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Comment by akritrime | Hacker News Reader

How do we know you are the right horse? Sorry, just watched `/the social dilemma` and now I am skeptical of all information on the internet.

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If you give me your email I can send you a message from my _lastname_@ work address, which you can then match up with published media I've done under my name, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBkX30Cj7Bw and https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/broadening-hsts-to-s...

Or you can look at the matching username on GitHub ( https://github.com/CydeWeys ) and see that I'm a member of the Google org and owner of the Nomulus repo ( https://github.com/google/nomulus/graphs/contributors ), the software running our TLD registry and which was announced here: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-nomulu...

Or I could just dig out my GPG key and sign a message.

So I respect your healthy skepticism, but I promise I'm really me, and not just someone pretending to be me! And I'll also note that, in all my time on HN, I've never once seen someone pretending to be anyone they weren't, at least not on seasoned accounts like mine. You can go back through my 5 years of comments on here, and every time I say I'm a specific person out there in the real world, it's always the same consistent person.

I actually confirmed your GitHub before I made the previous comment. It was just a frivolous reply that I found funny but HN didn't. Tough crowd. But I really, really appreciate your reply, thanks for taking your time to prove your identity. Hopefully I didn't waste too much of your Sunday morning.

My experience here is that humor (especially deadpan) tends to land very poorly on HN, both because people are never contextually expecting it and because they tend to downvote it when they do recognize it, as they dislike perceived low effort comments that they don't feel are meaningfully contributing to the discussion (i.e. adding noise, not signal). HN may as well put "Don't try to be funny" in the FAQ, because it almost never works out.

Mistake made and lesson learnt. After being introduced to the larger internet community via reddit, sometimes you slip up in more serious places like HN.

Yep, Hacker News is like Reddit, without the jokes and porn.

lol

This is argument from authority, but an exquisite one.

> If you give me your email I can send you a message from my _lastname_@ work address

Not disputing your account in any way, but please don't propagate the widespread myth that only people who own an email address can send from that email address. If you wanted to use your well-known email address as authentication, you'd need to offer to reply to a mail sent to that address.

You could check whether the email passed SPF, DKIM, and DMARC checks. Google has certainly implemented these for their SMTP servers. If all of the tests pass, you can be pretty certain that the sender is the owner of the address.

This is what I was getting at. It's definitely not possible to fully impersonate an email from an @google.com address. We've got all the security bells and whistles turned on.

Though, admittedly, it would be easier for a layman to verify ability to reply to an email than to verify all those features, so point taken.

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