{"id":14035,"date":"2018-12-10T04:30:02","date_gmt":"2018-12-10T12:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2018\/12\/10\/news-7802\/"},"modified":"2018-12-10T04:30:02","modified_gmt":"2018-12-10T12:30:02","slug":"news-7802","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2018\/12\/10\/news-7802\/","title":{"rendered":"Forbidden names, revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

Credit to Author: Sharky| Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2018 03:00:00 -0800<\/strong><\/p>\n

Flashback a few decades to the glory days of online service CompuServe<\/a>, when anyone could get an account — but not everyone could use their real names, according to a pilot fish in the know.<\/p>\n

“You logged in with your account number, but to join a forum — a chatroom focused on a specific topic — you had to give a real name,” fish says. “The name on your billing record was the default.<\/p>\n

“Of course there were fraudsters who used an official-sounding name to phish people for personal info and credit card data. So users were not allowed to have words like ‘billing’ as any part of their in-forum real name. This could only be overridden by the forum sysop. I was one.<\/p>\n

“I never knew how many fine people were named ‘Billingsley’ before I served as a sysop.<\/p>\n

“In our busy forum, we had about one user a month with that problem. I had to apologize, explain the stupid rule and go into the back-end interface to set the desired name manually.<\/p>\n

“We sysops agitated for a special-case exemption, but it never happened.”<\/p>\n

Sharky will filter out the identifying words in your true tale of IT life<\/strong>, so you can feel safe sending me your story at sharky@computerworld.com<\/a>. You can also comment on today’s tale at Sharky’s Google+ community<\/strong><\/a>, and read thousands of great old tales in the Sharkives<\/strong><\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

Get Sharky’s outtakes from the IT Theater of the Absurd delivered directly to your Inbox. Subscribe now to the Daily Shark Newsletter<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.computerworld.com\/category\/security\/index.rss<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Credit to Author: Sharky| Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2018 03:00:00 -0800<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Flashback a few decades to the glory days of online service CompuServe<\/a>, when anyone could get an account — but not everyone could use their real names, according to a pilot fish in the know.<\/p>\n

“You logged in with your account number, but to join a forum — a chatroom focused on a specific topic — you had to give a real name,” fish says. “The name on your billing record was the default.<\/p>\n

“Of course there were fraudsters who used an official-sounding name to phish people for personal info and credit card data. So users were not allowed to have words like ‘billing’ as any part of their in-forum real name. This could only be overridden by the forum sysop. I was one.<\/p>\n

To read this article in full, please click here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[11062,10643],"tags":[714],"class_list":["post-14035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computerworld","category-independent","tag-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14035\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}