempts to say "you sold it, it is now mine" were
She did buy a domain (Score:2)
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She got what she paid for.
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sadly, the website owner is the one that rules :-/
How can this be "sadly"? So you want that someone who doesn't PAY A DIME for a service GIVEN FOR FREE, to get granted higher rights than the person owning the domain name and infrastructure? Come on, on what world are you living?
That guy and his wife just got what they paid for, and the only person they have to blame is themselves for being greedy, or trusting enough someone they don't know, and give out personal content. Would you give your personal diary to a random person on the street? Same issue here
Re:Usernames should never change (Score:5, Insightful)
So you want that someone who doesn't PAY A DIME for a service GIVEN FOR FREE, to get granted higher rights than the person owning the domain name and infrastructure?
If you provide a service to the public, whether or not you charge directly for that service, you are taking on certain moral (and in some cases legal) obligations. One of the foremost of those obligations is not to pull the rug out from under people's feet.
I always wonder if people who say "if you're not taking someone's money you don't owe them anything" apply that principle to their daily lives. Do you refuse to send birthday cards to your family unless they pay you to do it? Do you tell your friend, "sure, I'll give you a ride to the store in an hour," and then, when he calls two hours later asking where you are, laugh at him and tell him how stupid he was to think you'd help him out for free? Do you turn the other way when you see a little kid about to wander out into traffic, because hey, it's not like the little brat's going to pay you to pull him out of the way of an oncoming car? How far are you willing to go in service to this vile principle in which you claim to believe?
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Mod the man up. He gets it. He understands what makes a society stable and friendly to its citizens.
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If you provide a service to the public, whether or not you charge directly for that service, you are taking on certain moral (and in some cases legal) obligations. One of the foremost of those obligations is not to pull the rug out from under people's feet.
It's with that thinking that people register dangerously to sites like Facebook. It's this misunderstanding that leads to disaster like loosing personal content. If someone provides you a hosting service for free, which means he is not bound by a contract to you nor by the obligation to fulfill that contract against the money you gave him, then that person owns you absolutely nothing. Read Facebook terms of services. More or less, they have the rights to do absolutely whatever they are pleased with the thin
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