I don't
22 karma · joined January 7, 2014
However, in practice, there exist many services which have GMail's logic baked-in. Or worse, they get overzealous/underzealous with validating the email.
For example, you decide to sign up for e.g. Netflix as alice@gmail.com, which is the address for a Google account which you own completely.
There exists a small edge case where you want a second Netflix account, so you could do that by also registering alice+netflix@gmail.com. Or a.l.i.c.e@gmail.com. In that case, all the emails to these 2 addresses will be directed to the 'main' alice@gmail.com, as you might be aware of. So you'll get messages for more than one, separate Netflix accounts on the same inbox.
I'm not sure if they had this "plus aliasing" from the beginning, same as their logic with the dots.
When I say that there exist many services which have GMail's logic baked-in, I mean that certain apps will forbid you from registering again as alice+asdf@gmail.com or even a.l.i.c.e@gmail.com, because they want to stop on person from 'exploiting' multiple accounts (though Netflix is not one of them).
It is indeed important to go back to the RFC and understand what you are pointing out:
i.e. That, even though GMail redirects messages from both alice+asdf@gmail.com and a.l.i.c.e@gmail.com to plain old alice@gmail.com, it doesn't make it standard behavior, and this is likely not the case for your home-brewed mail server or your enterprise exchange server, which may treat those as separate inboxes, and this can lead and has led to unintended consequences.
I've been involved in the QA of a system which handles payments for a telecommunications provider. It's very common for the customer to land on a payment page, where he essentially clicks on a link, his telecom's account information is pre-filled, like his email address, phone number, and payment amount, and the customer just has to fill in payment information. So even though the telecoms provider can (and in some instances already has) saved a customer's email with a plus sign, the external payment processor's portal mangles it during parsing, converts the plus signs to a space, and then complains about a malformed URL.
As always, this gets filed as out of scope.
Presumably these include any measures which would counter their operating model of tracking users on the web, under the excuse of stopping bots.
Ultimately point number 3 is a prediction. I could see that happening, but I am not convinced it's set in stone that the blocking would just increase. And even if that happens, and even bigger ranges are blocked, and even more stuff breaks, perhaps more people will start to notice and put an end to this, to CloudFlare's delight.
There's a distinction between the above statement and the truth, which is that CloudFlare and other large CDNs do not work in Spain when there are football matches.
Yes, it's not CloudFlare's fault in this instance, since I believe CloudFlare is not being notified to take action in real time. The blocking needs to happen quickly to block access to illegal streams of a live event. My understanding is that CloudFlare is largely out of the picture when this decision is happening, and CloudFlare is only taking the blame since that's what Twitch uses, which also can't react as quickly as La Liga wants.
That being said there is a solution to this that helps protect from collateral as well as the decentralized open nature of the internet: moving away from those large CDNs
Of course, the Great Filter isn't a new concept, but provided that this is an argument made by somebody other than the person who coined the term (that was Robin Hanson I believe), combined with the fact that I read almost the entire article before then going on to find the video, I find the two too similar to write it off to simple chance.
There have been criticisms of Kurzgesagt in the past, one I can recall being the following, in video form (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2dAGU-VJcE). I've now found out that the original video was retracted and the creator issued a public apology (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcgHGslVdrg), in addition to Kurzgesagt committing to performing more scrutiny over their videos and citing their sources wherever possible.
I do applaud this last step on their part, and I understand that you have to admit that the Great Filter video was published back in 2018 before this commitment was made, but something about the lack of attribution throughout the video doesn't sit right with me, still.
You can also have a look at the TED talk the description references. Cheers.