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Comment by a254613e | Hacker News Reader

Considering the relatively short response times the original owners were given in some cases, and you do not gain anything from having all those usernames I think what you did was kind of a dick move.

And because of that you'll use it to acquire even more usernames.

You opened a dispute to take someone's chat/telegram name... Not cool. What if the person was active but just didn't want to reply to you? Why would they, you don't own the rights to that username. What if they were away for personal or health reasons temporarily?

You're not a brand. You're not a product. You're someone who has those letters in your name, just like I'm sure a lot of other people.

What gives you the right to claim those usernames more than anyone else? In some cases it seems what gives you the right is just the fact that you bothered support, or opened disputes, to give you a name on another service then used that fact to get more of them.

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Agreed. As someone who follows Terence's blog, I was surprised and disappointed to read about this nonsense. It certainly screams entitlement.

I thought it was a great breakdown of how trivial this process is on various services and that it actually works.

A lot of these seem like security nightmares. I'm glad someone did the research at this small expense.

These comments are barking up the wrong tree. Nobody here is lambasting these companies for having such horrifying policies that ensure anyone targeting you is basically guaranteed to snatch up your username.

I read your comment before reading the article. I fully agreed with you, but then got surprised: It's not a fair comment at all. The author clearly states his discomfort with the short reaction times and he did nothing shady to get the username, he just followed the protocol defined by the services or politely asked. That's not as entitled or a dick move as you make it seem.

”It was so easy to break into these houses, and I felt discomfort with the low quality of locks used”

All of that fluff does nothing to cover up what an absolute dick move this was.

No, breaking in a house is completely illegal and most of the time unethical. Claiming a username for yourself has a long tradition (fortified by sci-fi and cyberpunk novels of the 80s and 90s) and is not at all that clearly a bad thing.

It's social engineering. Even I felt uneasy seeing how the author was able to take usernames. However, this isn't very different from other white/black-hat hackers getting into others' accounts by simply contacting support and providing minimal proof.

I agree with you. But I didn't make the Telegram policy - they did.

If you want to keep your username, the lesson here is to read the T&Cs and comply with them.

And, as I say several times in the blog post, I don't have the right to those combination of letters.

So you're suggesting that everybody should read the miles long terms for each website they subscribe to, otherwise they do not have a right to keep their username.

And I'm not sure that abusing an unethical system waives you from the morality of your actions.

The only lesson you're giving here is about you. But hey, any publicity is good publicity right? You're enforcing your 'brand' after all. \s

> So you're suggesting that everybody should read the miles long terms for each website they subscribe to

Absolutely. You should never agree to something you haven't read.

Oh so I guess the fact that there are whole organizations[1] devoted to reading the absurdly enormous TOS means nothing, and studies[2] that suggest a major percentage isn't reading them are false.

I will not believe you if you state that you read the TOS for every site you register on, every program you install.

[1] https://tosdr.org/

[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2757465

I'm sure there's some oddball lawyer out there who reads every T&C they're presented from start to finish, but for 99.9% of people, that would be an unreasonable burden.

So you would be ok with it, if lots of people would now start regularly claiming your known usernames on all possible platforms?

Wow. I hope you never end up in an argument with your bank (or mortgage holder or employer or anyone else) who abuses their superior knowledge of legal minutia that they forced on you.

It’s one thing to say “I’m raising a risk.” It’s another to blame the victim.

That's literally why I'm a member of a Trade Union - so that I have legal representation check my employment contracts before signing them. And why I have a lawyer check the paperwork when I buy a house.

These services should publicise their name dispute policies more openly. But, ultimately, they can enforce their private property rights on the usernames they control.

You should perhaps teach a class in responsibility deflection. It's very impressive how you are able to do something that, while perhaps inline with T&C, is indisputably a dick move - and turn around and blame everyone else! Just own up to it dude. The companies have bad policies, and you were a bit of a dick, them's the breaks.

I love how you claim to feel guilty every time you take over an account, and yet continue to do it.

You may not have written the policies, but you can certainly choose when to enforce them. You waited only a week for Soundcloud, even when you knew it was ridiculously short. For linkedin you went and 'politely' asked the active owner to transfer, telling him to his face he didn't have to, and when he refused you still went to check if you could force it by using a ToS.

Don't hide behind the policies, you are making the calls.

At the risk of sounding like an old fogey, do we really need some company to publish T&Cs to tell us how to treat each other? Why can't we just be good because it's good?

Be excellent to each other.

Just because it's policy, it doesn't mean you are not a jerk for doing it.

Are terms and conditions the only thing that keep you from being a raging sociopath? Just because the T&C say you can do something doesn't make it right.

If somebody did that to me, I would be really upset. Therefore, I am not going to do that to somebody else, even if the terms and conditions of the site allow it to happen.

You should listen to your conscience when you "feel guilty" about something.

My initial reaction was the same as yours. The fact he wrote this up gives me hope he did this more to raise awareness to how much of a problem this is.

He was asking for something he was probably not entitled to, was open and honest about that fact and various services turned the usernames over to him.

Imagine what someone with ill intent and using fraudulent means could do.

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